Volume 21, Number 1 (Fall 2018) The Howellsian The Biannual Newsleter of the William Dean Howells Society “Redtop.” Howells Residence in Belmont, Massachusetts, 1878-1881. McClure’s Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1, June 1893. TABLE OF CONTENTS Howells Essay Prize Winner 2017: 2 Lindsey Grubbs “The slow martyrdom of her sickness malady”: William Dean Howells’ “Sketch of Winnie’s Life” Call for Entrants: 2018 Howells Essay Prize Contest 6 Minutes of the Howells Society Business Meeting, May 2018 6 Essay Abstracts: Howells Papers Delivered at ALA 2018, San Francisco 7 Call for Papers: Howells Panels at ALA 2019, Boston 10 Special Event: Visit the Howells Archive at Harvard’s Houghton Library 11 WDH Society Information 12 Volume 22, Number 1 (Fall 2018) HOWELLS ESSAY PRIZE WINNER 2017 “The slow martyrdom of her sickness malady”: William Dean Howells’ “Sketch of Winnie’s Life” Lindsey Grubbs (Emory University) Winifred Howells, the first-born child of realist author Wil- photographs and fourteen of her original poems. Often more liam Dean Howells, was born in Venice, Italy on December 17, hagiography than biography, he presents a saintly figure, likely 1863. Growing up in the company of family friends like Henry spurred in part by guilt over his earlier criticisms. He writes, James and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, she dreamed of be- “every impulse in her was wise and good… She had the will to coming a famous poet. Her father recorded her rhymes before yield, not to withstand; she could not comprehend unkindness, it she could write herself, and at the age of nine or ten was devas- puzzled and dismayed her. She had an angelic dignity that never tated when her self-made poetry booklet failed to sell at a failed her in any squalor of sickness; she was on the earth, but church fair.1 Her juvenile verse circulated among Will Howells’ she went through the world aloof in spirit, with a kind of sur- friends, with Samuel Clemens declaring in 1875, “Winnie’s liter- prise.” 8 The pamphlet is a moving testament to grief, guilt, and ature sings through me yet! Surely that child has one of those fatherly pride, and has served as a major source for biographers ‘future’s’ before her.”2 Hoping to secure such a future, she and those writing about how Winifred’s death impacted her fa- worked assiduously on her verses, and had her first publication, ther’s career.9 of a poem called “The Deserted House,” in the youth section of A handwritten draft, though, is also extant in the Howells St. Nicholas in 5877 when she was thirteen. Though she used only family papers at the Houghton library, and attention to revisions her initials to disguise her lineage, the poem was, to her father’s highlights certain rhetorical and narrative decisions that guided great distress, noticed by publications like the New York Tribune this memorial, denaturalizing the finished narrative and in some and American Socialist, the latter of which claimed that the po- ways unsettling its use for pure biographical insight. In this pa- em was proof of “heredity of genius.”3 She was an avid reader per I will talk about two levels of revision: first, the changes (her mother proudly despaired, “She is reading Tasso’s Jerusa- Howells made to the handwritten document—some of which lem Delivered with great delight. She has read Froude’s Caesar appear to be written in the same ink, while others are penciled and Bacon’s Essays. What is she coming to!"4) and traveled with in later—and second, the changes between the manuscript copy her father, visiting Clemens and other luminaries, accumulating and the final printing. Howells labored over the document for signatures and poems in her autograph album from him and over a year—his initial opening line that it had been “almost half others including Sarah Orne Jewett, George W. Cable, Louisa May a year” since Winnie’s death is scratched through in manuscript Alcott, and James Russell Lowell. 5 to read “almost a year,” suggesting a roughly six month period After some early success with her poetry, the seventeen- for this first round of revisions, and by print in 1891 reads year-old Winny began to experience an endless cycle of illness “more than a year,” suggesting anywhere from a few more that saw her shuttled from physician to physician, finally landing months to another year between edits.10 in the care of S. Weir Mitchell, the notorious progenitor of the The revisions demonstrate Howells’ competing impulses in rest cure, in whose care she died in 1889. Central to the question the wake of his daughters’ death—a death especially devastating of her care was a misalignment of her own belief in an organic because of its incoherence with his beliefs about the true nature illness and Mitchell and Will