Dancing in Chains

The Youth of William Dean Howells

Rodney D. Olsen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9780814762301
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

" Dancing in Chains is far more than a sensitive biography (though it is surely that); it is also a model of psychologically informed social and cultural history. Olsen recognizes that psychic conflicts often play themselves out on a higher plane, that psychic and intellectual history are intertwined. He presents a wonderful nuanced picture of Howells."
—Jackson Lears,Rutgers University

In this insightful study of the childhood and youth of William Dean Howells, Dancing in Chains demonstrates how the turbulent social and cultural changes of the early nineteenth century shaped the young Howells's emotional and intellectual life. His early diaries, letters, poetry, fiction, and newspaper columns are used to illustrate Olsen's argument, which also in turn throws light on the dominant tensions in antebellum America.

Accepting the emergent middle-class ethos of civilized morality, with its new conceptions of child rearing and gender spheres, Howells's parents urged him to achieve self-control and individual success while also teaching him to seek the good of others rather than his own glory. For Howells the conflicts coalesced at the time of his leaving home, an increasing common rite of passage for antebellum youth. Trying to affirm his sense of literary vocation, he tested his aspirations against the family's Swedenborgian religious convictions and the antislavery commitments of his village while experimenting with competing literary ideologies in the process of meeting the demands of the new mass reading audience. For Howells the resulting tensions eased toward the end of his youth but reappeared in his more mature works of fiction and social criticism in later years.

Portraying the ordeal of coming of age during a momentous period of American history, Dancing in Chains is a fascinating study with a broad appeal to general readers as well as scholars.

PART I
Childhood

CHAPTER 1
A Selfish Ideal of Glory

We who are nothing but self, and have no manner of being
Save in the sense of self, still have no other delight

Like the relief that comes with the blessed oblivion freeing
Self from self in the deep sleep of some dreamless night.

HOWELLS, 1894

In his autobiography Years of My Youth (1916), William Dean Howells recounted that his childhood village of Hamilton, Ohio, was a place of “almost unrivaled fitness” to be the home of boys who were swimmers, skaters, foragers, and enthusiasts of outdoor life. Two branches of the Great Miami River flowed through the village; at the heart of the village was the inviting basin of the Miami Canal. Close by were fields and woods. Public holidays seemed to come in rapid succession, while “Saturdays spread over half the week.” After recording these lyrical memories, Howells* tried to recall how fear first came into his life. He noted that once a man in his village had died from hydrophobia. He tied this dire event to his father’s jest that the victim wisely made his peace with God, before he called in the doctors. As Howells described his father, William Cooper Howells always seemed to see the best in everything, often to the consternation of his wife. His father viewed hellfire revivals with “kindly amusement.” His Swedenborgian beliefs suggested that those who had chosen hell were happy with their choice. While he disliked religious controversy, he was stirred by the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, events that posed the question whether the American nation would become entirely free or slave.¹

Having sketched the joys of village life, a traumatic death, and his father’s easy demeanor toward aspects of life that troubled others, especially his mother, Howells recorded his earliest memory of fear. He focused on a “tragical effect” he had once suffered from the “playfulness” of his father.

My mother and he were walking together in the twilight, with me, a very small boy, following, and my father held out to me behind his back a rose which I understood I was to throw at my mother and startle her.

My aim was unfortunately for me all too sure; the rose struck her head, and when she looked round and saw me offering to run away, she whirled on me and made me suffer for her fright in thinking my flower was a bat, while my father gravely entreated, “Mary, Mary!” She could not forgive me at once, and my heart remained sore, for my love of her was as passionate as the temper I had from her, but while it continued aching after I went to bed, she stole up-stairs to me and consoled me and told me how scared she had been, and hardly knew what she was doing; and all was well again between us.²

Howells had thrown a rose, a symbol of love, at the object of his deepest childish affection, his mother. His trust in his father’s playful invitation had been met with summary punishment from his mother. Treating the same episode in a children’s story he had published earlier, Howells described the punishment as a boxing of ears, a startling violation of the affectionate treatment that his father always favored over any harsh form of discipline.³

The most prominent themes in Howells’s memory of the rose-throwing episode are associated with developmental difficulties that emerge in early childhood, about the time when “a very small boy” is old enough to tag after his parents. At this age, children have just acquired a proud sense of themselves as actors and initiators. They enjoy curious exploring and excited running about. They feel self-sufficient and want to try things out. They are eager to follow their parents’ enticements. A small boy imagines he can do everything his father can do. But very soon the child’s exuberant sense of initiative is complicated by fears of punishment stemming partly from related sexual impulses. “The child indulges in fantasies of being a giant and a tiger, but in his dreams he runs in terror for dear life.” At the time of the rose-throwing episode, Howells’s imagination of grand designs, especially his desire to act like father toward mother, was becoming burdened with guilt. While he was ready to follow his father’s playful invitation, he was vulnerable to his mother’s angry reaction.⁴

