1“A Circle in the Water,” so reads the title of a short tale by Howells which raises and dissolves the question whether an evil deed may come to a full final erasure. In order to picture this dissolution of guilt, the narrator summons the image of a pool with ripples widening and fading out as they reach the circumference. The text opens with Basil March’s blissful contemplation of this pool at sunset and with his praise of the illustrative value of what he believes to be a scene of innocent spontaneity:

[...] I lay and watched the ever-widening circle fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in point, I pleased myself greatly with it.

2Basil has not yet seen the pebble-thrower that causes the rippling. The man has just been released from jail where he served a disproportionately long sentence. Presently recognized by Basil as a townsman, he tells him of his burning longing to see his daughter. All sorts of family hurdles will stand in the way of this reunion, the better to be dissolved at the end. We are told that the pebble-thrower’s evil deed came to be whitewashed in an ocean of human love:

Love, which can alone arrest the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience, an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle in the water.

3At one edge of the tableau, the pool offers a soothing image of all but innocent stirrings fading out, at the other, an image of guilty turmoil smoothed out in a sea of human benignity. However, between these seemingly quiet shores and beneath the evening surface, a core scene of Howells’s imaginary is being acted out or rather shunted out, the father/daughter relationship and its erotic charge. Indeed “pebble-throwing” is a motif that occurs in several stories, Indian Summer particularly. There, it is bound up with a snake-like river, with Colville’s theory that rivers are made “to have stones thrown into them” (662) with a fear in little Effie of “spoiling” her gloves in the process, and with a sudden change of mind from Colville, who, on second thought, holds Imogene back from throwing the pebble, although the young daughter-like woman, who is “not afraid of her gloves,” would love to engage in the suggested pelting of the river. As a matter of fact Imogene is so sensitive to the older man’s failed love story that for most of the novel she is willing to give herself up to him in order to redeem his past as a jilted lover. The father/daughter love theme runs through the whole book in this oblique manner.

4In “The Circle in the Water,” a short tale, the father/daughter scenario rules supreme. Indeed, hardly set free from jail, the pebble-thrower can think of only one thing, to see his daughter. The latter, following her mother’s death, has been in the care of an aunt who has vowed to keep her safely sheltered from her convict father’s return. The aunt will nonetheless have to give in to the young lady’s monomaniac craving to be reunited with her father: “She hasn’t got anything but the one idea: that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be together for the rest of their lives.” The unremitting passion involved in the father/daughter bond is eventually defused in a plot dissolution typical of Howells’s reversals and fizzling-outs.

5To give an idea of how the potency of this attraction between father and daughter is conveyed let us look at the images that Basil, the I narrator, conjures up in this same tale:

It was before my own door in town. Tedham [the father] had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning for the child’s mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up. The colour of her hair was the colour of his fine brown beard, which had as yet no trace of grey in it; but the light in her eyes was another light, and her smile which was of the same shape as his, was another quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved hand with a gay laugh. “I should think you would be afraid of such a fiery sorrel dragon as that,” I said, in recognition of the colt’s lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.

6“Oh, I’m not afraid with papa!” she said, and she laughed again he took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.

7The dead mother, the close pairing of father and daughter, the fiery horse, the riding, the bow-window, the obedient other man who betrays signs of weakness, the play of hands, the signifier “handsome,” all of these features occur at critical points in many of Howells’s stories, as we shall see.

8The “smoothing”—an ever so recurrent motif of his fiction—contrived by the fading ripples provides a very apt metaphor of the deflating process involved in his literary endeavor. The phrase “the want of visible agency” speaks volumes: it epitomizes what I see as Howells’s compulsion to conceal the agency, to dilute guilt and spread sin as thin as possible. I wish to show that an anxiousness for appeasement lies at the core of his fiction, answering a need to even out the turmoil caused by the relentless return of such obsessive images as mentioned above in connection with the fiery daughter.

9This smoothing generally assumes in Howells’s abundant meta-fictional rhetoric the official guise of rescuing fiction from the overemphatic prose and overdramatic plots of the “novelists” and restoring it to a virtuous status, that of an unassuming effort dedicated to the commonplace. In challenging the accursed “novelists” and aiming for an art that would be the mere obverse of theirs, Howells covers his own struggle with his inner “Altruria,” a struggle I want to grapple with.

10One might object that Howells’s fiction taps into the larger struggles of his day. However it does not take long to see that the typical plot has small groups at its center, not the least of which the family or a family-like social group, and that the family stands at the root of it all. Thematically the house/home and the sphere of origins raise the paramount anxieties driving the writing. Ideologically Howells advocates restraint and prescribes the dilution of the personal into the impersonal. In so doing, one might say that he is undoing what he is doing, just as Silas Lapham burns down the house of his dreams through an insidious oversight. In relation to this we shall be examining the role played by Pen/elope in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the main corpus of the following analysis.

11Caught up in this tension, the typical Howells fable will thicken and loosen through a number of errors whose duplicity and reversibility blur responsibilities. The etiology of the crisis baffles attempts at apportioning the blame clearly. In actual fact, the one mostly to blame, even more so than crime-inducing money, is the self, that magma from which crises erupt: love, bereavement, getting engaged, possessing the other, being dispossessed by the other, separation from and reparation of the past, the painful bond with the native home, the awkward rapport with the old European matrix. In other words, basic radical familial aches and hurtful rents. But above all, the key crisis for the self, a male self needless to say, is that triggered by the encounter with the feminine, that fateful ember liable to set aflame the highest achievements of successful men. What I mean by the “feminine” here is the inflammatory erotic potency of feline daughter figures arousing the guilt-ridden appetites of father figures, and/or the rueful sentiments of fathers dispossessed of their daughters. One apt instance of such a feline seductress, although slightly masked by the diverse population of the novel, is the “leopardess” Christine Dryfoos in A Hazard of New Fortunes. This comes across most clearly in the scene (Part Fifth, end of Chapter 23) where the once almighty father whose son has recently died, eventually comes to Beaton’s workshop and lies down exhausted on the artist’s settee. The purpose of his call is to try to cajole the latter, whose visits to his daughters he all but prohibited, into visiting again, as the smitten Christine, furious not to see Beaton any more, is now rejecting her father. However in lying down on the artist’s couch, the old man collapses climactically inside the symbolic den of his daughter:

[Old Dryfoos] He tottered with Beaton’s help to the aesthetic couch covered with a tigerskin, on which Beaton had once thought of painting Cleopatra, but he never could get the right model. As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his effectiveness and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would make a very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, while these thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. The old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and lengthened into his normal breathing.

12The father nearly lays down his life on the tiger skin which condenses the typical features of the young feline woman (c-leo-patra, leo-pardess), a potential empress. His defeat is conveyed in relation to the displaced emanation of his fiery daughter under the very eyes of the plausible suitor and weaker man. I might also have quoted the scene where the father, much in the position of a voyeur, peeps furiously at his daughters while Beaton gives them a very manual music lesson. This key triangle, as we shall see, occurs with variations in many texts. In the typology of such feline daughter figures, though they may be not so conspicuously challenging if quite as irreducible, one might include little motherless Idella, in Annie Kilburn, whom Reverend Peck, her phallic father, keeps forgetting about, but who, eventually placed in a host family, creeps back at night to Annie Kilburn’s house much in the form of a cat “caterwauling,” also Kitty Ellison who pursues the shy Arbuton in A Chance Acquaintance, or little fatherless Effie who won’t let go of Colville in Indian Summer, or little Flavia, Marcia and Bartley’s daughter in A Modern Instance, or, last but not least, Hannah Morrison thus sized up by Marcia: “You’ve got a sorrel top in your office that’s fiery enough if she’s anything like what she used to be when she went to school.” (A Modern Instance 179) These female instances, most often “intractable,” pose a castrating threat to the weaker men, usually son figures, while by contrast they kindle guilty desires in mature men.

13Before tackling the analysis of The Rise of Silas Lapham from the perspective of this kernel scenario and its dissolution, some general observations need to be made regarding the “anatomic” structure of Howells’s texts. The archaic content of the material handled in the stories assumes primary structural forms. The body and its parts or lack of them, along with such metonyms as garments or statues, including a whole range of anatomic correlatives, constitute a rigid critical architectonic.

