Chapter 5
The Rise of Silas Lapham and the Hazards of Realistic Development

I

As Tom Corey goes to work for Silas Lapham, his mother worries about his seeming attraction to Silas's daughter, Irene. While not admitting her motive to herself or others, Mrs. Corey decides to pay a second visit to the Laphams, telling her own daughter that "it seemed she ought somehow to recognize the business relation that Tom had formed with the father; they must not think that his family disapproved of what he had done. "'Yes, business is business,' [says] Nanny, with a laugh. 'Do you wish us to go with you again?'"^[1]

The Rise of Silas Lapham is often called the first realistic portrayal of a businessman in American literature, but Nanny Corey's laughing response to her mother calls attention to a problem that occupies the novel's critics: how does its business plot relate to the love plot involving Tom and Silas's two daughters? Nanny's identification of business with business would seem to imply that the business plot could be marked off as a self-contained entity. But her laugh undercuts any such tautological identification by suggesting that business is not quite identical to business. Mrs. Corey may claim that her visit to the Laphams is to recognize her son's business relation, but if business were completely confined to the world of business, she would have no obligation to do so. Instead, her "business" as mother is to give her son's relation her blessing, a reminder that business relations are legitimated by more than purely market relations.

And there is more. Mrs. Corey claims to be visiting the Laphams on business matters, but, as her daughter knows, her visit involves more serious business: the possible romantic relation between Tom and Irene. Woman's business may focus on personal relations whereas man's business focuses on market relations, but Howells's plot makes it impossible to separate the two completely.

Howells dramatizes that impossibility by self-consciously using the word "business" in nonbusiness contexts. For Mrs. Corey the confusion about the object of her son's affections is the Lapham's "terrible business" (SL 265). Silas reminds Penelope that her actions in the matter are "my business and your mother's business, as well as yours" (SL 252). When his wife wants to know about his deteriorating business affairs, Silas rebukes her with, "You mind your own business, Persis" (SL 284). Asked by Jim Millon's wife what she thinks about the possibility of her daughter getting a divorce, Silas responds, "I don't care anything about all that. It's your own business, and I'm not going to meddle with it. But it's my business who lives off me" (SL 296).

And just as "when it really [comes] to business" (SL 317), "business" moves into all realms of action, so romance inhabits the realm of business. Money, Bromfield Corey claims, "is the romance, the poetry of our age" (SL 64). Silas's paint is "more than a business to him; it was a sentiment, almost a passion" (SL 50).

Confronted with this seepage of one plot into another, critics have sought ways to balance the two. For instance, G. Thomas Tanselle refers to "the care Howells has taken to keep the two plots in balance," whereas Wai-chee Dimock wants us to think of "the novel form as a system of symbolic equivalents, in which disparate events tally with each other, compensate for each other, and balance each other out."^[2] What these efforts fail to take into account, however, is an imbalance at the heart of Howells's novel, an imbalance that makes itself felt in even the simple effort to make business equivalent to itself. If formalist critics attempted to stabilize that imbalance by offering a reading of the novel as a whole, recent historical critics have tried to stabilize it by expanding the scope of their reading to situate Howells's text within its cultural context. Dimock, for instance, argues that Howells's balancing of "formal arrangements inside [the] novel" has a "direct link" to "social arrangements outside" it and thus reveals the novelist's effort to dispense "poetic justice."^[3]

Howells did see a relationship between a work's formal structure and questions of justice, and his sense of justice, like the symbol of Justice

holding the scales, involves images of balance.^[4] An equitable social order for him would be one of balanced exchanges among individual members. But, as he tries to imagine such a world, he recognizes that in a world of chance, perfect balancing acts are virtually impossible. Critics intent on performing them in their readings of Silas Lapham, as ingenious as they may be, neglect this important aspect of Howells's realism. Indeed, they repeat the efforts of Silas, who continually strives to balance his accounts but usually fails. Those failures indicate that the unbalancing accompanying even the simple attempt to make business equivalent to itself cannot be stabilized by expanding the scope of our reading to the entire novel or even to Howells's cultural context. This is not to argue that Howells's text has no cultural and historical implications. But the link between it and its context is not "direct"; their relationship is itself an unstable one. Indeed, the unbalancing in Silas Lapham is generated more from Howells's insistence on the contingency of history than, as some might argue, from the rigors of his rhetoric. To be sure, rhetorical slippage can contribute to history's contingency, and when Howells is not rhetorically rigorous his realism rarely works. But his works are most effective when he accepts the responsibility of presenting an economy that is subject to the unaccountable, even though doing so plays havoc with his efforts to construct balanced aesthetic objects.

An economy that is subject to the unaccountable causes special problems for the assessment of morally responsible actions. How, for instance, can people be held accountable for their actions, if they live in an unaccountable world? Indeed, Howells's desire for virtuous action has caused some critics to assume that he advocates a return to an agrarian economy and its secure set of unchanging values. But as his relation to the world of Equity in A Modern Instance indicates, Howells knows that such a closed, static world limits human development. If a world subject to chance makes the assessment of responsibility hazardous, it also keeps open chances for development.

Even so, Howells does worry about the selfishness fostered by the desire for economic development. As Thomas Galt Peyser puts it, "Howells was in the difficult position of advocating a strong self that nevertheless complies with the rules of a virtuous society."^[5] Rather than take the easy stance of dictating what those rules should be, Howells tries to imagine the possibilities of morally responsible development while conducting what Everett Carter calls his "criticism of unexamined 'fixed principles' and closed systems of morality."^[6] That criticism is also

directed at preconceptions that readers bring to the text. By keeping open a space for readerly participation, Howells allows them to experience the hazards of his economy of the unaccountable.

To present a self-sufficient, balanced economy is to position readers outside the text, leaving them with few responses other than preconceived judgments about the accuracy of its representation of reality. In contrast, by allowing a space for readers to participate in the text's network of exchanges, Howells discourages fixed judgments about a closed text and invites responses subject to the chance at play within and without it, responses, that is, in which readers become increasingly aware of the importance of responsible judgment for human development and the hazards involved in judgments of responsibility. I hope to provoke such responses in contemporary readers through my analysis of Howells's attempt to provide a realistic account of responsible human and economic development in a world of the unaccountable.

II

We can start by looking at why various efforts to balance the book's action fail. Critics as different as Donald Pizer and Dimock do so by appealing to the "economy of pain" that the Reverend Sewell articulates to solve the dilemma in the love plot when Tom declares his love for Penelope, not Irene.^[7] Confronted by one heartbroken daughter and one full of guilt, who refuses to see Tom, the Laphams seek Sewell's counsel. Sewell advises Penelope to overcome her false sense of duty that he blames on sentimental novels and accept Tom's offer to marry. For him the solution is pure common sense: "One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame.... That's sense, and that's justice. It's the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality" (SL 241).