How a child resolves the developmental difficulties of this phase of life has significant meaning for his anticipation of adult roles, whether he trusts himself and others, whether he feels sufficient to pursue and accomplish tasks. Another problem is accepting an emotional separation from his mother that is more decisive than his earlier separations. And most significantly for Howells, how a child deals with these difficulties establishes the lineaments of conscience. The child’s primitive conscience can be unyielding and cruel, for it partly reflects a turning in of his aggressive impulses. Whether a child will be harshly punishing or fairly reasonable in his self-judgments depends upon his predispositions, family circumstances, and alleviations provided by parents and other ideal adults.⁵

The interrelated meanings of Howells’s rose-throwing episode—especially its reference to the development of his conscience—become clearer in light of his earlier treatment of the episode in The Flight of Pony Baker (1902), a book-length story for children.⁶ Stung by the boxing of ears he receives from his mother, Howells’s stand-in, Pony Baker, decides to retaliate by running away with the circus. Pony imagines that one day he will return to his village as a famous circus performer, amazing everyone with his ability to ride three horses bareback. He will be, this sexually charged image suggests, powerfully self-sufficient. Pony imagines that his moment of triumph will be his retaliation, for, among his many admirers, he will choose to shun his mother.

As he elaborated his own childhood trauma, Howells portrayed how Pony Baker’s impulsive self-confidence is replaced by disillusionment and terror. As his first step to stardom, Pony plans to join a circus that has arrived in his village. But as his departure nears, Pony begins to doubt his imagined prowess; he begins to feel he is as diminished as his name suggests. One night, his fears come alive in a dream. As he falls asleep, he seems to see the circus procession approaching his house. He runs outside to meet the wagons and feels himself floating above the ground. Then the magician suddenly appears. Pony has been told the magician aids runaway boys like himself, but Pony is frightened by his strange appearance: He wore “a tall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was so wide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretched them out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand in one hand, like a blind man.” Pony is even more alarmed by the magician’s gruff and ominous words: “He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice: ‘It’s all glory; it’s all glory,’ and the sound of those words froze Pony’s blood.” With these words, Howells invoked the specific kind of guilt encouraged in his childhood home. In Swedenborgian belief, seeking “glory” was the most abhorrent selfishness; it destroyed a person’s usefulness and brought eternal damnation.⁷

Frightened by the magician’s looming appearance and damning words, Pony tries to escape by shrinking up “so little” he will not be seen. When regression fails, he searches frantically for the knob of his front door but finds only a smooth wall. This hint of castration anxiety is elaborated through an abrupt transition in Pony’s dream. Just when he is about to envelop Pony, the magician is transformed into Pony’s father, who is standing beside Pony’s bed consulting a doctor about Pony’s sleepwalking. His father and the doctor have decided that Pony must be bled—a fearful remedy Howells had endured as a child in Hamilton.⁸ As the doctor begins to prepare his lancet, Pony’s mother suddenly calls and rouses him from his dream. With Pony awake and reconciled to his mother, Howells completed this remarkable re-creation of his own childhood trauma. Writing without knowledge of Freud’s interpretation of fantasy and dreams, Howells had tapped a stream of symbolism, forcefully posing a retributive conscience and the threat of disfigurement against a small child’s grand designs.

Parallel themes appear in Howells’s discussion of the abusive corporal punishment he witnessed while attending common schools. He stated that such treatment always “outrages the young life confided to the love of the race.”⁹ Recollection of his outrage at these abuses called forth another painful memory:

From the stress put upon behaving rather than believing in that home of mine we were made to feel that wicked words were of the quality of wicked deeds, and that when they came out of our mouths they depraved us, unless we took them back. I have not forgotten, with any detail of the time and place, a transgression of this sort which I was made to feel in its full significance. My mother had got supper, and my father was, as he often was, late for it, and while we waited impatiently for him, I came out with the shocking wish that he was dead. My mother instantly called me to account for it, and when my father came she felt bound to tell him what I had said. He could then have done no more than gravely give me the just measure of my offense; and his explanation and forgiveness were the sole event.¹⁰

The child’s wish to become the sole object of his mother’s attentions is reflected in Howells’s innocent remark. His father had treated the offense with the affectionate regard he advocated for child rearing, a tactic that made Howells appreciate its “full significance.” His mother’s less tolerant reaction, like her reaction in the rose-throwing episode, complicated his feelings. While he wrote that he was not left with “an exaggerated sense of [his] sin,” Howells nevertheless retained this painful memory, with all details of time and place, into the very last years of his life.¹¹