14Thus a close scrutiny of the major works reveals the critical role of the hands and of their lack: amputation, mutilation or mere weakness thereof, thus Colville whose wrist gets caught in the “curb-bit chain of the horse” as he rescues the ladies in the carriage, a critical juncture in the plot, which then gets shunted off from its father/daughter love line, or Ferris whose injured hand saves him from proving his talent as a painter and having to finish his potential rival’s portrait, an unfinished work which secures his reunion with the loved one. This type of weakness operates in contrast with the play of the powerful hand, or of both hands, signaled among other things by correlative objects such as pianos or type-writers. Lindau actualizes perfectly the latent contrastive scenario of the hands: a former talented pianist, he lost a hand in the War Between the States and now does not earn “a handsome pittance.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 83) The organic nature of the material carries over contagiously into sound physicality through a whole complex of satellite signifiers such as “handsome,” a great favorite with Howells, or names of characters endowed with the powerful hand such as Mrs. Mandel, who keeps Dryfoos’s daughters in line, or Manda (Grier) who runs her best friend’s life for her, or the flamboyant Hannah who loves her love “with an H because he is Handsome.” (A Modern Instance 235)

15The leg plays a similar role as a contrastive index of power or weakness, some illustrations of which may be found in the following examples: Ben Halleck, Bartley Hubbard’s weak opposite number, walks with a limp due to an injured leg, Beaton, the aptly named man of too many parts, “lags on the art leg,” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 83) Reverend Peck has a leg cut off by a train, Lemuel is hurt at one leg by a kicking horse, or Colville again, who back in Florence after twenty years stumbles upon the same idiosyncratic figures in town, notably the ominous one-legged young man that he can’t outstrip: “[...] and the young man with one leg, whom he thought to escape by walking fast, had timed him to a second from the other side of the street” (Novels 1875-1886 598). The limp even contaminates the reader’s representation in The Rise of Silas Lapham. During the calamitous dinner, Bromfield Corey accounts as follows for the success of the novelists that trade on sloppy excess: “It flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their supernatural proportions.” (The Rise of Silas Lapham 185) One last example, the mighty Lapham harbors in one leg a war trophy, “a ball,” which he has Bartley touch during the interview conducted by the latter (The Rise of Silas Lapham 15). This sample is enough to suggest that the sensitive issues of sexual power in man and woman along with their correlative deficiency play a central role as latent motors of the writing, a fact which bears heavily on Howells’s ascetic recommendations in literary esthetics.

16In like fashion the house and its “organs,” the veranda, the balcony, the windows, the luxuriant garden, along with a string of echoing signifiers, thus “windows,” “widows,” “windrows,” or “bower,” “mower,” “flower” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 250), form a nexus of erotically-charged loci. The “L,” a glazed veranda, occurs in several texts as one such sensitive spot, most notably in The Minister’s Charge (Chapter 12), where it is clearly associated with Miss Vane’s “man-body,” Lemuel, whose initial job is to see to the “furnace.” It is most enlightening to correlate this “L” with such other organs as those of another great body, that of New York. There the “L road” races its insolent course grazing the lofty towers of the city, all but erasing them, and looking down on things on the ground “in wanton disregard.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 159-60) An aloof panoramic body of windows, the L road also offers glimpses of private lives behind windows. Seen or seen from, with it the gaze rules supreme. Lastly widows and windows both convey lacunary presences and surrogate images typical of self-censored forms.

17Thus the “L” spawns favorite compensatory associations. It cheers up “widows” and it satisfies jaded couples: “That widow is from the country. When she’s been a year in New York she’ll be as gay as an L road. [March] He celebrated a satisfaction they both had in the L roads.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 54) The L road holds such assuaging powers that March turns to it when his wife’s nerves get frayed: “He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the present and he proposed that they should take the elevated road as far as it should carry them into the country [...].” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 54-55) Conversely the L road may disclose its nocturnal truth as a phallic monster, so it does to Mrs. March in a dream: “[...] a hideous thing with square eyes and a series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 55) The dreaded thing, as we know, is also the craved thing. Further proof of this lies in the fact that Mrs. March in her hunt for “rents” uses a “vertebrate,” a compilation of ads she has put together in articulated form to guide her quest.

18Having foregrounded in quick strokes the organic and phonetic dominance in the representation, I wish now to focus in detail on the operating modes of some fragments and signifiers in The Rise of Silas Lapham and train the torch on some structural modalities of the erotic scenario mentioned above, a scenario which I believe to underlie, with variations and evolutions, most of Howells’s texts.

19One first broad observation about the figurative rule informing the obsessive scenario is that it is binary and rests upon contrasts. Things are imaged negatively around the core theme of having/having-not, power is conveyed through its opposite, possession through dispossession, a see-saw movement of opposite pairs sustains and, to a certain extent, starves the plot, the more so as the see-saw movement may also affect one and the same person, any “possession” being liable to switch into its reverse. Now, such virtual plots based on symmetry and displacement need some specific elements to carry beyond the mere contrastive depiction of characters, they require, much like children’s tales, misunderstandings and coincidences, and also symbolic bits and fragments as currency for exchange. The object at stake on this symbolic market is always more or less a person vied for, but things get transacted obliquely through metonyms, most commonly a body metonym, thanks to which human pairs are reconfigured. I shall bestow in what follows great attention upon two such fragments, a “shaving,” and a “pin,” which I believe condense much of the symbolic energy of the crisis in such a self-enclosed context as The Rise of Silas Lapham.

20In the novel the crisis arises from a collective visual misunderstanding provoked by the radiant beauty of one of Lapham’s two daughters, Irene, the epitomy of seduction to all eyes around. The other one, Pen, not half as attractive but very sharp-witted, later turns out be the elect. However, behind all this lurks shadow-like another pair, more disturbing, that which Irene and her father potentially form. Let us for a start observe how Irene is depicted, first in relation to her mild suitor, then to her sister, then to her father.

21Irene does not fit the stereotype of the leopardess to a T but she does belong to the set of inflammatory young ladies. She has the russet flamboyance of the disturbing Zerilla and her eyes hint of erotic kindling: “[Her eyes] seemed to burn on what they looked at with a soft, lambent flame.” The very first time she is glimpsed with Tom, it is within the skeleton of her father’s “other” house, and she holds on to the young man’s hand: “she clung to the young man’s hand an imperceptible moment longer than needed be, or else he detained her” (53). Familiarity with Howells’s major texts invites one to decode this typical hand gesture as one of female predation upon a weaker man—Kitty Ellison and a few others bear this out—and/or of defense against the father’s threat, as we shall see further below.

22As for Tom, he fits the picture of the shy suitor, and may have clung to the young lady’s hand. Hints of a crush on Irene are unquestionably dropped. However, a meticulous scrutiny discloses the spectral presence of the stronger man behind him, i.e. the father or a father-like figure. For one thing, Tom’s first appearance as a suitor takes place during a visit at the lady’s father’s “anatomic” house and narcissistic shrine. For another, he is described in dwarfing contrast with the ithyphallic carpenter, “with his rule sticking out of his overall pocket,” who is “talking about measurements” with Mrs. Lapham (52). Another sign of woman-related weakness in him crops up when he has his hand crushed by that lady: “Mrs. Lapham gave him a stout squeeze of her comfortable hand.” (52) A gesture typically evocative of domination in Howells’s code of hands. What is more, when Tom makes a first flitting appearance among the Lapham ladies at the sea-side (24), it is on the heels of Mrs. Lapham’s saving of his own mother’s life, he is thus full of gratitude to her and he lavishes as much attention to her as to her resplendent daughter, a fact which baffles the elder woman. Tom starts out as more of a son than a seducer. Indeed, for the young man to achieve manhood, Lapham believes he needs to be taken in hand by him: “I could make a man of that fellow, if I had him in my business.” This sounds much like Dryfoos, who, according to Fulkerson, seeks to avoid his son Conrad ending up behaving “like as if he was a girl.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 79) The way to being a real man lies through the father. Tom’s overall portrayal gets inscribed in contrast with the erector father.

23At surface level everything points to a love story between Irene and Tom. Down below though, erotic polarities thread a different line. Accordingly, let us see how a fragment, a “shaving,” creeps up between the two apparent lovers shadowing forth the latent father/daughter crisis fuelling the tale. Let us first note that the word “shaving” is over-determined by masculine and feminine registers, active and passive ones also. It signals both virility and its erasure. Concurrently its curves give it convulsive overtones, both snake-like and feminine. The very word holds a dialectic tension. As we shall see, it is this shaving that drives the scene between Irene and Tom in chapter 9. It sets in motion a sequence of interpreting games, the various steps of which call for close attention.