Sewell's advice does seem to work for this particular situation. It does not, however, apply to all events in the novel. Silas's transactions with his ex-partner, Rogers, for instance, do not adhere to its logic.

In the story's moral climax, Silas refuses to sell potentially worthless stock to Rogers, even though doing so would, without violating the business ethics of his day, save his financial empire and satisfy his wife, who feels that Silas owes his ex-partner a moral debt. Silas has scruples

because he knows that Rogers plans to unload the stock on unsuspecting Englishmen, ill-served by morally questionable agents acting on their behalf. Pleading that the sale is "my one chance; that if [Lapham doesn't] meet me on it, my wife and children will be reduced to beggary" (SL 327), Rogers accuses Silas of wanting "to sacrifice [Rogers's wife] to a mere idea" (SL 328). Of course, according to Sewell this is precisely the problem with Penelope's refusal to marry Tom. Her "false ideal of self-sacrifice" (SL 241) causes unnecessary suffering. In both plots agreements could be reached that would minimize suffering for everyone except a third party: in one case Irene, in the other rich men who can well afford the financial losses that they might suffer. But for some reason the economic logic of the love plot does not work for the business plot.

If Pizer and Dimock turn to an "economy" to unite the book's action, Donald Pease turns to the logic of family relations. Noting that "throughout the novel the different subject positions Silas Lapham occupied in different social narratives produced mobile social energies transgressive of any single social logic," Pease finds himself, nonetheless, compelled to offer such a single logic. He finds it in Silas's refusal to sell to Rogers. According to Pease, by treating English strangers "as if they were family members rather than business partners," Silas "enacts a scene that refuses the difference between business transactions and family relations out of which all of these narratives were constructed."^[8] But Pease's reading raises unanswerable questions. Why, for instance, does Silas protect the interests of his adopted English "family" at the expense of his real family (or even that of Rogers)? Furthermore, how does this logic square with Sewell's advice to Penelope to construct a new family by discounting the suffering of her closest family member—her sister?

Howells does, as Pease suggests, invite us and Silas to bring the different social narratives in which Silas is placed "into relationship with one another."^[9] But we need to resist the temptation to erase their differences so as to fit them under a single logic. A tentative explanation of their differences is suggested in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes when Basil March distinguishes between two worlds of chance. One is the world of chance in which Conrad Dryfoos is randomly killed as he tries to halt a violent streetcar strike. "All that was distinctly the chance of life and death. That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance." There is, however, another world of chance to which March objects, which is "this economic chance world in which

we live and which we men seem to have created" (HNF 436). In Silas Lapham Penelope's dilemma results from the chance world of God; Silas's from the economic chance world of men. In the love plot no one, as Sewell insists, is to blame for Tom loving Penelope rather than Irene. The distribution of affections is not something that we can control. In contrast, Silas's actions are not blameless. The distribution of economic opportunity does seem to involve questions of blame and responsibility.

This difference affects the meaning of self-sacrifice in the two situations. Even though she is not to blame, Penelope adheres to a "false ideal of self-sacrifice" (SL 241) in refusing Tom, whereas Silas is incapable of the proper "measure of self-sacrifice" (SL 50) in his dealings with Rogers, even though he is potentially to blame for Rogers's fate. In one case self-sacrifice is folly, in the other it is called for.

The distinction between the two plots does not rule out similarities between Silas's and Penelope's dilemmas. What is common, however, is that a perfect balance cannot be found in either. The love plot suggests why. Balancing the interests of all involved is impossible because it is the nature of a triangular affair to leave the odd person out. The plot of Silas Lapham consists of one incident after another in which attempts to balance accounts leave something or someone unaccounted for. We could even say that the plot is driven by Silas's failed desire to make things come out even. Nonetheless, his desire is understandable. Silas does not want to feel in anyone's debt. His image of himself as a self-sufficient, self-made man depends on keeping balanced accounts, especially moral ones.

The image of balance brings us back to the relationship between the formal structure of Howells's novel and the world in which it is produced. If the late nineteenth-century economy disrupted efforts to balance one's accounts, the ideology legitimating that economy, as we have seen, depended on various images of balance. One involved the balancing of different social spheres by what in chapter 2 I called boundary theorists. Another involved contractual relations among supposedly equal economic individuals. To review, we can start with contractual relations.

According to laissez-faire thinking, the economy operated most efficiently and for the benefit of all when it was generated by mutually agreed upon contractual relations among autonomous, self-possessed individuals. Theoretically, such an economy left to regulate itself would generate a natural balance among its individual members and thus correct unnatural hierarchies based on preassigned status. Even so, it

was widely recognized that this famous move from status to contract created peculiarly modern anxieties. Traditional societies may have been hierarchical, but the status assigned to various members gave them a secure standing in the world, a world in which everyone was part of an interconnected network linking the social system to a cosmic order. Loosening the traditional communal bonds of Gemeinschaft, contract threatened to produce the anomie of an atomized Gesellschaft . Crucial to boundary thought, the image of balanced social spheres helped to combat this sense of atomization.

Not confining themselves to market relations, late nineteenth-century laissez-faire theorists assumed that society consisted of more economies than a market economy. For instance, they also recognized the domestic economy, an economy that comes closer to the word's original meaning, which is the control or management of a household. If for them contract governed the market, status continued to rule at home.

Today's cultural critics tend to explain the simultaneous existence of these two spheres as the uneven development of residual, dominant, and emergent forces,^[10] but the period's laissez-faire thinkers did not share their temporal metaphor. Instead, they relied on the spatial metaphor of boundaries. What today seems to be uneven development was, for them, the result of different spheres of human activity operating according to naturally different logics. Believing that attempts to guarantee "even" development in different spheres would be unnatural, they tried instead scientifically to determine the boundaries between spheres. A legal system that recognized such boundaries would, they felt, create conditions in which individuals would be free to act in accordance with natural necessity, thus minimizing the need for governmental interference. If contemporary critics assume that "uneven" conditions in different spheres are unjust because out of balance, the period's laissez-faire thinkers relied on boundary thought to balance the various mutually dependent, but different, spheres sanctioned by nature, just as for Sewell the economy of pain "naturally suggests itself" (SL 241). Contract might have broken down the interconnected organism of traditional societies, but the image of balance among spheres of different standing allowed boundary theorists to retain the sense of an organic, if differentiated, society.

