Abstract
This chapter traces the evolution of Howells’s economic vision between 1879 and 1890 through the concepts of autonomy and heteronomy as defined by Cornelius Castoriadis. Howells’s initially optimistic view of capitalism appears in his plots as well as in his aesthetic. The supposedly truthful representation of reality implies the construction of a “reliable” idiom as well as a careful management of rhetoric based on the avoidance of metaphors. However, by the early to mid-1880s, the belief in virtuous capitalism became untenable, producing a self-divided, alienated realist discourse where ideology precluded mimesis. Howells was nevertheless to redefine and humanize his economic vision through the concept of “complicity,” thus achieving greater ideological and aesthetic autonomy and moving toward a dissolution of genre.
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Notes
- 1.
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) can be regarded as another illustration of this shift: “Celebrating and questioning the dream of self-fulfillment, Sister Carrie […] occupies a historically pivotal position, looking back towards the success myths of Horatio Alger , and anticipating some of the modernist tropes found in the works of such writers as Richard Wright and Henry Miller ” (Davies 2011, p. 381).
- 2.
For an alternative reading, see Shonkwiler 2007, pp. 37–45.
- 3.
For a detailed analysis of the “commonplace ,” see Brandt 2018, pp. 35–38.
- 4.
“Nothing allows us to assert that the framework of gestures comprising productive labor in the narrow sense is ‘truer’ or ‘more real’ that the ensemble of meanings in which these gestures have been interwoven by those who perform them. […] [E]conomic determinism […] is just as unacceptable in that it is pure and simple determinism, that is to say inasmuch as it claims that one can reduce history to the effects of a system of forces […]” (Castoriadis 1975, p. 28).
“If, to autonomy, that is to self-legislation or self-regulation, one opposes heteronomy, that is legislation or regulation by another, then autonomy is my law opposed to the regulation by […] another law, the law of another, other than myself. […] The essential characteristic of the discourse of the Other , from the point of view that interests us here, is its relation to the imaginary. It has to do with the fact that, ruled by this discourse, the subject takes himself or herself to be something he or she is not (or is not necessarily) and that for him or her, others and the entire world undergo a corresponding misrepresentation. […] The subject is ruled by an imaginary, lived as even more real than the real, yet not known as such, precisely because it is not known as such. What is essential to heteronomy—or to alienation in the general sense of the term—on the level of the individual, is the domination of an autonomized imaginary which has assumed the function of defining for the subject both reality and desire. The ‘repression of drives’ as such, the conflict between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’ do not constitute individual alienation, which is finally the almost unlimited reign of a principle of de-reality ” (Castoriadis 1975, pp. 102–103).
- 5.
“Between is the only honest place to be” (Rodden 1999, p. 19).
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Tanguy, G. (2020). William Dean Howells and the Economic Novel: Heteronomy and Autonomy. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_9
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