24The first scene “insulates” Irene and Tom in the sanctum of the father’s desire, specifically near the “bow-window”—a key erotic locus—of the young lady’s prospective bedroom. The conversation receives momentum from the novel Middlemarch and its awesome seductress Rosamond Vincy. The femme fatale motif comes up straight away as the primum mobile. Irene has only scanty and indirect knowledge of literature and small talent for conversation. Thus the talking is done obliquely, via Pen her sister and the books she reads. This quasi-removal of symbolic referentiality from Irene’s speech keeps her a mirroring force, both evocative of and responsive to the lineaments of eroticism, a correlative of the “shaving” which indeed soon engrosses her in mimetic gestural activity: “The girl was silent again. She followed the curl of a shaving on the floor with the point of her parasol.” (104) The adventitious chip spawned by the carpenter’s vigorous rubbings receives a second inscription from Irene as she duplicates its curve with the phallic object in her hand. Irene seems to absorb the “convolutions” of the shaving: “‘I don’t know,’ said Irene, still intent upon the convolutions of the shaving.” (104) The pictured activity, increasing from “curl” to “convolutions,” fascinates Irene.

25Stage number two in the sequence, the young lady recoils from pleasurable engrossment in the duplication of the object and its pictured activity, and seems to throw this symbol of a doing into his court: “She gave the shaving a little toss from her, and took the parasol across her lap.” Not surprisingly this potential opening fails to elicit a chiming response from Tom. Rather, the tossing of the shaving is left to work freely its associations. It brings up a prophetic association with the fateful music-room upstairs: “‘We are going to have the back room upstairs for a music-room and library,’ she said abruptly.” (104) Let us mention in parenthesis that a place of music in Howells is most often a locus for the hands to have free play, a surrogate figuration of sexual activity. Also the place will be one for books, and the question of “bindings” crops up presently, in other words, the theme of physical restraint and intellectual sublimation turns up quickly in conjunction with its opposite, a typical tension that receives its climax in this very spot, since it is precisely in this room that Silas (chapter 24), using “shavings” found on the floor, tries out the only untouched chimney of the house, and unwittingly, as it seems, sets ablaze his cherished but threatened edifice. In the mean time the motif of the “shaving” pursues its function as tensional vehicle, relayed in this by cognate fragments.

26Thus, from its very emergence the “shaving” stands as an enigmatic sign destined for deployment and repetition. An incentive to duplication it clinches a hermeneutic and mimetic hold on the text. For further evidence of this, let us consider a second stage in its career or rather the way another one comes as a symbolic prolongation of the previous: “She found another shaving within reach of her parasol, and began poking that with it, and trying to follow it through its folds. Corey watched her awhile.” Tom, reduced to gazing and conjecturing, is pitted against the mysterious ways of woman, along with the question of a possible role for him:

“You seem to have a great passion for playing with shavings,” he said. “Is it a new one?” “New what?” “Passion.” “I don’t know,” she said keeping on with her effort. She looked shyly aslant at him. “Perhaps you don’t approve of playing with shavings?” “Oh, yes, I do. I admire it very much. But it seems rather difficult. I’ve a great ambition to put my foot on the shaving’s tail and hold it for you.” “Well,” said the girl. “Thank you,” said the young man. He did so, and now she ran her parasol point easily through it. They looked at each other and laughed. “That was wonderful. Would you like to try another?” he asked. “No, I thank you,” she replied. “I think one will do.”
(107-108)

27What is adumbrated here is a consummation where the woman, ambiguously assisted by the mild young man, plays the instigating and performing part. She symbolizes sexual activity through contrast. With her phallic parasol she is able not only to follow and duplicate the curves but to penetrate them. The young man, for one, is quick to associate the convoluted “shaving” with the slippery threat of a snake and to act as auxiliary to the woman’s craving by stamping on it so that the active force inherent in it may be extinguished, a rather negative contribution. In like fashion Irene’s father stamps on the embers to put out, as he believes, the fire that will devour the object of his passion behind his back. In our scene the daughter’s mimetic erotic drive has its way and the son figure merely assists the lady in her performance. The erotic drama condensed in the “shaving” and in what goes on around it at the hands of the pair foreshadows the distribution of roles in the crisis to come, with the daughter as the inflammatory agent, the young man as a timorous figure of ambiguity, and the father as the inextinguishable counterpart to Irene.

28What comes next in the scene confirms the figurative vocation of the “shaving.” The young man lifts it to his nose, which we know to be “aquiline” (65), therefore potentially manly, as opposed to his father’s “straight” appendage—nothing means anything unless it be through contrast. The “shaving” does partake of a male/female sexual economy, but in our scene the olfactory function of the nose eclipses its previously suggested potential phallic vigor: “‘It is like a flower. May I offer it to you?’” Tom invests the object with a virginal aura and returns it as a chastened genteel homage to its provocative finder. Irene thereupon re-eroticizes it and supplies it with renewed hermeneutic sustenance as indeed she sports and publicizes the offered “flower.” Yet, by putting it in her “belt,” she places it at a switch between tightening and loosening, a spot of dual potentiality typical of this contrast-based picturing. Necessarily, the publicizing of the “shaving” entails a new reading gaze. Not surprisingly it is that of her sister Pen, the other prong, the one who has brains and through whom the dual interpretive game and dramatic enfolding—they are consubstantial—must pursue its course. Irene has turned the “shaving” into an erotic trophy. Imogene makes an homologous show of erotic victory toward the end of Indian Summer: “[...] she put it [bouquet] in her belt, and made Colville notice it when he came,” (816) a prophetic exhibition for the eyes of the jaded man of her swerving from him and of her imminent conquest of the erotic man.

29Pen’s wit and facetiousness, her readiness for fanciful and binary interpretations resonate with the dramatic ambivalence of the “shaving” and sweep it ahead toward the center of crisis. If it is a flower, she suggests, it should be put in water, a romantic hypothesis soon superseded by another, violent and visionary: “But there’s some sense in it. They [shavings] can be used for kindlings when they get old, and you can’t do anything with flowers. Perhaps he’ll get to sending them by the barrel.” (113) Pen gears the “shaving” toward the crucial semantic sphere of ignition via the motifs of accumulation and ageing, a sphere cognate with that of the father. She overturns the gallantly social vocation of it into that of incendiary power related to age. With old flowers nothing can be “done,” activity is ruled out, while with growth of number and years they can be made to bring about a paroxysm of doing and undoing, they are potential fire.

30In Irene’s playful handling of it with Tom, the “shaving” epitomizes erotic doing, it flourishes a primary image of sexual action, a pictured event correlative of Irene, in the face of which Tom is reduced to the role of authenticator. Pen, in the reading she gives of her sister’s exhibited “shaving,” prophesies that the act-image is fraught with an explosive crescendo that reaches far beyond any victory Irene might pride herself upon. Pen’s voice becomes yet more oracular when she draws a parallel between the word “shaving” and the word “splinter: ” “I hope you didn’t put on that expression when he offered you the shaving. If you did, I don’t believe he’ll ever give you another splinter.” (115) What draws the reader’s attention here is that the very same word “splinter” designates the smoldering bit of wood used by Lapham to light the cigar associated with the testing of the untried chimney and the enjoyment of a transgressive moment in the frigid house, leading up to the destruction of it: “[...] and then, lighting a cigar with a splinter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out in his own mind.” (294) Through this lexical commutation, the erotic action connected with the effulgent daughter woman and pictured through the “shaving” merges with the virile fragment, here as often associated with a predatory image of the father, as we shall see further on. Laughing Pen makes out the wolf father from a long way off.