Howells's relationship to boundary thought is complicated. On the one hand, he shares its assumption that different situations generate different logics. The logic of the love plot cannot simply be imposed on

the logic of the business plot. On the other, the seepage of one plot into the other suggests that the boundaries separating different spheres are fluid, not fixed. If, as Dominick LaCapra argues, "the saying 'Business is business' was a meaningful tautological expression" of the doctrine of separate spheres,^[11] the inability to confine business to business in Silas Lapham unbalances the balance sought by boundary thinkers. We can see how by looking at Silas's unsatisfactory account of the transaction that ended his partnership with Rogers.

Silas absolves himself of responsibility in forcing Rogers out of partnership by arguing that they agreed to a balanced exchange between free and equal individuals. According to Silas their exchange was a "perfectly square thing" (SL 46). Rogers "got his money out and more too" (SL 46). But even though Silas's action is legal, Mrs. Lapham does not consider their accounts balanced. When she objects that Rogers's lack of money unbalanced their exchange, Silas reverts to the vocabulary of free will. Rogers had a "choice: buy out or go out"(SL 46). When Persis further objects that "it was no choice at all" (SL 46), Silas asserts that Rogers's choice was determined by natural laws of economics. Silas had not taken unfair "advantage" (SL 47), he had simply exploited a "business chance" (SL 47). Mrs. Lapham's rebuke that "it was no chance at all" (SL 47) threatens Silas by implying that the transaction was not square. Her response so throws him off balance that he dogmatically appeals to the separation of domestic and business spheres. " 'I'm sick of this,' said Lapham. 'If you'll tend to the house, I'll manage my business without your help' " (SL 47). The book shows the impossibility of keeping those spheres separate even if they should not be collapsed into one another.

Howells's response to boundary thought needs to be distinguished from other possible responses. If Howells had indeed constructed a balanced formal order that submitted both plots to a common logic, he would have remained within the framework of a literary organicism that has complicated relations to various views of the social order. For instance, Marx responded to the alienation of nineteenth-century society by explaining all social formations by relating them to an economic base. Thus what seemed to be a fragmented social order was, in fact, a total one united by the reigning mode of economic production.^[12] In contrast, sentimentalists found a unifying force in a metaphysical cosmic order. Influenced by the early Foucault, some new historicists try to explain all social phenomena by a common episteme, which for many is a non-Marxist "logic" of the market.

Howells, however, does not present a social world united by a common logic, but instead one in which the "logics" governing individual spheres are simultaneously different and related. They are, it might seem, in a relation of "relative autonomy." But even this sophisticated formulation fails to do justice to Howells. Although Louis Althusser used it to revise Marx's theory of economic determinism, it lacks an adequate account of temporality.^[13] To be sure, notions of spheres and boundaries involve space. But the relations among spheres in Howells's novel are temporal in at least two ways. First, efforts to apply the logic of one sphere to another are acts of translation, acts with a temporal dimension. Second, various spheres are not, as boundary thinkers assumed, fixed over time, but subject to revision.

To insist that temporality is an important part of Howells's aesthetic is, in one sense, not to make a startling claim. The nineteenth century is, after all, a period in which temporal narratives of development predominate. But we can better understand Howells's vision by comparing it to one of the most important accounts of temporal development, the dialectical logic of Hegel as used by Georg Lukàcs to develop a Marxist aesthetic.

Lukàcs champions works of nineteenth-century realism because, for him, they express a Hegelian sense of time, which allows them to distinguish the contingent, fragmented details of social life caused by capitalism from the true, dialectically driven course of history. They do so through a formal structure that organizes significant details into a plot that reveals essential contradictions at work within any historical moment. But for Lukàcs the form of realistic works does more than reveal contradictions. It also gives us a glimpse of a world of balanced social justice achieved through the unfolding of time. Indeed, in Lukàcs's Aristotlean Hegelianism, a balanced symbolic form is the aesthetic counterpart to Hegel's dialectical Aufhebung .

In our poststructuralist age it is not surprising to find Lukàcs's Hegelian sense of temporality under attack. If for Lukàcs realism provides a dialectical alternative to existing historical conditions, the "police academy" of critics argues that, by imagining a balanced form in which the contradictions of an age can be contained, works of realism legitimate the existing social order. But neither Lukàcs's nor the "police academy" description of realism adequately describes the temporality of Howells's fiction.^[14] In Silas Lapham there is no ultimate synthesis of contradictions. Rather than an Überwindung of contradictions, we have what Martin Heidegger calls a Verwindung .^[15] The aesthetic counterpart

to such a Verwindung is not a balanced formal structure that contains all of the individual elements of its plot. It is instead a work in which the plot's temporal movement disrupts efforts, including its author's, to achieve formal balance. This disruption is apparent in the novel's third plot.

III

Akin to the third party that gets left out in a triangular affair, the third plot disrupts efforts to balance the book's main plots. For instance, for Tanselle it is a "serious problem" because it "remains an element not smoothly blended into the larger structure."^[16] But Howells's realism forces us to face such problems, even if they are not easy to account for.

The third plot involves Zerrilla Dewey, the daughter of Jim Millon who sacrificed himself in the Civil War so that Silas could live. Feeling infinitely indebted to Jim, Silas supports Jim's wife and Zerrilla by employing the daughter as a secretary. This support becomes increasingly expensive because Zerrilla is married to a sailor who shares her mother's alcoholism.

Bucking the trend of critics who tend to ignore or discount this plot, Dimock argues that its importance is its tenuousness. Tenuously connected to the main plots, but revealing a "network of complications and entanglements," it suggests "a world of causal infinitude" in which "human responsibility becomes infinitely problematic." According to Dimock, Silas's decline is precipitated by this dilemma of "unlimited liability," because "the causal universe he inhabits is not only fearfully expansive but also fatally expensive. Moral responsibilities here have a way of becoming financial liabilities." Though this "domino theory of moral responsibility" proves frightening, Dimock argues that Howells suggests a remedy. "If moral responsibilities tend to get out of hand by mutating into financial liabilities, then the solution must work in the opposite direction, which is to say, it must try to rectify the moral by way of the economic" (my emphasis). She finds this solution in the familiar appeal to the "economy of pain," an economy that not only helps us to "cope with our own suffering," but also "with the suffering of others: cope with it, in the sense of acceding to it, accounting for it, and learning to see it, as Howells says in its 'true proportion.' "^[17]

For Dimock, Howells's economy of pain is so embracing that it contains even the tenuous and the contingent, thus helping readers account for suffering. But as powerful as this reading is, it miscalculates the proportion between the third plot and the rest of the story. To be sure, Silas tries to isolate it. He even records his payments to Zerrilla in a separate account book. Nonetheless, Zerrilla's story does not present us with actions almost "completely superfluous" that can eventually be accounted for by an economy of pain. Instead, it presents us with vitally connected actions that, nonetheless, painfully force us to face our inability fully to account for them. For instance, Zerrilla does more than "provoke Mrs. Lapham into a fit of unfounded jealousy"; her story brings aspects of the two main plots into direct conflict with one another.^[18] Those conflicts undermine efforts neatly to balance the business and love plots.