William Cooper Howells emphasized reason in the raising of children. He had faith that understanding petulant actions in their “full significance” and in their “just measure” would disarm unreasonable anxieties. But the remedy of reason did not always suffice. Throughout his childhood, Howells repeatedly suffered from irrational fears and self-accusations. He experienced terrible nightmares that continued in his thoughts and tortured his waking hours. Fearful and hesitant, he “cowered along in the shadow of unreal dangers,” everywhere imagining “shapes of doom and horror.” Because he often “dwelt in a world of terrors,” he was susceptible to the tricks and tauntings of his playmates, who took advantage of his fears. Furthermore, he suffered from his “abject terror of dying.” When he began to write poems and stories, he sometimes would imagine a character dying. Then he would think that “he was that character, and [he] was going to die.” His most agonizing fear, recurring during his adolescence, was of dying from hydrophobia like the man in his village. But he also suffered from his “fantastic scruples.” Once when a schoolmate accused him of taking her pencil, he became “frantic with the mere dread of guilt.” Despite his innocence, he could neither eat nor sleep until the issue was resolved. To ease his sufferings, his father reminded him of the need for reason, but Howells continued to magnify minor and imagined offenses.¹²

Howells’s persistent fears and exacting scruples suggest that he struggled in childhood with a severe conscience. Other memories reveal associated childhood inhibitions. When he was nine or ten, Howells traveled with his father on the New England No. 2, the Ohio River steamboat piloted by one of his Dean uncles. Throughout their journey, Howells was troubled by his father’s penchant to go ashore, stroll along the wharf, and distract himself by “sampling a book-peddler’s wares, or [by] talking with this bystander or that.” Howells refused to accompany his father on these forays. He clung to the steamboat rail, fearing that the boat might leave before his father returned.¹³

Each stop renewed Howells’s anguish, as his father’s “insatiable interest in every aspect of nature and human nature urged him ashore and kept him there till the last moment before the gangplank was drawn in.” At last, Howells’s misery “mounted to frenzy”:

I was left mostly to myself, and I spent my time dreamily watching the ever-changing shore, so lost in its wild loveliness that once when I woke from my reverie the boat seemed to have changed her course, and to be going downstream instead of up. It was in this crisis that I saw my father descending the gang-plank, and while I was urging his return in mute agony, a boat came up outside of us to wait for her chance of landing. I looked and read on her wheel-house the name New England, and then I abandoned hope. By what fell necromancy I had been spirited from my uncle’s boat to another I could not guess, but I had no doubt that the thing had happened, and I was flying down from the hurricane roof to leap aboard that boat from the lowermost deck when I met my uncle coming as quietly up the gangway as if nothing had happened. He asked what was the matter, and I gasped out the fact; he did not laugh; he had pity on me and gravely explained, “That boat is the New England: this is the New England No. 2, ” and at these words I escaped with what was left of my reason.¹⁴

Though calmed by his uncle’s words and his father’s promise to account more exactly for his movements, Howells continued to resist his father’s visits ashore to gather intelligence or to inspect glass foundries and rolling mills. He resisted as well when his father asked him for his impressions of the river landscape. “My lips were sealed,” Howells explained, “for the generations cannot utter themselves to each other till the strongest need of utterance is past.”¹⁵

The excursion on the Ohio River was Howells’s most extended venture beyond the bounds of his home village and his first prolonged experience of the bustling, urban world. He vividly recalled the frightening clamor and confusion of steamboat enterprise he saw in Pittsburgh:

The wide slope of the landing was heaped with the merchandise putting off or taking on the boats, amidst the wild and whirling curses of the mates and the insensate rushes of the deck-hands staggering to and fro under their burdens. The swarming drays came and went with freight, and there were huckster carts of every sort; peddlers, especially of oranges, escaped with their lives among the hoofs and wheels, and through the din and turmoil passengers hurried aboard the boats.¹⁶

Scenes of dazzle and danger may have sparked Howells’s fear of separation and encouraged him to cling to his father. His imagined separation from his father, moreover, can be understood in terms of his conflicted impulses, both as his wish to eliminate his father and as his urge to self-punishment. His inhibition in action and speech suggests the self-distrust born from such conflicts. Like many of his childhood memories, the steamboat incident indicates that Howells was susceptible to harsh demands of conscience. His self-accusations could be assuaged but not entirely eased by forces he identified as the protectors of his childhood—“a father’s reason” and “a mother’s love.”¹⁷

Howells’s evocative childhood memories do not stand alone. Their meaning is amplified by understanding other important influences on his early development. The family players in his individual drama were major characters. Their personalities and inclinations entered into his associations—his temperamentally optimistic father, his sometimes more fearful mother. Their religious and other beliefs also mattered—the Swedenborgian perspectives that warranted William Cooper Howells’s comfort with the things his wife found troubling, the politics that he elevated to the forefront of his concern. The texture of village life mattered as well, portrayed by Howells as pristine but with a suggestion of its tenuousness. In its broader dimensions, Howells’s story involves his family’s reaction to the dominant ...