31One thing should be made clear though, in no way am I saying that Irene may be perceived as a silly sexy girl who flirts flippantly with young men and crows about it. No such thing here. Irene like all the other characters is a conveyor of dual potentialities, and the issue of “doing” is as crucial and problematic for her as it is for the others, if not more as she, of all the characters, is the one most deprived of logos. Indeed, in a crisis based upon duplicitous images and another’s interpretation, to what extent is doing possible? Thus hermeneutics lie at the core of the action and vice versa. Accordingly a new question, or rather a painful anxiety, arises from her necessarily limited cognitive make-up. It occurs in the context of interpretation of the “shaving” with her sister, the brain. What can men “do,” if anything, when it comes to making a seducing move toward a woman? This interrogation confirms Irene’s tragic status as one confined to the imaging of a dubious act. Here again Pen’s reply is prophetic in more ways than one: “Some of’em can’t—especially when there’s such a tearing beauty around.” (115) Beyond the frozen metaphor “tearing beauty,” it may be suggested that Irene’s stunning beauty is liable to induce in some men castrating effects. More relevantly this “tearing” should be set against the unfixable “rent” through which guilty lust insinuates itself in the music-room and eventually conspires to set Silas’s house ablaze. It is indeed the wind blowing through the rent in a window screen that sweeps the shavings together, shavings which thus heaped offer the fuel for lighting the fire from which the cigar itself. . . . A concatenation of adjacent items and signifiers bring about the climactic event for which Silas is responsible but it is made possible by a gap. An image suggesting action, Irene partakes of the rent, the unnamable gap that lies at the core of the father/daughter crisis.

32Without losing sight of the critical “shaving” I wish now to explore the figure of Irene in her relation to the stronger man, her father. This new pair tells another tale, nocturnal and gloomy. The love scenario has been overturned: Eros/Irene has just heard the news of her demise, she is not the one loved, Pen is. Upon hearing this, she becomes Iron/Irene, she drags her father through a ruthless nightly routine. First she repels any placatory approach from her compassionate mother, thus establishing contrastively that it is a matter exclusively between the man/father and her: “‘Don’t touch me,’ she said icily.” (230). Then she imposes silence first on her mother: “‘I don’t want to talk about that. Tell him [father] to get ready.’” Then on her father: “‘Don’t talk, papa. I don’t want any one should talk with me.’” (231) With dialogue thus ruled out, gestures and images hold full sway, the nightmarish has free rein. Iron/Irene captures her father and marches him through the night straight to the object of his lust, the new house, and she strikes it off with one verbal stroke: “‘I shall never live in it,’ and she began to walk on.” In other words, you shall not have me, you shall not have it. “The shaving-Irene-new house-father” connection receives here further substantiation, along with the prospect of a catastrophic outcome. Indeed the scene of Irene’s refusal in front of the new house that night is revived on that later night when Lapham gazes at the sealed windows shortly before the fire (292-93) and also after the fire has been put out (297), as we shall see. The correlation is unmistakable. Irene’s refusal heralds another dismissal, much closer in time: she announces to her father that she will leave the present home and go back to the native family place, Lapham, as if to say that her old man has forfeited any claim to the family name. Quite a prophetic dispossession as indeed Silas eventually has to go back to the old country. The father/daughter erotic economy mediated by the new house has received further substantiation of the explosive threat it carries.

33The next stage in the nocturnal sequence led by Irene is transacted through another mediating object, more clearly erotic and mimetic of the daughter woman, a cat. After her stark dismissal of the new house and her reiteration of her wish for silence, Irene makes a beeline for the enticing bright lights of a shop-sign shining in the dark: “She halted him once more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary’s window.” (231) Standing on the threshold she explains that she must have some sleeping medication, a request frowned upon her father. But the latter can’t do anything about stopping her, she has him in hand, so to speak. The apothecary advises bromide that, by a mistake typical of the binary displacements recurrent in this dream-like elaboration, he believes to be intended for the father. What is more, as they enter the shop the father seems overwhelmed by a general detumescence, so to speak, the daughter looks like stone, and an insidious cat creeps up and rubs itself against the father’s leg, a member whose erotic value, as we recall, is heightened by the presence of a “ball” from the war:

[Irene] She did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her father’s expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary’s cat rubbed itself against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, “You want to take a spoonful of that as long as you are awake. I guess it won’t take many to fetch you.”

34The scene may be read in two non-mutually exclusive ways. After an outright rejection of the father’s desired object, Irene drags him to the place of utmost castigation, where castration, colliding with desire, is symbolically enforced. The father’s defeat is established. Concurrently one may consider that the father’s threatening erotic drive is confirmed by the apothecary’s mistake, Silas does need medication to curb an incoercible urge, and the target of it is the forever irrepressible return of the cat daughter. No interpretation is ever stabilized when dealing with such obsessive figuration resting upon on repeated oscillations. However, at this juncture, what is shown contrastively is that Irene has the whip-hand, as her hand language attests: “Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers.” (232) She does the grabbing and her hands are wrapped protectively. Such gestures are by now familiar to us. The brutal closure of the scene asserts further her empowerment through dispossession: “‘Give me that bottle,’ she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.” (232)

35Thus as soon as she receives the news of her own demise, Irene sets in motion a nightly errand that thrusts her mother, the wife, out of the way and seizes her father, the husband, to drag him to the symbolic collapse of his deep desire, the daughter/house. She consecrates negatively the father/daughter erotic tension and her vengeful triumph over her father through symbolic dispossession.

36I wish now to illustrate very briefly how erotic feline imagery may permeate any area of the novel, sometimes beyond gender distinctions, which confirms yet again that the characters like their object correlatives are essentially conveyors of the basic critical values. Thus the masculine pair Rogers/Lapham falls under the operative rule of the guilty scenario between the father and the cat daughter. The unstoppable return of Rogers in Lapham’s feet bears a kindred obsessional cast. At first glance, though, Rogers looks nothing like a sultry redhead and yet... First nudged out wrongly from their partnership by Lapham, Rogers causes the latter’s final ruin by returning time and again to mew on his doorstep and profit by his former partner’s guilty feelings. Indeed he drags him into a flood of debt that provokes his financial “drowning,” following transactions involving “wild-cat stocks” (245), or “wild-cat securities” (281), and “wild-cat patents” (301). A feline predator lurks behind the murky figure of Rogers. He is even described as “tempter” (311) and hugging predator: “he’s got a drowning man’s grip round his neck.” (256) Insidiously it is tigress Rogers that brings about Lapham’s financial death by water. By fire and water, thus falls the House of Lapham.

37Let us now leave the cat to its stealthy prowl and return to our “shaving.” It resurfaces in chapter 19, just a little before the night scene at the apothecary’s shop, in company with a “pin,” its most thought-provoking symbolic counterpart. The scene describes the handing over of power from Irene to Pen. Irene has just been officially deposed and, true to her silent ways, she turns to symbolic objects to convey her message, she lays down the public insignia of her previous conquest in her sister’s lap. She is not as violent about it as Christine Dryfoos, witness the following quote from A Hazard of New Fortunes: “‘Here are your presents.’ With both hands she flung the jewels—pins and rings and earrings and bracelets [...]. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father’s plate.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 361) The intaglio ring was indeed offered by her father to Christine, it was later moved to a different finger by the quasi lover Beaton, it then goes violently back to the father after Beaton’s dismissal from the Dryfoos home at the hands of the father’s employed chaperone Mrs. Mandel, to return eventually to old Dryfoos’s hand and imprint its mark on Conrad’s face seen as he lies dead from having deflected death from Lindau. Quite a long-range ring indeed.

38Here is now the quote concerning Irene and Pen: “She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon in her hand. She held it a moment; then... she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word.” (250) Their gestures clearly echo one another, but here Irene is dealing with her sister, not with her father, that, she does later, and we have seen that she could be as tough as Christine in punishing him. What I wish to point out here is that under the “pine” of the “pine-shaving” lies a “pin” which we must open up.

39In the set of relics handed over to Pen, lies a “pin” that first appears in chapter 17. The moment and mode of its emergence shed some light on its symbolic value. Irene has a sudden craving for it a little after, in the narrative sequence, Tom has revealed to Pen that she is the one he loves. The structural severing off of the scenes ensures the confinement of information to circumscribed binary areas, still a further form of silencing yielding primacy to the figurative language of images. And images don’t lag behind, they connect across barriers metonymically. Thus, although Irene does not yet know of her demise, her craving occurs in sync with the her chronological dispossession: “I guess I shall get one of those pins that Nanny Corey had in her hair,” and a few lines below we read: “I should have liked to have Pen go with me.” (219) Another clue that this sudden craving is closely linked to Pen, and functions as a symbolic stop-gap for her loss. Also this “pin” echoes phonetically the name Pen and announces itself as a potential suture.