A working wife, Zerrilla occupies a space that stretches the period's belief in contract to its conceptual limits by threatening the delicate balance that laissez-faire thinkers maintained between the business and domestic economies. On the one hand, the business realm depended on honoring the right of individuals to contract out their labor for pay. On the other, the domestic realm depended on a contract in which a woman forfeited her right to enter into business contracts because her husband became her legal representative. As more and more women entered the workforce, legal thinkers were forced to face the problem of who owned her earnings. The solution did not lend itself to simple balancing.^[19]

Of course, the inequities that the marriage contract posed for women with property were not new. In the antebellum years several states had passed married women's property acts that allowed women to retain property when they married. Such property did not, however, bring the marriage contract into conflict with the business contract. Property earned by working wives did.

To forbid working women from possessing their earnings was to threaten the logic of the business contract. To allow them to do so was to threaten the relationship of status established by the marriage contract.^[20] Thus when states began to pass "earnings acts," many defenders of traditional marriage opposed them. At the same time supporters appealed to a situation like that represented in Howells's third plot: a married woman whose earnings are wasted by an alcoholic husband. The fact that Zerrilla's plight seems to leave her with no option but divorce suggests why traditionalists felt threatened by earnings acts. Indeed, the third plot links Howells's novel to a heated debate sparked

by a dramatic increase in divorce revealed by the 1880 census. That link in turn forces a reconsideration of our account of the two main plots.

Traditionalists argued that divorce threatened the social fabric by tearing down the family. Those supporting more liberal divorce laws argued that their consideration of the individual was a sign of progress.^[21] In A Modern Instance Howells had already dramatized the difficulty of balancing competing claims. By returning to the issue of divorce in the subplot of The Rise of Silas Lapham, he not only brings the logic of the domestic and business spheres into conflict, he also complicates the situation presented in his love plot.

The love plot is special because it involves no breaking of contractual promises. If Tom and Penelope's pursuit of their love had violated vows Tom had made to Irene in courtship or marriage, Sewell could not so easily have declared that "none is to blame" (SL 241). By placing Zerrilla in a situation in which she can assert herself only by breaking the vows of marriage, Howells points to the limits of Sewell's economy of pain. On the one hand, Zerrilla's husband is to blame for not living up to his marital obligations. On the other, Zerrilla will be blamed if she does not live up to her marriage vows. Reconciling Zerrilla's claim for divorce with Penelope and Tom's claim to pursue their love calls for a revised understanding of marriage and a reconsideration of the distinction between God's and humanity's worlds of chance that allowed us to differentiate between Silas's responsibilities in the business plot and his daughter's in the love plot.

According to the narrator in Silas Lapham:

The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two people by no means reckless of each other's rights and feelings, ... may tear at each other's heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the divinity of the institution (SL 49).

Unsentimentally describing the struggles of marriage, Howells nonetheless lapses into a sentimental view of it as a sacred bond. He is, for instance, much more of a traditionalist than Henry James. But Howells is not a complete traditionalist, as we can see by comparing his

attitude toward divorce with that of the spiritualist feminist Victoria Woodhull.^[22]

Traditionalists considered marriage a special contract whose vows involved much more than a horizontal exchange between two people. It also involved the promise each party made vertically to God. Thus they resisted arguments that marriage was a civil contract. They particularly opposed laws allowing divorce because these laws undermined a couple's sworn relation to God. In contrast, Woodhull attacked laws that forbade divorce, but not because she denied a divine sanction to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was for her a manifestation of the spiritual force governing the universe. But since that force embodied itself in the bond between husband and wife, not positive law, she felt that once husband and wife no longer sensed the mystical sanction of their relation, their commitment to one another disappeared. Indeed, as far as Woodhull was concerned, laws forbidding divorce constituted an unwarranted governmental interference with the divine spirit.

Howells also opposed absolute prohibitions on divorce, but for different reasons. If for traditionalists the commitment between husband and wife grew out of the sacred nature of the marriage ceremony and for Woodhull it resulted from the sanction of a transcendental spirit, for Howells it was constructed through the couple's horizontal exchange of promises. At the same time, marriage involved more than the couple's immanent relation, because it depended on the mysteries of love. In Howells's next novel, for instance, Sewell, contemplating the requirements of marriage, wonders, "Was love so absolutely necessary?" (MC 334). His wife forcefully responds, "You know that it is vitally necessary" (MC 334). Since for Howells the distribution of sexual affection seems beyond human control, marriage for him, as for traditionalists, was an institution in which the chance worlds of God and human beings intersected. But how they intersected was quite different.

In calling marriage a divine institution "that knits society together" (SL 49), Howells grants it a social role that would make him a reactionary if we accept Sir Henry Maine's claim that "the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the individual."^[23] But for Howells, part of the divinity of the institution is that, whereas it might seem to limit the freedom of the parties bound together, it in fact makes possible the mutual growth and development of individuals. Explaining why he plans to marry his intended, a character from Howells's next novel exclaims, "Why am I in love with M. Swan? Because I can't help it for one thing, and because for another thing she can do more to

develop the hidden worth and unsuspecting powers of A. W., Jr., than any other woman in the world" (MC 218).

Thus for Howells divorce is not simply a conflict between an individual's need for self-development and society's need to have people honor commitments to divinely sanctioned institutions. Social and individual needs are interrelated as much as opposed. If honoring the commitment to a bad marriage can stunt individual growth, in Howells's world an individual develops as a responsible human agent in part by honoring the commitments he or she has made. In turn, society depends on the sense of duty and obligation most fully developed in individuals tested by institutions like marriage. For Howells, then, unlike Woodhull, a couple should not be released from its vows the moment it senses that its bond is no longer sanctified by a higher spirit. Indeed, for him marriage cannot partake of its divinity without people working to live up to mutually created duties and obligations that have no higher sanction than the promises that they have made to one another. Even so, blind commitment to a marriage in which husband and wife are constitutionally incompatible only serves to undermine the institution's social function by stunting individual growth.

The special status that Howells attributes to marriage not only justifies Zerrilla's difficult decision to seek a divorce, it also helps to explain why Sewell's economy of pain works for Tom and Penelope but not for others. For Tom to marry Irene would be a disaster because it would bind both to a loveless marriage. For Penelope not to assert her "right" to Tom merely because it would hurt Irene also makes no sense. As Silas notes, the original confusion "had already put Irene to the worst suffering" (SL 252). How Irene deals with her imagined loss is a test of her character, not Penelope's. Furthermore, if Tom and Penelope do not marry they will give up a rare chance for mutual development and growth that fuses the strengths of the Lapham and Corey families.

