W. D. Howells and the Crisis of Overproduction

Abstract

In October of 1888, at the height of his literary fame and influence, W. D. Howells wrote the following to Edward Everett Hale:

I am persuaded also that the best that is in men, most men, cannot come out until they all have a fair chance. I used to think America gave this; now I don't. – I am neither an example nor an incentive meanwhile in my own way of living …Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds, – you have the secret of that; with me they only breed more words. At present they are running into another novel.

Howells's tendency to equate his own weaknesses with the social tensions of late-nineteenth-century America is equally apparent in a letter written a few weeks earlier to Henry James:

I'm not in a good humour with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun…after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew upon real equality. Meantime I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy. (417)

While these letters express, most clearly, a sense of disillusionment, a feeling that Howells like his country has betrayed his early promise, they also manage to imply the more disturbing fear that the promise may actually have been kept – that luxury and meaninglessness may be the logical culmination of both moral projects. There is a feeling here beyond irony (and he was never a great ironist) that Howells, like America, is helpless in the grip of a process which makes vacuousness and luxury the inevitable result of any quest for value. I will argue in this article that one name for this process is capitalist modernity and that the specific moment of capitalist development that Howells is reacting to, in these letters and in his work as a whole, is the crisis of overproduction experienced by the US economy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Howells's uncertainty in these letters, about his own life and writing and about the state of his country, speaks, in this context, to the confusions of a culture in which the morally sanctioned effort of production had become somehow itself a problem, a problem whose solution – consumption – appeared as an immoral, yet inevitable, form of wastage.