40The signifier “pin” polarizes the latent scenario of erotic loss and compensation. However, with Irene sidelined, it takes the other woman sexually connected to the father to carry on the task of representing the motif of erotic betrayal. Thus Mrs. Lapham is enlisted to convey figuratively her husband’s betrayal in rival collaboration with Silas’s fiery mare. Very much like Irene in the next chapter, the wife targets the father, her husband. She sends word to his office that she needs him rather urgently for a “ride: ” “Silas, I should like to ride with you this afternoon. Can’t you come home early?” (218) The erotic tenor of the demand here again finds its confirmation contrastively. Indeed the husband does comply but, to his wife’s great annoyance, he comes over, hitched, so to speak, to his favorite mare, whom—the mare is referred to as “she”—we know he loves to “let out” and whose “silent” motion and “alien force” forms a “tight fit” with him (32-34) Mrs. Lapham is not amused: “I wish you hadn’t brought this fool of a horse... I wanted to talk.” The restrictions placed by deeper forces upon interlocution to the benefit of images come up again in this “either/or” situation. The husband’s reply leaves no doubt as to the fact that sexual fulfillment has priority over speech and that release is obtained thanks to a fiery and silent “alien”: “Well, I can’t drive this mare and talk too, I’ll sell out altogether... She’ll be quiet enough when she’s has her spin” (220) The triangle finds a new formulation metonymically, with the mare as the desired alien. More to the point here, is the interplay between “pin” and “spin,” where one can see the snake “s” hitch itself to the “pin,” a configuration that overcomes via this letter collage the inevitable successiveness of the oscillations punctuating the plot line, and that mirrors the tensional and paradoxical duality of the core material. Here the frictional values of release and reparation become condensed in this telling letter conflation.

41The “pin” closes momentarily the scenario. Irene is by now turned into stone and marginalized. Pen’s vocation gears her toward suture and reparation. It therefore falls to a new conveying agent to materialize obliquely Silas’s adulterous passion. An opportunely fluttering scrap of paper correlated to the stunning redhead Zerilla and her boss Silas performs the task of mongering a hint of betrayal to the wife. This spontaneous leak through a “crevice”—another necessary rent—of a personal document belonging to Lapham bears a strong suggestion of the latter’s dalliance with a daughter-like woman. Could the stunning redhead Zerilla be Silas’s mistress? A true false lead all the more worthy of attention as the document carries not only a record of sums of money but a hieroglyph of what could be read as an apposition of the feminine and the masculine: “‘Wm. M’” (267) This fluttering leak however does not elicit any immediate response in Mrs. Lapham. Here again silence or lack of response heighten the mimetic over the dramatic. Thus, hardly discovered by the wife the scrap of paper goes to sleep or rather into gestation in her work-basket. Mrs. Lapham’s role here barely exceeds that of a figurative extra.

42Our scandalous drowsing fragment is revived in the next chapter, (23) in blatant correlation with the fire motif. Let us observe the sequence. Lapham announces to his wife that he is in serious financial trouble: “the new house has got to go,” (271) and that he has “‘sent orders to shut down at the Works.’” This prompts in the narration the following comment filtered through the wife’s consciousness: “The fire had never been out before since it was first kindled. She knew how he had prided himself upon that; how he had bragged of it to every listener and had always lugged the fact in as the last expression of his sense of success.” (272)

43Lapham’s success and demise both trigger associations with the fire motif. Interestingly a whole metonymical network based on the hot and the cold, with redness in common, is in motion. Irene, as we have seen, has already tumbled into the category of stone and ice. In our sequence this duality assumes a kindred tension, as we are about to see.

44Hearing of the extinguishing of fires, the wife worries about the “hands: ” “’I don’t know what’s going to become of the hands in the middle of the winter [...].” (272) This concern of hers reverberates with what we know of the crucial role of the word in Howells’s writing and confirms yet again the high metonymical density of this very organic fiction. More to the point, it anticipates the reference to pretty Zerilla’s “red fingers,” as she plies her type-writer’s keyboard in an unheated room at work, a key scene explored ahead. (315)

45Thus, our obscure scrap of paper awakens in a context of fire and it reactivates the connection between the father/husband and the young cat lady. Here too, images thrive upon minimal interlocution. Lapham merely replies, “‘Oh,—it’s nothing,’” to his wife’s question: “‘Who is ‘Wm.M?’” Dialogue remains lacunary and fruitless. Under such circumstances the scrap of paper secures further range through further fragmentation. Indeed we read that “[Lapham] tore the paper into small pieces and dropped them into the fire.” One scrap escapes combustion to be stumbled upon, needless to say, by Mrs. Lapham, the next morning, a characteristic delay that, here again, offers the fragment scope for its mute figurative labor. It bears a cipher not far removed from the previous one: “Mrs. M.” The woman/man suggestion gains momentum and no dialogue will detract from its enigmatic visual presence as indeed the husband, in typical reticence, denies his opportunely patient wife any explanation. While the reader receives the needed information through the narrator’s voice, Mrs. Lapham, unenlightened as she remains, focalizes the enigmatic spectacularity of the fragment, and her dazedness nourishes the contrastive visual potency of the adulterous scenario, as we shall see.

46This cryptic force releases itself in a prophetic visual explosion, when, thanks to an opportune coincidence of the subjacent scenario, the wife falls foul of the effulgent redhead at the very spot where her husband should have been. The sequence needs to be observed in detail: one morning, as he turns up at work Lapham finds the beautiful Zerilla, his typist, sitting bundled up in her outdoor jacket and typing with her fingers all red. She explains that there is “something the matter with the steam.” The lack of “steam,” a nicely ambiguous word, has the fiery young lady constricted and numbed. This constriction within a garment belongs to what might be called the typology of the “overcoats,” these sorts of strait-jackets that all but paralyze the characters, more often than not male ones. Beaton, for instance, stifled by his “idiotic fur-coat” and simultaneously impeded by the strike-bound surface car network, a crippling fact which will force him to walk in the hot weather and “mount the stairs of the Elevated station.” (A Hazard of New Fortunes 353) Conversely, the timorous Arbuton achieves symbolic power when he rescues the perky Kitty from the fangs of a hound and has his “overcoat” torn by this animal. He then gives up the torn “overcoat” to the “cooper,” another figure of constriction, who helped him get rid of the dog. This shedding of the overcoat marks a turning point in the plot through a relaxing of the young man’s inhibitions. In our sequence Lapham offers his typist a kindred loosening. Just as he loves to “let out” his fiery mare, so here he lets in his secretary. Indeed he releases her from her strait-jacket by having her sit at his desk to practice her two-handed skill in his office: “‘Well, take your writer into my room, there’s a fire in the stove there,’ said Lapham passing out.” (315) Here the focus is placed on the transfer of the “type-writer,” a correlative of the potential power involved in the use of both hands, into the place of the “fire.” Also most noteworthy is the fact that hardly has he had the young woman ascend his fire-heated throne with her two-handed scepter, when he “passes out,” an ambiguous formulation that carries overtones of self-extinction. Through this contrastive transfer of the frozen redhead into his fire-heated room with her type-writer, Lapham symbolically brings alive the potential fire in her: he implants in his personal sanctum the eroticism of the fire that will eventually put him out. His passing out is also prophetic of his leaving his “new house” to burn behind his back. The “want of visible agency” is here again nicely constructed.

47The follow-up, with the wife’s coincidental arrival upon the scene shortly after her husband has left it, invites the comment that Lapham, through his displaced agency, has been involved in the preparation of an adulterous mise-en-scène for his wife’s eyes. Her metonymical presence as the gazer seals the transgressive character of Lapham’s introduction of the frozen fiery lady in his heated sanctum. Indeed Mrs. Lapham turns up out of the blue this very morning with the intention of apologizing to her husband about Rogers, his other wild-cat tempter. Strikingly, the wife wears a veil, like a widow, allegedly so as not to be recognized by Tom. The veil acts as another sign of the wife’s symbolic dispossession by the fiery lady. Simultaneously the veil operates as a curtain ensuring the binary closure typical of such scenes, with speech impeded by a separating agent, and information held in from neighboring presences. The third party can only turn up in a delayed and/or adventitious manner. The curtain/veil also gives the scene a clandestine and voyeuristic cast that sharpens the transgressive nature of the vision. The wife’s entering the office unrecognized, therefore as both an absence and a presence, ensures that the “show” explodes in full scandalous exhibition. Sitting behind her husband’s desk, a very pretty redhead who does not know who is facing her, has her two hands dancing away on the keyboard in full unconcern: “Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating a type-writer. She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the scant attention [...].” (316) A crucial thing to remember here is that the stunning Zerrilla is indirectly another Lapham daughter since her own father deflected upon himself the bullet aimed at Lapham by a sharp-shooter during the Civil War: “I hated to look at him after it was over not so much because he’d got a ball that was meant for me by a sharp-shooter—he saw the devil take aim and he jumped to warn me [...].” (192) Zerrilla thus crystallizes the lurking presence of the daughter in the mistress. Also she blends together the erotic fire of the mistress/daughter and the debt to the savior. Quite a potent, paradoxical tension.