By having society held together by an institution partaking of the divine, Howells might seem to impose a moral order on his world, and to an extent he does, certainly more than James. Nonetheless, the way in which Howells conceives of the institution makes the determination of responsibility more complicated rather than less. For traditionalists marriage vows could never be broken, because they were governed by God. For Woodhull they could be broken the moment that the parties sensed the withdrawal of divine sanction. But for Howells neither absolute position will do. Involving commitments created through the exchange of interpersonal vows, marriages never involve a situation in

which "no one is to blame." At the same time, no match is so made in heaven that the husband's and wife's interests never conflict. Since the intersection of the chance worlds of God and humanity varies from marriage to marriage, each situation needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Howells's inability to predict how the worlds of God and humanity intersect in any situation distinguishes him from a boundary thinker like William Graham Sumner.

Sumner makes a distinction very similar to the one made by Howells's March. "Certain ills," he argues, "belong to the hardships of human life.... We cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of these" because "God and Nature have ordained the chances and conditions of life on earth once and for all." At the same time, "certain other ills are due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or errors of civil institutions."^[24] These ills do demand a human remedy. Unfortunately, however, from Sumner's point of view, reformers too often confuse the two and hold human beings, especially certain social classes, responsible for eliminating the first class of ills. Avoiding such confusion, Sumner sets clear-cut limits on human responsibility. On the contrary, by suggesting that in marital controversies the chances of life ordained by God and humans intersect in varying proportions, Howells makes determination of responsibility extremely difficult. Furthermore, he does not confine the intersection of the two worlds to marital situations, as evidenced by the original source of Silas's debt to Zerrilla: his relation to her father. The events of the third plot suggest that far from being set by God "once and for all," the limits of human responsibility are always open to question.

Displaying a generosity that he refuses to extend to Rogers, who, his wife claims, also "saved [him]" (SL 47), Silas tries to pay back an infinite debt to the man who saved his life. Infinite as it might be, that debt has little to do with blame. Just as Tom is not responsible for the distribution of his affections, so Silas is not responsible for Jim's fate, which belongs to the chance world of life and death. Silas's debt is linked to that world.

Silas tells Jim's story at a dinner party to illustrate Corey's remark that an individual may go into war "simply and purely for his country's sake, not knowing whether, if he laid down his life, he should ever find it again, or whether, if he took it up hereafter, he should take it up in heaven or hell" (SL 202). Such sacrifice, Sewell admits, helps us "to imagine what God must be" (SL 202). Recalling the ultimate sacrifice, Jim's death calls attention to humanity's infinite debt to Christ, whose

story most poignantly dramatizes how the world of God, while different from that of humankind, intersects with it. But if Jim's story dramatizes human beings' infinite responsibility, his daughter's dramatizes the impossibility of paying back an infinite debt such as the one owed to Christ or Jim.

As the alcoholism of Zerrilla's mother and husband becomes a bottomless hole, absorbing all the money that Silas can give, Silas is forced to realize that he can no more successfully translate his moral debts into economic ones than he can successfully buy status in Boston society. Economic factors influence these other realms and vice versa, but they are not equivalent. Furthermore, Silas must learn that as a mere human being he cannot pay back all of his moral debts. To live in a historical world once inhabited by Christ may mean that people live with an infinite debt, but when Silas acts to cut off support to Zerrilla's husband, he dramatizes a paradox: to be a responsible human agent one must draw limits to one's responsibility. Not to do so is to pretend to be a divine rather than a human agent. Such pretense is not, according to Howells, very responsible.^[25]

In order to function, every society constructs narratives that establish what it considers responsible limits to responsibility. Some do so by assigning people clearly defined sets of duties and obligations based on status, while others limit obligations to terms negotiated by contracting parties. When Howells suggests that people have an infinite debt that can never be fulfilled, he draws attention to the contingency by which such limits are drawn. By presenting us with situations in which people must act in order to be responsible, he confronts us with the necessity of drawing them. By imagining novel situations that cannot be accounted for by agreed upon limits, he forces us to reconsider and perhaps redefine them, just as the "flawed" third plot of his novel does.

Any consideration of how the formal structure of Howells's fiction relates to questions of justice needs to take into account his concern with such novel situations; that is, situations that cannot be accounted for by existing formal structures or a Hegelian dialectic. Nonetheless, critics, confused by Howells's statements that the function of fiction is to portray men and women as "they really are," ignore the temporal dimension of Howells's sense of reality.^[26] The dangers of doing so are illustrated by Walter Benn Michaels's fascinating, but flawed, attempt to draw connections between Howells's aesthetic and the period's economics.

IV

Michaels's reading of Howells is, as he acknowledges, indebted to Leo Bersani. Working within a framework established by Roland Barthes, Bersani challenges arguments like Lukàcs's that champion nineteenth-century realism for opposing the fragmented world created by capitalism. Admitting that the realistic novel offers valuable social criticism by exposing contradictions, Bersani claims that, nonetheless, its final sense of cohesion offers implicit reassurance that contradictions can be contained within a significantly ordered structure inherent in society. Naturalizing the relations historically constructed under capitalism as "the real," realism's balanced formal order serves the status quo by castrating desire for an alternative social order.^[27]

Michaels accepts Bersani's account of realism's efforts to achieve a balanced economy within a balanced formal structure, but he offers a different account of capitalism. Capitalism, he argues, does not castrate desire; it generates it. Consumer capitalism, for instance, produces and reproduces subjects with an endless desire to be what they are not. That desire is generated by an economy based on speculation. Building his argument on the precarious foundation of this speculative economy, Michaels performs a dazzling balancing act that links business and love plots through their fear of speculation. The love plot, he argues warns against sentimental fiction whose lack of anchorage in reality arouses dangerous speculative desire, whereas the business plot warns against a capitalist economy that rewards earnings gained through speculation rather than "real" labor. In this reading Howells opposes the dangers of speculation with the agrarian values of self-sufficiency and balance that led to Silas's initial rise and to which he returns at the end of the novel. Aligning Howells's realism with this pre-market notion of character, Michaels claims that Howells thinks of both as sources of inherent values that resist the flux of an inequitable capitalist economy. In contrast, Michaels champions Sister Carrie, whose dramatization of the "almost structural impossibility of equilibrium" endorses "the popular economy" of capitalism.^[28]

In his response to Bersani, Michaels in effect endorses the formal relations between capitalism, realism, and naturalism established by Lukàcs.^[29] According to both, realism tries to resist capitalism, whereas naturalism feeds its logic. But for Lukàcs resistance is possible whereas for Michaels it is not. Realism does not naturalize the status quo.