Howell’s belief in her hypochondri- of her illness, and its coherence with hers, which he had dis- asis and stubborn love of the sick role. Writing to his father prior missed. In the revisions, Howells is clearly still working through to her death, Howells expressed frustration and disbelief, writ- the tension between her narrative and his own. On the one hand, ing, “There are some proofs that she suffers little or no pain, but Howells works to strengthen Winifred’s voice posthumously, she manages to work upon our sympathy so that we are power- combating the urge to infantilize and deify, while granting her less to carry out our plans for her good.”6 Sending her to Mitch- the authority to testify to her own suffering by presenting her ell, he is encouraged by the “very firm hand” of the notorious poems as accurate portraits of her inner life. On the other, he doctor, which he believes could repair the damage done by the attempts to narrate Winifred’s life in a way that preserves her “sentimentality” of her earlier physicians, who allowed her to legacy as a being of almost supernatural goodness, vindicates form “every bad habit of invalidism.” him from responsibility for her death, and forges a comprehensi- After Winifred’s death in 1889, Howells wrote a biograph- ble story from the seemingly meaningless course of the illness— ical pamphlet, printing a small run for family and literary one that emphasizes aesthetic rather than physical etiology. His friends, like Henry James.7 The printed pamphlet, titled simply editorial struggle reveals the complicated emotional, epistemic, Winifred Howells, is twenty-six pages long, and includes three 2 Volume 22, Number 1 (Fall 2018) and aesthetic stakes of the hunger for narration in the face of ture his daughter’s ill-health. Early in the manuscript, he begins medical incomprehensibility. to write, “years afterwards, when the mal…” cutting himself off from finishing the word malady, striking it through, and writing Howells’ letter to Mitchell following her death highlights instead “sickness,” which he strikes through again, adding “the the intensity of his ambivalence about the legitimacy of his slow martyrdom of her sickness,” signaling a purposefulness to daughter’s illness, even after her death—“The torment that re- her death for some greater cause. Her symptoms are no longer mains is that perhaps the poor child’s pain was all along as great symptoms, but sacrifices at the altar of beauty. Still not satisfied, as she fancied, if she was so diseased, as apparently she was.”11 he cuts “sickness,” reverting again to “malady,” which, beyond its Such attitudes toward hysterical illness were typical in the late elevated sound, evokes a sense of a more constitutional prob- nineteenth century. Because the amorphous disease was charac- lem—sicknesses can be cured, maladies remain—and a more terized by mysterious physical symptoms unexplained by or in ethereal one. “Sickness” calls forth the embodied experience of excess of organic abnormalities or wounds, it was fundamentally illness, with all its unpleasant symptoms, in a way that “malady” an illness that relied on the veracity of the patient’s testimony. does not.14 Because it was also an illness of moral perversion and simulation, though, this testimony was intrinsically unreliable. The biog- His revisions routinely emphasize spirit and aesthetics, raphy shows Howells working through the epistemic conun- crafting a less embodied illness narrative. He writes, “The motion drums posed by his daughter’s death, narrating a coherent life that was rest, and the rest which was motion, in the gliding, story in which her illness was intrinsic to her character and her dreaming gondola, was the medicine which her eager and fragile death inevitable, redeeming her from the charges of depravity body craved,” which is amended to read “her eager spirit and and fraud so often leveled at hysteric women. fragile body needed.”15 Her malady is revised to include both spirit and body, skipping too the potential impropriety of a body In the first paragraph of the pamphlet, he writes that her that is eager and craving. (The craving is instead moved to a later nature was “transfigured for us in the light of death,” which has phrase as he replaces the “deepest need of a life born to the in- shown her “as we could never otherwise have seen her” (WH 3). tensest love of beauty” with the “craving” of one.) Several pages This framing acknowledges his misperceptions while she lived, later he again edits out bodily detail. His first manuscript indi- but suggests that since her death he has learned to see her truly. cates that her poems “bring her again to our knees; we feel the Howells understood the stakes of his posthumous narration.

Load more

Table of Contents