48Death indeed stalks about in the core scenario. What follows in the sequence yields some valuable clues as to this. Thus, what bewilders the wife after her initial shock at finding the redhead instead of her husband is the sight of the girl’s and Silas’s garments as lingering presences:

Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one, and Lapham’s office coat, looking intensely like him to his wife’s familiar eye hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs. Lapham liked even less than the girl’s good looks this domestication of her garments in her husband’s office.
(316)

49The arresting nature of the adulterous deed is sketched out starkly for the gazer by the simultaneous presence of the incriminating garments, a sort of still-life freezing agency in guilty fixedness. The garments exhibit for the wife’s eyes a bemusing alienation of the familiar, she is exiled from “him/home” by the sight of her husband’s mimetic coat in proximity with the girl’s domesticated one. However the vestigial clothes are proximate but separate, a gap remains. Activity is held still. For the gazer, bereavement seems more to the point than mere dispossession by a rival. Accordingly, such obliquely transgressive scenes make the transgressor one forever gone from, and forever running after, his truly desired object, one doomed to pursue rather than to win, and to a certain extent a loser lost to his home life. Under this phantasmal regime of negative suggestion, defeat has precedence over success as things are always seen from a losing gazer’s point of view. The scenario never overtakes the courted goal, it displaces paradoxical images conjoining fire and mortal petrification. Indeed hanging garments have to do with death. One example from several, the reader will remember Miss Vane desperately seeking, beneath the glazed L of her house, her indispensable furnace-man, Lemuel, who unbeknown to her has quit his job, and only finding vestiges of him: “On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal hanging there.” (The Minister’s Charge 121)

50In a bid to substantiate further the preceding remarks upon body metonyms and mortal petrification, I will say a few words about statues, these frozen bodies so often encountered in Howells’s fiction. We may start by remembering that Irene, hardly deposed, becomes a statue, she imposes a chilly order upon everyone and everything around her: “She herself seemed as steady and strong as rock.” (232) Petrification is synonymous with indomitable ascendancy: “Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted... with certain silences which represented the moments when she stood stock-still.” (233) In the last chapter her chilling ways clearly assume the signs of a castrating force: “She had lost all her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and there she was like a cutting edge.” (327) I described earlier Irene’s impervious sovereignty during the nightly errand with her father. With loss comes absolute rigidity, an aloof presence/absence, a form of bemusing mortal petrification.

51The reader will also remember the gimcrack-filled drawing-room with statues where, opportunely left alone one night, Pen has a shock upon discovering Tom sitting amid the tawdry clutter in the dimly-lit room, ushered there through some mistake of the maid’s. Another mistake, Tom has come to meet Lapham. This accidental chain leads up to a tableau with marble statues “representing allegories” brooding upon the clutter in an atmosphere of mourning:

These phantasms added their chill to that imparted by the walls, the landscapes, and the carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams invited company. Corey had not been in this room before... Penelope looked into this [sitting-room] first, and then she looked into the parlor, with a smile that broke into a laugh as she discovered him standing under the single burner, which the second-girl had lighted for him in the chandelier. (203)

52Contrast is what matters in this description. The chill of the “phantasms” means little unless set against the few occasions when lights glare and fire flares. This is the alien place, the father’s other place, the two-faced grotto. Accordingly, Tom having come to see the father but seeing the daughter instead, is first shown into the room of the frozen bodies, a place which the father may on occasions heat up violently. A switch-place where castration may be reversed into its opposite. Also to be noted, it is the “second-girl” who puts him there, a sort of spectral Irene. Better still, she has lighted a burner, she has the igniting power, a feature which confirms her structural symmetry with the father. However, she has lighted only one burner. Pen’s humorous interpretation of the tableau, as ever, hits the bull’s eye and: “‘I don’t understand how you came to be put in there,’ she said, as she led the way to the cozier place,’unless it was because Alice thought you were only here on probation, anyway.’” (203) The young man must first be put to the test of the chilly place with potential heat, a glimmering light held out by the spectral other, before being taken into the “cozier” place. Is it any wonder then that this “probation” scene just precedes the passage into the snug sitting-room where Tom declares his flaring passion to Pen. Tom and Pen’s incipient love story is beginning to break the deadlock of exclusive eitherness. The frozen duality held up for a belated gaze is thawing out into sequential activity. This time the gazer is a sharp-witted interpreter dealing face to face with a living object, or rather a subject, not a fragment, no a/tom, a full Tom. Only speech can do that. The ominous father/daughter trail is receiving a promise of genteel conjuration thanks to the literate couple.

53One last word about statues. The reader will remember that at the beginning of the last chapter, Pen, in a closed-off scene, receives her prospective parents-in-law alone, without her own parents, in the cluttered room with the statues. Here, though, it is the group of “phantasms” forming “the Emancipation group” that looms to prominence. According to the narrator, she has chosen to receive them in this crowded room because she wants to make a clean breast of the worst and relieve herself of it first thing, as an indispensable preamble: “The girl had instinctively judged best that they should know the worst at once, and she let them have the full brunt of the drawing-room while she was screwing up her courage to come down and see them.” (327) A “probation” scene for Pen, a wish to own up to the presence of an evil thing about to be overcome, an “emancipation” scene. Yet this avowal of hers will not assume its full import unless read in terms of the double threat posed on the Corey couple by the aforementioned statues:

She was afterwards—months afterwards—able to report to Corey that when she entered the room his father was sitting with his hat on his knees, a little tilted away from the Emancipation group, as if he expected the Lincoln to hit him with that lifted hand of benediction; and that Mrs. Corey looked as if she were not sure but the Eagle pecked. (327)

54Corey the father, described from the beginning as an idle aesthete lacking the Roman nose, seems to be ducking away from the great emancipator’s powerful hand, as if its generous sweep were about to release not so much the slaves but rather its castrating force upon him. Here again a paradoxical figure, the binding liberator. The mother also seems under a threat, namely that of the erotic prickings of the beaked fowl. The smoldering ember in the frozen body is released through a contrastive scene of fixed agency. Irene, in her two successive avatars partakes of the father’s dual threat, burning and castration. Pen, who pertains to speech, belongs to the temperate middleroom that will survive the burned house.

55After this swerve into the realm of stone figures, let us head back to the trail of fire blazed by our fragments. A third slip of paper bearing a strong intimation of adultery between Zerrilla and Lapham reaches the wife. It comes obliquely from Rogers, as we discover belatedly. It is a poison-penned anonymous letter, a veiled letter so to speak: “Ask your husband about his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and a Wellwisher.” (310) The two “Ws” echo those in the previous fragments and they corroborate the view that Rogers reiterates his solicitations in the same wave of compelling onslaughts as the censored erotic object. Here again what strikes the observer is the prevalence of a primary mode of inscription marked by imaging letters; a language in the making, still between mimetic indexes and symbolic letters. This must be thought alongside the fragmented nature of language as symbolized by the three successive bits of fluttering paper. Language in the whole novel is shown to be in crisis, both through the fragmentation just mentioned and through Lapham’s verbal collapse during the fateful dinner. With Pen absent (“It vexed him to think she had not come; she could have talked as well as any of them”), he either cannot keep up with the various interlocutors, he is left out of the social exchange, or he tumbles into the opposite extreme, rambling away flood-like and deluging his commensals. Furthermore, when one considers the fact that the greater part of the talk is devoted to books, sentimentalism, love stories, self-sacrifice, popular novelists, one cannot fail to see how self-reflexive this novel is, a feature common to many Howells books. To connect us back with the fire motif, I wish merely to add that in the preceding chapter (13), after Pen has stated her refusal to go the dinner at the Coreys and left her mother to struggle with the writing of the acceptation in her primary school-teacher’s “round hand,”—here too language is in training—Lapham has the “furnace-man” post the letter:

Penelope had gone to her room, without waiting to be asked to advise or criticise; but Irene had decided upon the paper, and, on the whole, Mrs. Lapham’s note made a very decent appearance on the page. When the furnace-man came, the Colonel sent him out to post it in the box at the corner of the square.