Instead, it depends on a nostalgic view that a balanced economy based in nature exists as an alternative to the "artificial," speculative economy of capitalism. Although Michaels himself does not engage Lukàcs, we can see this nostalgia in Lukàcs's reliance on an Aristotlean notion of mimesis, in which a work of art, through its formal structure, is able to impart a sense of reality more "real" than the contingent world of historical actuality recorded in naturalism's meticulous detail. Linking efforts to oppose the historical reality of capitalism with a belief in such a naturally based, transcendent world of reality, Michaels champions naturalism, implying that in its immersion in the contingent and speculative economy of capitalism it is in effect more realistic than realism.

For Michaels, naturalism's relation to consumer capitalism does not come from an accurate representation of reality. On the contrary, within the "logic" of naturalism there is an inevitable gap between a work of art and what it would represent. It is, however, precisely this imbalance between life and art that serves the interests of capitalism, for it helps to generate mimetic desire, a desire to be what one is not. In naturalism "the relation between art and desire is ... very different from Howells's in The Rise of Silas Lapham, where art, like character, was seen as a kind of still point, a repository of values that resisted the fluctuations and inequalities of industrial capitalism."^[30] In contrast, naturalism is not only about consumer capitalism, it also produces ideal subjects for it, subjects constituted by a desire to imitate what they cannot be.

The problem with Michaels's reading is that it allows the Reverend Sewell unequivocally to speak for Howells when, in denouncing sentimental fiction, he proclaims that "the novelists might be the greatest help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation" (SL 197). Such an aesthetic, Michaels argues, is essentially a painter's aesthetic. But a call to paint "life as it is" is somewhat ironic in a novel in which Silas uses his paint to cover the natural landscape with advertisements for itself. Paint can cover up the world as well as accurately imitate it. Granted, Silas's commercial use of paint differs from aesthetic uses of it, such as Bromfield Corey's. For instance, in a statement that Michaels quotes to represent Howells's aesthetic, Corey asserts that "you never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate—all these shrink abominably" (SL 95-96). Corey does see art as an escape from the speculative fluctuations of the market. But Corey's theory of art is not Howells's.

Causing Corey to respond to a "shrinkage in values" (SL 95) by investing "his values into pictures" (SL 96), Corey's aesthetic contributes

to a decline in his family's fortunes. Its concept of imitation also robs him of the originality necessary to develop as a painter. The limits of Corey's classical aesthetic are suggested in the conversation about his house during the book's central dinner scene. Built in "perfect taste" (SL 192) and embodying its architect's "preference for the classic" (SL 187), the house is, according to Silas's architect, neither as "original" (SL 192) nor as well-built as the structure that Silas's "practical sympathy" (SL 191) has allowed him to construct. The point is not that the Corey's house lacks aesthetic value. Howells continues to value taste, just as he continues to value human "character." The house does create a space for impeccable taste and trustworthy character. But in protecting itself from "modern fuss" (SL 191), it shuts out the temporality necessary for the development of character.^[31]

Corey's classical, "painterly" aesthetic assumes that the real is stable and unchanging. In contrast, Howells's novelistic aesthetic assumes a world in which temporality has become a component part of reality, one in which a future reality is always capable of rendering an existing reality unreal. Incapable of expression by spatial metaphors, this sense of reality plays havoc with balancing efforts that depend on foundational thought.

Michaels argues that Howells's realism rests on the solid foundation of stable values of morality and art. For him Howells dramatizes the moral depravity of speculation through Silas's failed efforts in the stock market. To be sure, both Silas and his wife look down on the "unearned" wealth gained in the market. Mrs. Lapham calls it "gambling" (SL 129); Silas claims that "every cent" of his fortune "was honest money—no speculation—every copper of it for value received" (SL 206). What Michaels overlooks, however, is that Silas loses money in an effort to balance his accounts. Just as Silas tries to balance his accounts with Jim Millon by throwing good money after bad into the bottomless pit of alcoholism, so in trying to recoup his economic losses Silas throws good money after bad in the stock market. Rather than establish a simple opposition between a speculative economy and one based on firm foundations, Howells shows how Silas's speculation is motivated by an impossible dream of establishing a firm foundation for his investments. A case in point is his investment in his paint "farm," which links Silas's economics to the complicated relationship between the chance worlds of humans and God.

Silas certainly believes that he has invested in something with intrinsic value. Harvested, appropriately enough, from the earth, his paint, he

believes, "will stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun" (SL 11). It is, he tells Tom Corey "with the solemnity of prayer" (SL 76), "the best paint in God's universe" (SL 76). Silas makes it, as Mrs. Lapham puts it, his "god" (SL 47). He tells Bartley Hubbard, "I believe in my paint. I believe it's a blessing to the world" (SL 17). But Silas's belief is seriously flawed. He may grant his paint an everlasting value, but, as Tom reminds him, it is merely "the best in the market" (SL 76). When West Virginia paint enters the market, Silas's faith proves to be misplaced.

Silas's problem is that he has invested too much in his paint. That investment has to do with more than its cash value. It is not money, but his paint that is "the poetry of Silas's nature, otherwise so prosaic" (SL 50). "A sentiment, almost a passion" (SL 50), his paint connects him to what he believes is an almost sacred natural order. More than greed, his sentimental attachment to the paint discovered by his father causes Silas to make crucial business mistakes, such as keeping the works open too long. Indeed, it seems that if he would recognize the split between God's order and the humanmade world of the market and see his paint as simply a cash investment, he would be financially better off.

But in Howells's fiction the chance economic world of human beings is never completely divorced from the chance world of God. If Silas's financial rise is enabled by the chance location of mineral paint on his father's land, the chance presence of a "vein of natural gas" (SL 301) close to the West Virginians' paint guarantees his decline by keeping their manufacturing costs below his. What to Silas is a solid investment in a natural substance, rooted in the earth and linked to family values, turns out to be a speculative investment in a hole in the ground, an investment subject to chance. Silas has, according to Tom, "put a great deal of money into his Works" (SL 301), but "the value of his Works" (SL 301) is subject to forces outside of his power. There is, it seems, always an element of economics over which humans have no control.

