Reality/Realities/Realism: William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton and the Robes of Fiction

Among other contributions to Realist literature, William Dean Howells’ and Edith Wharton’s novels revisit the major topoi of fictional narratives with a special emphasis on the problematic relationship between truth and illusion, failed ideals and scientific knowledge, lost certainties and overwhelming doubts in late nineteenth-century America. This paper examines the dialectic between the ideological constructs of western culture sustained by the realist venture and the aesthetic principles inherited from the Classics in an age adrift where “the spirit of commercialism” left holes in the social fabric. This critical reading of Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) on the one hand, of Wharton’s trilogy (The House of Mirth, 1905; The Custom of the Country, 1912; The Age of Innocence, 1920) on the other hand, focuses on language in relation to the meaning, truth and ethics of literary utterance.