56The role distribution shows through unmistakably. Pen withdraws from the writing process, she opens the critical language gap, her fiery sister chooses the material, the flesh, on which the basic round hand of the mother will inscribe itself in a primary fashion and the father puts fire to paper, so to speak, in having the furnace-man mail the letter.

57It remains now for the pair “shaving/pin” to bring the trail of fire to its climactic tension. Some other fragments already touched upon will feed into our reflection through an illuminating parallel with a scene from A Modern Instance. The sequence opens with Lapham walking toward his glorious new house:

[...] he left his office early, and went to look at the house and try to bring himself to some conclusion there. The long procession of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the red sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat, stopped in front of the house and looked at their multitude.

58The thought of losing this glowing beauty brings a lump to his throat. But the fiery lady already refuses to give herself away. Indeed, when he trains his brimming eyes upon the windows, a most critical locus, he reads refusal there. The “window-spaces,” not being glazed with glass, contrary to the erotic L or veranda, are “glazed with white linen: ”

He turned and looked up, as he had often done, at the window-spaces neatly glazed with white linen, and recalled the night when he had stopped with Irene before the house, and she had said she would never live there, and he had tried to coax her into courage about it.
(292-93)

59The correlation between the new house and Irene declares itself openly. The virginal white linen shielding the critical gaps fly the flag of untouchability, and it brings on the memory of the punitive night errand, with Lapham remembered as the tempter coaxing the young lady into penetration. As I said before, windows are key erotic loci and signifiers in Howells’s imaginary. Women and windows seem hardly separable. Out of so many, here is just one example from chapter 2 of our novel. Lapham is riding with his wife in the dashing cutter pulled by his fiery mare: “There were women’s faces at many of the handsome windows [...].”

60An almost compulsive pairing seems to establish itself bringing in its train the inevitable “handsome.” The window and the gaze have from time out of mind been associated in Western consciousness. Nevertheless, what is particularly striking here is that windows are, as often in Howells’s fiction, critically associated with the word “glaze,” a gaze into which a stealthy L has crept up. Here most notably the windows have been glazed with linen. Not much of a find for sure, yet one that brings to the fore the potency of letter and sound contamination in Howells’s highly self-censored creation. Eroticism encodes itself quite visibly on the flesh of language like tattoos.

61The second stage of our sequence has Lapham penetrating into the frigid house:

He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always carried, so that he could let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the house dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken place a thousand years ago.

62The freezing of the agency through belatedness and arrest noted as a structural trait in previous scenes, here assumes climactic visibility. This account bears a typical erotic paradox at its center. Lapham carries the phallic key around all the time so that he may call on his beauty any time he pleases, yet the house does not seem to have been visited for ages. True, Lapham has been rushed off his feet with work, and lack of money has brought the construction to a stop. Still, what matters here again is contrast, specifically the contrast between the unrestricted erotic potentiality of repeated ins and outs for Lapham, and the frigidity of the arrested interior echoing the denial sported by the virginal glazing. Irene’s statuary petrification reverberates with that of the house. Once inside, Lapham “explores” his house much like one breaking and entering, in this primary darkness he recognizes the smell of his own paint named after his wife, the Persis Brand that Seymour the architect had insisted that they experiment in the hope that they might use it for the decoration of Mrs. Lapham’s room. Married life, adulterous intimations, conjugal smells are wafted in contrast with the smell of untouched wood. Inevitably Lapham’s gaze is drawn to the windows but the “linen sashes” will only yield enough light for him to make out the wood shavings left to lie about by the powerful carpenter:

The floors were strewn with shavings and chips which the carpenter had left, and in the music-room, these had been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide rent in the linen sash. (293)

63Our “shaving” is back with its charge of fatality. The manly carpenter has deposited his inflammable chips. The rent too is back, this gap previously mentioned in the context of Irene’s “tearing beauty.” And it forms a gap in the flag of refusal, a crack in the virginal shield, another oxymoronic tension. Yet before pushing the analysis through this most revealing breach, a word is to be said about these “windrows” encountered in a key chapter of A Modern Instance, with its alternative spelling “winrows.”

64In the passage I am setting against the fire scene in The Rise of Silas Lapham, Marcia, little inclined to wreak vengeance upon her absconding yet still pined-for husband, and Ben Halleck, her limping undeclared suitor, are on board a train that carries them on a punitive mission led by Marcia’s father. He has indeed vowed to stop Bartley getting an illegal divorce out West. Marcia with the weaker limping man at her side is gazing from the window at the landscape:

But in another breath she rose from this desolation, and was talking with impersonal cheerfulness of the sights that the car-window showed. As long as the light held they passed through the same opulent and monotonous landscape..., and the farmers were riding their plows, or heaping into vast winrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year’s crop. Where they came to a stream the landscape was roughened into low hills [...]. If there was any difference between Ohio and Indiana, it was that in Indiana the spring night, whose breath softly buffeted their cheeks through the open window, had gathered over those eternal corn-fields, where the long winrows, burning on either hand, seemed a trail of fiery serpents writhing away from the train as it roared and clamored over the track.
(A Modern Instance 567)

65The jilted Marcia finds reparation in the late afternoon sights offered by bountiful nature; she achieves “impersonal cheerfulness,” this dissolution of the self so crucial in Howells’s conception of existential equilibrium. Also Marcia’s regained cheerfulness comes with the still sun-lit vista of men “riding their plows.” “Windows,” “plows,” “winrows,” the sound/letter pattern gains momentum through characteristic contamination. Eroticism rears its head and darkness gathers. Indeed with reparation it soon brings along its dubious inflammatory potential. The men are “heaping” into “winrows” vegetal bits of the previous winter, stiffened things, stalks. A pattern of winterwrought accumulation and drying very similar to that of the shavings in the music-room emerges here too. With night “gathering,” another increasing pattern, the vision turns lurid and infernal, the winrows are becoming “fiery serpents” and the train races ruthlessly through the night much like the “L road” of New York. The soothing tableau offered by the train windows has switched to a nightmarish vision of hell.

66Not surprisingly, the father has center stage in what follows on the heels of the ominous sights. Indeed the old man, who, in typical predatory fashion, chews bits of wood, has become a correlative of the indomitable train. Chewing the cud of vengeance, he can think of only one thing, to regain his daughter stolen from him by the seducer Bartley her husband who eventually ran away from her, adding insult to injury. During this chase after the dispossessor the father gains a more and more threatening ascendancy over his companions, particularly his own daughter, as the rest of the scene bears out. Indeed, toward midnight the little “posse” get off the train and make for the waiting-rooms pending the arrival of a connecting train. Marcia trembles: “Marcia clung to Halleck’s arm, and shivered convulsively. [Her father] stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor.” (A Modern Instance 569) She clings to the weaker man, the one who limps, to fend off her father’s threat or more exactly she is made to signal the threat contrastively. At the station, another opportune coincidence, some women are cleaning the ladies’ waiting-groom. Accordingly the female travelers are requested to go into the men’s tenebrous waiting room, in the middle of which the father holds sway menacingly:

There was no choice; Olive went in first and took the child on her lap, where it straight away fell asleep; the squire found a seat beside them, and sat erect, looking round on the emigrants [...]. Marcia stopped Halleck at the threshold. ‘Stay out with me,’ she whispered. I want to tell you something. ‘I am not going on! I am going back.’
(A Modern Instance 569)

67This threshold is homologous to the one Irene vows that she will never cross during the night errand with her father. To conclude this excursion into a parallel scene let us say that, on board the train, the window brings on a dual scenery: for Marcia, as wounded wife gazer, a healing vista of earthly eroticism, for Marcia, as daughter gazer, a vision of nightly serpent-strewn hell. The blissful impersonality brought on by the vision from the window tumbles into horror of the ghoulish nocturnal father. The window is indeed the critical focal point and threshold of the father/daughter erotic threat, it is the glazed place of a potential blazing and darkness.

