Often overshadowed by The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development as a novelist and a social critic. More than 100 years after its publication, it stands as one of Howells’s strongest fictional stances against social inequities in American capitalism and its treatment of the poor and working classes.
In an era of “red” states and “blue” states, an age in which the plight of workers is diminished in favor of corporate interests, Howells’s description of the conflict over American identity is also remarkably resonant. The battle today, as in this novel, is framed as a battle for the identity and character of the nation, over what version of America will survive.
The novel opens with Annie Kilburn returning from Europe to her hometown of Dorchester Farms—now called Hatboro, after its primary economic product, straw hats—to “try to be of some use to the world—[to] try to do some good—and in Hatboro I think I shall know how” (645). Her confidence is shaken, however, upon seeing the class segregation, the industrially altered landscape, and the bustling commercial activity in the sleepy rural town of her memory.
She is particularly appalled when she is taken to a local factory to see industrial America firsthand. There, she witnesses a type of modern slavery in which “tireless machines march[ing] back and forth” are the masters of the “men who watched them with suicidal intensity.” In one of Howells’s most direct representations of the dehumanization of industrial capitalism, Annie cannot help but think of “the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest” (741).
Conversing with some of the prominent townspeople, Annie is drawn into their attempt to start a “Social Union” to break down the barriers between the rich and the poor. Hatboro’s elite envision producing plays (starting, ironically, with Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy grounded in irreconcilable feuds between countrymen) in order to raise money for the town’s working poor, as well as organizing lectures and concerts “to show them that the best people in the community have their interests at heart, and wish to get on common ground with them” (672).
Their patronizing attitudes are revealed further as Annie learns that a dinner planned for after the play does not include the workers, “the socially objectionable element” who are the supposed beneficiaries of this largesse (672). Annie has mixed emotions, and she confronts her own complicity in these condescending attitudes toward the working poor. She is forced to wonder “how her own life was in any wise different from that of those people. . . . She too was idle and vapid, like the society of which her whole past had made her a part” (716).
As many of his biographers note, Howells expressed similar self-scrutiny as he finished this novel. In an 1888 letter to Henry James, he admits, “after fifty years of optimistic contention with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong . . . unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy” (Howells 1979, 3:268). Like Annie, he struggles with the recognition that social and economic circumstances needed to change but that he was somehow complicit in the very class system that obstructed the poor and was powerless to enact any meaningful change.
The strongest voice for the needs of the poor comes from the town’s new minister, Reverend Peck. As many critics and biographers have noted, Peck is a representation of Leo Tolstoy’s ideas of Christian Socialism, which Howells was reading deeply and thoughtfully during this time. Tolstoy’s call to give up one’s wealth and status to live and work among the peasants struck a chord with Howells as he turned his attention to what he saw as fundamental contradictions between American Christianity, the practices of industrial capitalism, and the basic principles of democracy (see Cady, 7–10, and Alexander, 61–100).
Annie Kilburn, like a great deal of Howells’s work from this period, wrestles with Tolstoy’s altruistic ideas and whether they could actually change the deep-rooted problems of America’s economic imbalances. Peck sees through the shallow intentions and hypocrisies of the Social Union and his sermons challenge the cultural authority of Hatboro’s leaders. After Annie asks for his participation in planning the event, Peck refuses, explaining that the cultural elite “proceed on the assumption that working people can neither see nor feel a slight. . . . good is from the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose” (682–83).
Annie counters Peck’s argument by quoting her father’s idea that true social equality as a “principle could never govern society, and that . . . to try to mix the different classes would be un-American” (683). Peck’s response rejects Kilburn’s fixed notions of American identity, claiming, “We don’t know what is or will be American yet” (684). In fact, he maintains that America is fighting another, silent civil war: “The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled” (804). He explains that a false sense of “Americanism” has perpetuated the barbarism of the industrial age; that the individual with social or economic power has been “forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success is built” (805).
Indeed, the entire novel provides a spectrum of late 19th-century interpretations of “America” and “American.” Adherence to tradition, Emersonian self-reliance, benevolent patronage, and Christian socialism all contend for cultural authority in the novel. William Gerrish, one of the newer citizens who runs Hatboro’s first department store, is the voice of American business in the Gilded Age. Talking about the workers and his role as a boss, Gerrish proclaims, “You’ve got to put your foot down, as Mr. [Abraham] Lincoln said; and as I say, you’ve got to keep it down” (696).
Gerrish, proud of his rags-to-riches background, does not condone what he perceives as “pampering those who have not risen, or have made no effort to rise” and believes in rigid class structures: “I will not allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose—whose—whose idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country where—where everybody stands on an equality” (699). Gerrish, contradicting Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, also makes sure everyone recognizes his beneficence, his contributions to improve the moral and economic benefit of the town, everything “from the drinking fountain in front of this store to the soldiers’ monument on the village green” (697).
Gerrish’s selective memory of his own rise (as well as the historical proclamations of Lincoln, twisted to fit his own ideals) is weakly contested by Squire Putney, a remnant of the old power structure of Dorchester Farms, who is unable to effect any prolonged significant change because he is an alcoholic. Though he sees through the bombast of Gerrish and the way American history and Christian ideals are manipulated to the benefit of those in power, he is powerless to confront the social problems brought on in industrial America. The days of the intellectual aristocracy are past, an idea Howells reinforces by giving Putney’s son Winthrop a handicap; his “white face had the eager purity and the waxen translucence which we see in sufferers of hip-disease” (717). The mental and physical diseases of the Putneys represent the inability of America’s fading genteel class to effect positive, progressive change.
Peck’s ideals do not escape Howells’s scrutiny, either. Reminding the citizens of Hatboro that they “have been guilty of forgetting [their] brother’s weakness,” his behavior reveals its own mnemonic shortcomings. On several occasions he forgets about his daughter, leaving her behind after lecturing about social reform and brotherhood, a sign that Howells was not entirely comfortable about those who adhere only to a doctrine of ideals. Peck’s strong words to Annie—“sympathy—common feeling—the sense of fraternity—can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these”—are diminished by the fact that he leaves his daughter sleeping in Annie’s arms and comes for her only when reminded by Annie’s housekeeper Mrs. Bolton (684). Thus, while Gerrish and Peck have wildly different beliefs of how society should be organized, their respective idealism reveals lapses in memory.
In the end, though, men like Gerrish seem to triumph, as Peck, the spokesman for Tolstoy’s humanitarian Christianity, is killed by a train, an iron symbol of progress and speed. Yet Annie has changed, since she realizes, as Kenneth Eble notes, that “the particular ills that fall upon the lower classes are the result of a social system which will not be remedied by charitable gestures from a well-meaning aristocracy or by appeal to past traditions of morality or power” (104). Altering her initial plans, Annie no longer desires to change the world, but to do what good she can do in her community to ease adversity.
Howells, though, continued to explore America’s social and economic problems, despite his ambivalence about whether or not his fiction could stimulate meaningful change when he himself lived in luxury and comfort. In typical Howellsian fashion, Annie Kilburn poses no solutions, but it does remain somewhat optimistic that social change, however slow in coming, was possible, and that fiction could play a role in the transition.
Sources
Alexander, William. William Dean Howells: The Realist as Humanist. New York: Bert Franklin, 1981.
Cady, Edwin H. The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958.
Eble, Kenneth. William Dean Howells. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Howells, William Dean. Annie Kilburn, 1888. In William Dean Howells: Novels, 1886–1888,
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
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