Social Bluffing and Class Difference in Howells's the Rise of Silas Lapham

Faking It: Social Bluffing and Class Difference in Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham mary marchand I would have a man know everything and yet, by his manner of speaking, not be convicted of having studied. —Antoine Gombaud, De la conversation ILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS was preoccupied with the W narrative possibilities of social mobility. While his preoc- cupation is hardly surprising given his own journey from back- woods Ohio to Back Bay Boston, what is astonishing is that the writer who so splendidly “made it” produced some of the era’s most pessimistic and demoralizing accounts of just how improb- able such an attainment is. Howells’s vision of society, which contrasts sharply with that of other Gilded Age writers, defies the Veblenesque trope of class competition. In the work of Edith Wharton, for example, who is also fascinated by aspirants’ struggles, the dominant class, highly structured and minutely hierarchized, is armed for battle, with old money relying on various outflanking maneuvers and a rich repertoire of social snubs to repel, in her words, the “invaders from Pittsburgh” and the “Barbarians from the West.” In Howells’s fiction, on the other hand, social distance is maintained even though no one polices the social boundaries. Howells’s distinctive approach to class emerges most vividly in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his dark fable about I would like to thank Elsa Nettles, Penelope Cordish, and the anonymous reviewer for NEQ for their extensive and insightful comments on drafts of this essay. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIII, no. 2 (June 2010). C 2010 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 283 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.283 by guest on 01 October 2021 284 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY one family’s social humiliation. Self-made entrepreneur Silas Lapham, wife Persis, and daughters Penelope and Irene fail to find acceptance in polite society despite their cultural docility and insiders’ resignation to their presence. Once Lapham con- cedes his unworthiness and surrenders any claims to equality with the elite Coreys—Bromfield, Anna, and their son Tom— which happens halfway through the novel, Howells invites his readers to rediscover Silas’s decency, evident in his (overly) scrupulous business dealings. But neither Silas’s probity nor Penelope’s marriage to Tom Corey—marriage and virtue being traditional novelistic levelers of class difference—can efface the lesson inscribed in the Laphams’ failure to fit in: in Howells’s vision of the social world, there is something inimitable about upper-bourgeois culture—something that defies the aspirants’ attempts to acquire or fake upper-class behaviors. As many critics have noted, the social distance that separates the two families is most clearly measured by their differing tastes: the crude taste for the showy versus the refined taste for simple pleasures. But if we read Howells’s novel in light of work by sociologists and political psychologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Jon Elster, and Paul Veyne, we see that Howells too insists that many of the essential features of class are so subtle as to be almost beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement. Both the novel’s insiders and outsiders concur on this point. “Have your friends got these qualities,—which may be felt, but not defined?” Bromfield Corey asks his son Tom. Tom “could hardly have helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself.” Persis Lapham observes, “I can see—and feel it when I can’t see it—that we’re different from 1 those people.” It’s a question of taste, yes, but what informs upper-class taste in the novel is ease. Ease, in the sense of freedom from awkwardness, is a paradigmatic case of what El- ster characterizes as dispositions that are essentially byproducts: they “have the property that they can only come about as the 1 William Dean Howells, TheRiseofSilasLapham(New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1996), pp. 142, 113, 187. Hereafter references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.283 by guest on 01 October 2021 FAKING IT 285 2 by-product of actions undertaken for other ends.” Like the insomniac’s self-defeating attempts to will sleep, the Laphams try to will what cannot be willed. Nor can it be successfully faked, and much to the discomfort of the squirming reader, the Laphams’ bluffs and impostures are invariably called, ei- ther by each other or by a narrative that sees through their feints. But in dramatizing for readers what none of the char- acters can articulate but all of them finally “feel,” namely the “fine yet impassable” (p. 378) differences between the classes, Howells risks coming face to face with the terrible uncertainty of his own social position. Part 1 The novel opens with an accident that marks the begin- ning of the Lapham women’s social education when they are brought into brief but intimate contact with the Coreys. How- ells’s ambivalence about induction into this kind of knowledge is evident in the narrator’s concise sketch of the Laphams’ lives prior to their enlightenment. By means of his presentation of the Laphams’ early years at their Nankeen Square house, How- ells suggests that one can remain ignorant of—and thereby free from—the pressures to conform to or outdo the pecuniary stan- dards of the class just above, a position in direct opposition to Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class Howells will review ten years after the release of Silas Lapham. Whereas Veblen regards the instinct for emulation as second in strength only to the instinct for self-preservation, the motor of the incessant 3 striving that characterizes all classes, Howells imagines the Laphams living with their wealth for twelve years in the midst of Boston with “a sort of content in their own ways that one may notice in certain families”: The very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another; they equipped their house 2 Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 43. 3 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 109–10. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.283 by guest on 01 October 2021 286 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for their own satisfaction; they lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish, but because they did not know how to do otherwise. [P. 28] As Howells is at pains to clarify elsewhere in the sketch, the Laphams’ “not knowing how” is not simply a want of the qual- ifications to compete; their ingenuousness is so absolute that they fail to recognize a world of refinements yet to be mas- tered. Thus, although the Lapham daughters learn to dance at the fashionable Papantis, they don’t belong to the private classes; “they did not even know of them, and a great gulf divided them from those who did” (p. 27). It’s largely in ret- rospect that we fully appreciate the Laphams’ self-content as an almost edenic state of class innocence, painfully at odds with the self-consciousness that for Howells characterizes the middle-class aspirants’ mindset. The narrative reflects and dig- nifies the Laphams’ solidarity by according them a certain pri- vacy. While the narrator later relentlessly exposes the terrible insecurities precipitated by their new awareness of the Coreys, early on the family’s motives can only be guessed at. “Perhaps” the Lapham women did not care to put themselves forward at the resorts they visited; “apparently” Penelope didn’t care for society (p. 28); and so on. But there is a double edge to this sketch of the Laphams’ early lives. As with Irene’s “unconsciousness” regarding her beauty, which the narrator characterizes as “an innocence almost vegetable” (p. 28) and which, like the family’s unconsciousness, is dispelled by her brush with the Coreys, there is something both appealing and irritating about the Laphams’ complacency. The other side of their innocence is a fatuousness that denies that there are things worth having beyond their ken or the reach of their wealth. That less desirable trait is embodied in the confession that the first half of the novel is designed to wring from Silas. While he once “could not have imagined any worldly splendor which his dollars could not buy if he chose to spend for them”—including, as he brags to Tom, a “first-class picture” (p. 56)—he subsequently perceives “a cloudy vision of something unpurchasable where he had Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.283 by guest on 01 October 2021 FAKING IT 287 supposed there was nothing” (p. 149). In this sense, the family’s new awareness of their standing relative to the Coreys, with all of its attendant insecurities, is rife with the ambivalence of a fortunate fall, for the Laphams now possess an awareness that is the precondition for their education. In Bromfield Corey’s words, they possess “knowledge enough to be ashamed of their ignorance” (p. 120). As Hsin-Ying Li argues, whatever How- ells’s misgivings about upward mobility, because “civilization” and “education” were for him synonymous, “social ambition 4 still connotes self-improvement.” Nowhere in the sketch are Howells’s allegiances more clear than in the narrator’s characterization of the Laphams’ crude tastes. Even as the narrative bespeaks admiration, if not longing, for the Laphams’ sturdy self-regard, it invites readers to scorn their preferences for “rich and rather ugly clothes,” “the costliest and most abominable frescoes” (p.

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