68Let us now return to the rent in the linen cover. It is through this gap in the virginal shield that the fire, snakelike, insinuates itself: “[...] these [shavings and chips] had been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide rent in the linen sash.” It is through this crack in the shield that the ill wind of criminal desire has accumulated the igniting material for its kindling. It is precisely this gap which ought to be sealed. Lapham sets about it to no avail:

Lapham tried to pin [the rent] up but failed and stood looking out of it over the water. The ice had left the river, and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of sunset. The Cambridge flats showed the sad, sodden yellow of meadows stripped bare after a long sleep under snow, the naked trees, the spires and roofs had a black outline, as if they were objects in a landscape of the French school. (293-94)

69It is exactly when the need for sealing the gap crops up that the object and signifier “pin” resurfaces. Let us note as well that the rent also operates from inside out symmetrically to the earlier inroad of the wind. To be more precise, it functions as a peeping-tom’s key-hole; through it a winter vision offers itself to Lapham, the statuary side of the archetypal scene. Lapham is made a voyeur, a typical deviation of eroticism into watching another’s agency, but the scene peeped at bears the mark of no agency. The “French” landscape gives no suggestion of lusty reveling, it is an aftermath, the bleak sight of an after-fire.

70Another attempt to seal the rent occurs, fruitlessly again, when the law creeps up on Lapham in the form of a coincidental policeman. This repressive irruption follows a sequence punctuated by three highly noteworthy stages: first Lapham lights a fire in the virginal chimney using the windrowed shavings as fuel, then, after peeping out at the bleak winter-charred landscape, he resolves not to give up his dazzling beauty of a house, thirdly he lights a cigar suiting mimetic action to his decision not to give up the joys his fiery lady house procures him. This lighting of the phallic cigar is the critical hinge upon which the scene turns to bring about destruction. This lighting is indeed fraught with an illusion of extinction that will lead to the house burning down behind Lapham’s back. Delayed action here again prevails.

71The policeman’s irruption inscribes graphically the alienness of Lapham; it sets off the intrusiveness of his nocturnal visit. He is caught playing with fire in his own murky alien attic by a patrolman. The latter’s presence builds up the repressive contrast further when, accepting a cigar from Lapham, he says he will smoke it outside. He won’t cross that threshold. The policeman’s attempt then to fix the rent himself confirms further the guilty charge figured by the gap. Transgressive fulfillment is in the air, with active though fruitless repression as its companion piece. Forces and counter-forces are escalating. However the rent resists patching up, desire still outweighs repression:

The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection. ‘You want to get that linen window, there, mended up’; ‘Yes, I’ll speak to the builder about that. It can go for one night.’ The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the linen together where Lapham had failed before. ‘I can’t fix it.’

72The law attempts to fix the rent with a pin, yet with no success. Lapham claims he can fix it. But there is no fixing it. The “pin” remains a symbolic solution, a forever delayed cessation of the guilty impulse through a conquering of basic instincts and an access to the language of maturity. Is it an accident then that Pen, the pin correlative, turns up with her father once things have taken advantage of the unfixable gap? Lapham’s displacing of the agency surfaces in an ironical manner when, after enjoying his cigar in the music-room and returning home hopeful of a financial “retrieval,” he “made Penelope go to the theater with him.” (294) Lapham displaced Pen to another scene of action. He blindfolded his own displaced agency. Human action is on the stage. Artistic symbolization cocks a snook at falsely unassigned doings. Pen and her father can only be witnesses. Pen’s presence next to him echoes retrospectively the failed pinning of the rent and her own absence as the missing gap-sealer during the night, just as she was absent on the night of the fateful dinner. She is present on the scene the better to manifest her former absence and to act as an image of the law as indeed she receives her father’s laconic confession of guilt: “‘I guess I done it, Pen.’” (295) Other than that she doesn’t do or say anything, she operates as the presence of an absence. As for Lapham he only acts as spectator of the catastrophe. He focalizes the description, but he operates as a mere receiver of the images of his dispossession. This minimal presence makes him an eye/I—“I guess I done it, Pen,”—an I reduced to an eye, and an eye that barely recognizes the I, belatedly at that. Thus, much as in a silent movie, the impact of the images reaches maximum graphic force, and contrasts thrive unhindered. The mighty fire engines, the smooth flames eluding the pursuit of the men’s hoses, the erected ladders, all sketch out starkly the last convulsions of an erotic struggle instigated by one who may only behold his own exile from it, much like his wife earlier on, although, unlike her, he has only himself to blame for this deed that undoes him. Penelope thus assumes more than the role of ironic representative of the missing pin, she is also the one that, like Odysseus’s wife, undoes what she does, a gap in the pin. A mad pursuit of paradoxical images that may never end.

73Indeed the obsessive scenario does not stop with the ashes. A new fiery daughter figure blows on them and teases fresh fire out of them. Standing in the midst of a crowd of gapers, a pretty girl, whose appeal is not described but suggested in contrast with the presence of ladies “fantastically wrapped up,” exclaims: “‘Isn’t it perfectly magnificent! ’ cried a pretty girl. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it on any account. Thank you so much Mr. Symington, for bringing us out! ’” Whereupon a man remarks that the owner could afford to burn a house like this every year, in other words, with this man fire may revive indefinitely. A prospect which prompts the pretty girl to blow on the verbal embers: “‘Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?’” The question thus formulated leaves the reader in no doubt as to the reactivation of the erotic scenario. Another spectator makes a very telling remark about the lack of a coat to shield the house from the fire. This coat echoes the strait-jacket overcoats mentioned earlier as constricting forces of containment. Only, here the coat is of paint, the paint Lapham made his once prosperous business from: “‘He ought to have had a coat of his non-combustible paint on it.’” Through this merging of meanings the critical duplicity of Lapham’s fortune-making product shows through clearly. The paint stands both for what splatters and what shields, for containment and release, for looseness and restraint. A pretty ember at the core of the book.

74The true and final vision of aftermath occurs the next morning in a private scene that has Lapham standing, a sole spectator, in front of the charred shell. Like the house under construction, the house under destruction crystallizes an in-between. Its lacunary structure, just like the previous, brings into schematized relief the lineaments of an anthropomorphic correlative. Although largely destroyed, the house endures as a skull with sockets, an x-ray of Irene’s face. A skull of a house where mourning clings to the socket-like windows, and where ice, the echo of fire, has frozen other men’s squirtings into streams of tears, quite a condensation of paradoxical elements, with bereavement and sexual release welded together, or perhaps for ever newly-wed:

Lapham on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell. The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills and copings.

75The fire of transgression has turned to ice much as Irene has turned to stone. The charred shell still flourishes its challenge, a maddening refusal, a forever unravished daughter bride forever beckoning. Between the skeleton of the house under construction and the charred skull, desire has somehow performed its guilty deed behind the scenes in an invisible interval, through a gap, and it has attempted to burn itself into final extinction, all to no avail. Ice has revived the provocation and fixed it in glaring ostentation. It is precisely in this arrested in-between that Howells’s fiction blocks itself, doing as it undoes, thus having to rely on so many half-way houses. Caught between the urge to run free of former ways and the nostalgia for the lost country, between an impossible recovery and an accommodation to loss, its deep necessities doom it to the accidental. Wedged between fire and ice, it seeks compromises in a general doubling of functions, in so many halves and pairs. This tension between such symmetrically opposite polarities drag it into damaging compromises in the plots but produce wonderful collisions and fascinating scenes.

76Read that way, The Rise of Silas Lapham is an intriguing novel. It offers a perfect metaphor of Howells’s literary quandary and invaluable insights into what lies beneath his repeated barbs at the “novelists.” Between pin-Pen and I/rent, the fascinating alien peeps through the gaps with its welling of spectacular deadlocks. Irene’s embers forever revive and the house of Howells is cracked with many “rents.” In phonetic kinship with this, house-keeping and house-renting play a major role in this fiction. Finding a house for the other in oneself, lodging the alien, such anxieties loom to prominence in many stories. Howells stumbles repeatedly upon this dividedness and forever smoothes on the page the turmoil caused by the underwater struggle between the opposite forces of Irene and Pen. Beaton, the artist of too many parts fails calamitously in his attempted suicide and the gifted Alma denies herself to him in order to wed her art just like one taking the veil. These inevitable dissolvings of artists, I feel, symbolize the call of the impersonal beckoning from the depths of an endeavor that, in seeking an effacement of the self, runs the risk of self-effacement.