Another illustration of Silas's failure to establish firm foundations is his house, which would seem to be a stable investment preferable to risky speculation in the stock market. The house is an attempt to establish foundations in a variety of ways. Most obvious is the metaphor of foundation itself. A house is constructed on a foundation rooted in the earth. It is built on a piece of real estate. But Silas's investment in his house is also an investment in the social status of his daughters. He first considers building it after Mrs. Corey's visit to their Nankeen Square house and her remark that " 'nearly all our friends are on the

New Land or on the Hill.' " (SL 29). Mrs. Lapham, who at first resists the notion of building on Silas's Back Bay lot, ponders the consequences for her daughters and grants that " 'we ought to do the best we can for the children, in every way.' " (SL 29). The Back Bay location will provide the daughters with a social foundation lacking in their Nankeen Square address.

The speculative nature of this investment is dramatized when the house goes up in flames. But even earlier, Howells hints at the investment's shaky foundation. Houses in Back Bay are built on top of a salt marsh, so that "before they began to put in the piles for the foundation they had to pump. The neighborhood smelt like the hold of a ship after a three years' voyage. People who had cast their fortunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still 'hung onto the Hill' put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up the Back Bay" (SL 43). As in the case of his paint farm, Silas invests in a piece of land with a hole in it whose value is subject to market fluctuations. Significantly, Silas loses his entire investment because the passage of time causes his insurance policy to lapse.

In dramatizing how seemingly solid investments are themselves a form of speculation, Howells establishes a complicated relation among sentimentalism, realism, and capitalism. Bromfield Corey suggests a link between sentimentalism and capitalism when he complains that sentimental fiction "flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their supernatural proportions" (SL 197). Such flattery generates what is known as mimetic desire in the reader. Mimetic desire is generated, on the one hand, by the lack of proportion that so irritates Sewell and, on the other, by a form of imaging that evokes a root meaning of speculation; that of a speculum or a mirror. Unleashing a desire in readers to become the flattering image that it constructs of them, sentimental fiction simultaneously makes fulfillment of that desire in the human world of time impossible. As Michaels has argued, this production of endless desire helps to feed a consumer-driven economy.

But for Michaels, Howells's dislike of sentimental writers is not simply caused by the fact that they generate uncontrolled desire. According to him, Howells faults them, not only because they offer unrealistic models, but, more important, because they offer any models at all. "Realism, defined by its fidelity to things as they are, can never in principle serve as a model, good or bad, since only when art is not like life can life attempt

to be like art. The true scandal of sentimentality is thus its inversion of the proper relation of life to art, an inversion made possible only by the introduction of a discrepancy between the two terms."^[32]

What Michaels fails to see is that such a discrepancy exists for Howells as well. "We start in our novels," he argues, "with something we have known of life, that is of life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide the joint . But the joint is always there, and on the one side of it are the real ground and real grass, and on the other are the painted images of ground and grass."^[33] In fact, the discrepancy within Silas Lapham is so pervasive that business is not even equivalent to itself. Even so, not all discrepancies are the same. Howells's problem with sentimental fiction is not that it presents us with a discrepancy between life and art and thus offers itself as a model. All fiction, because it will never be completely equivalent to life, has the capacity to do that. What is at stake is the nature of the discrepancy that it presents between itself and life and thus the type of model that it offers.

Howells objects to sentimentalism not because it awakens desire but because it awakens it only to close off possibilities for human development. Sentimental fiction generates endless movement, but that movement takes place within a closed world bounded by its mirror reflections. Rather than generate an open-ended economy, subject to chance, it ultimately rules out the possibility of chance and with it chances for development. Why it does so is suggested by the fact that one of its bounding mirrors offers images of the supernatural. That flattering image causes sentimental fiction to establish a relation between the worlds of God and humankind quite different from that of Howells's realism.

Sentimentalists frequently attribute their "works" to the hand of God. Responsibility for what they write lies with God, and they are no more than passive agents through whom God reveals his Word. This seemingly modest claim is, however, one full of hubris, for it implies that their works reveal the infinite perspective of God necessary to see the ultimate balancing of human accounts. As a vehicle for God's word, their fiction gives us a view of the world as if from a higher perspective, which corresponds to the meaning of speculation that comes from specere, or to see and thus specula, or a watchtower.

As titles like Gates Ajar and Barriers Burned Away indicate, the sentimentalists of Howells's day assumed access to a timeless, transcendent world that would balance accounts left uneven in the imperfect world of human history.^[34] That balanced economy means that what

Michaels takes to be sentimentalism's production of unregulated desire is, in fact, highly regulated, as it remains subordinate to the supernatural force that first awakens it.^[35] By placing human actions in the hands of a transcendental force, sentimental fiction removes the risks of chance—and thus human responsibility—from life. Solving the conflicts that it raises through plot devices similar to a deus ex machina, it produces mechanical, rather than human, agents who model their lives on the supposedly fixed values that govern the contingent world of time. In contrast, Howells does not claim to reveal God's perspective. Acts of human labor constructed out of the materials offered to him, Howells's novels are the responsibility of human, not divine, agency. As such, they serve pragmatically as equipment for living, precisely because they force readers to face the moral complexity of living in a world without fixed principles.^[36]

The most important discrepancy between life and art dramatized by Howells's realism is not between a fallen world of history and a transcendental world of permanent values. Resulting in part from the difference between real grass and imitated grass, it also involves what Reinhart Koselleck calls an asymmetry between our space of experience and our horizon of expectations. This asymmetry, according to Koselleck, is constitutive of a modern sense of temporality, one that is future-oriented because the future may always bring about events that present or past experience cannot account for.^[37] In such a world people are continually challenged to reconstruct and reorder social arrangements and to reconsider the nature of virtuous action.

Neither painterly nor architectural metaphors can adequately account for this temporal dimension of Howells's fiction. Nonetheless, critics continue to assume that Howells endorses the claim that Corey makes when he says, "You architects and musicians are the true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, painters, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try to imitate, we try to represent. But you two sorts of artists create form" (SL 192). Corey, however, neglects an important aspect of a novelist's task. A novelist might work with given forms, but he still needs to place them in relation so as to create "novel" forms. This creative act is crucial for the novelist's fulfillment of his moral responsibility, because by forcing us to revise fixed notions about the nature of what is real it challenges belief in closed systems of morality.

The assessment of responsibility for Howells is a formal one, and his responsibility as a novelist is the formal one of bringing different spheres

of action into proportionate relation. But for a novelist to fulfill that responsibility in a temporal world subject to chance, he cannot rest content with finding a form that "captures" reality either through spatial images or a dialectical logic. Instead, starting with existing forms, he must continually work to rearrange and reorder them. If in constructing a form that brings actions into proportionate relation Howells helps us to see how one should act in a given situation, he also knows that the "logic" growing out of that situation is not self-contained. Instead, a responsible action in one situation helps to generate new situations that unbalance whatever tentative balance might have been achieved. "Each novel," Howells wrote, "has a law of its own, which it seems to create for itself."^[38]

The need to revise every tentative formal solution helps to account for Howells's Balzacian strategy of interweaving various works. Such interweavings serve both to supplement his balancing efforts in one work with new situations in another and to remind us that, as "novel" as those situations are, they should not be seen in isolation from related ones. Actions in one situation generate actions in another, but precisely because the new situation is a novel one, the solution applied to the previous one cannot be simply translated to the other without some form of revision.

For instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham is followed by The Minister's Charge, peopled with characters from the previous work who are confronted by another triangular love affair, but one that cannot be solved by Sewell's "economy of pain." In fact, it cannot even be solved by Howells's complicated attitude toward divorce that is partially suggested by Silas Lapham 's third plot, for, unlike the third plot, Howells's new novel involves promises made before marriage. Thus Sewell and readers are forced to imagine what would have happened if Tom had promised to marry Irene and then realized that he and Penelope were the ones in love. Although I do not have the time to explore all of the complications that Howells's new novel presents, I do want to look at Sewell's most quoted passage from it because it is so important in assessing Howells's sense of responsibility.

V

Toward the conclusion of The Minister's Charge Sewell delivers a sermon on "Complicity." He tells his congregation that "no

one for good or for evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows, but each was bound to the highest and lowest by ties that centered in the hand of God" (MC 341). Although the sermon grows out of Sewell's entanglement in the book's triangular love affair, "it struck one of those popular moods of intelligent sympathy when the failure of a large class of underpaid and worthy workers to assert their right to a living wage against a powerful monopoly had sent a thrill of respectful pity through every generous heart in the country; and it was largely supposed that Sewell's sermon referred indirectly to the telegraphers' strike" (MC 341).

Just as critics take Sewell's comments on the novel as Howells's response to the dangers of sentimental fiction, so they take his sermon as Howells's response to the inequities of capitalism. Howells even suggests a connection between the sermon and novel-writing. Listening once again to her husband blame a woman's false sense of self-sacrifice on novel-reading, Sewell's wife notes his propensity to interrelate everything and exclaims, "What in the world are you talking about, David? I should think you are a novelist yourself, by the wild way you go on!" (MC 340). Sewell responds, "Yes, yes! Of course it's absurd. But everybody seems tangled up with everybody else. My dear, will you give me a cup of tea? I think I'll go to my writing at once" (MC 340). What he writes is the sermon that he delivers the next day.

But for Howells a sermon and a novel operate differently.^[39] At the end of The Silent Partner Sip offers a sermon, whose message about entanglement is similar to Sewell's about complicity. But Howells undercuts the authority of his sermon in a way that Phelps does not. For instance, the comment of Sewell's wife suggests that his propensity to make connections has affinities with the sentimental fiction that he deplores. Indeed, earlier Charles Bellingham mocks sentimentalism when, facing the complications of the triangular love affair, he wonders, "What is the reason these things can't be managed as they are in novels?" (MC 333). In "any well-regulated romance" (MC 333), he concludes, all problems would be solved by a plot that brings everything together by coincidence. Even if Howells agrees with much of Sewell's doctrine of complicity, his suggestion that it shares formal characteristics with the fiction that he condemns deprives it of its transcendental perspective. To be sure, it remains an important point of view within the novel, but only one of many in a world in which there is no regulating hand to guarantee that accounts will come out equal, even if, as in the case of Phelps, their balancing has to wait for death. Ironically, the

problems posed by the interconnected action of Howells's fiction expose the limits of Sewell's vision of an interconnected world.

Sewell's doctrine of complicity would seem to challenge boundary theorists' efforts to limit people's responsibility. As such, it has affinities with a challenge to the orthodox method of determining blame in tort cases posed by Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer who influenced pragmatism's revolt against formalism. At the time, courts would take money from A to give damages to B only if it could be proved objectively that A caused injury to B. Borrowing from current science the notion of "chains of causation," the courts felt that they could trace the line of causation from A to B by distinguishing between remote and proximate causes. Only proximate causes counted as evidence. Green, however, argued that what the courts accepted as scientific proof was actually based on two metaphors, that of a chain and that of the distinction between remote and proximate. "To every event," he claimed, "there are certain antecedents.... It is not any one of this set of antecedents taken by itself which is the cause. Not one by itself would produce the effect. The true cause is the whole set of antecedents taken together."^[40] A generation later legal realists used this logic to argue that singling out one person to pay damages was not a scientific determination of responsibility but judicial policy as to who should pay for a damage that had an interconnected set of causes.

Similarly, Sewell's doctrine of complicity plays havoc with efforts to use science to fix responsibility by demarcating the natural boundaries between different spheres of action. But if Sewell's stress on complicity challenges boundary thought, it also rules out blaming it alone for the inequities that it supposedly legitimates. Sewell, for instance, argues that "if a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible" (MC 341). If the "virtuous" are as responsible as the "vicious," how can we untangle the complicated interweavings that "cause" an action in order to assess blame? Indeed, although Sewell counsels humanistic compassion, the logical consequence of his doctrine is that it too is complicit with the market conditions that it implicitly criticizes, a complicity that confirms Thomas Haskell's argument about the rise of a humanitarian sensibility in the context of the market.^[41]

It is certainly plausible to argue that Silas's humanistic concern about how the sale of worthless stock would affect people beyond his

immediate circle grows out of the same understanding of the market's complexity that helped him to reap financial gain. In both cases Silas must take into consideration the remote consequences of his actions. To be sure, his sympathy seems to be awakened only when he himself becomes a victim of "business" chances. But without a sense of the market and its consequences, he would not have been able to recognize the similarity of his position to that of complete strangers.

Haskell, however, does not simply argue that a market economy calls attention to people's interdependence. Interdependence, after all, is not a new idea. Medieval thinkers also imagined an interconnected world. Instead, Haskell claims that to an unprecedented extent the market rewarded people for thinking of the future consequences of their actions. This future-orientation contributes to a modern sense of temporality that undercuts what Morton White calls a formalist order to the world.^[42] Rather than a medieval interconnectedness in which elements of the system turn back on themselves in resemblance to create a self-contained world, modern interdependence is open-ended. In such a world the medieval solution of determining responsibility according to preordained status sanctioned by God will not do. Neither will the formalist solution of fixing responsibilities through scientifically establishing boundaries. That world also suggests problems with those who, like Green, still caught within the framework of scientific formalism, dismiss metaphors as invalid. "Nothing," Green argues metaphorically, "more imperils the correctness of a train of reasoning than the use of metaphor."^[43]

To be sure, metaphors are rhetorical rather than scientific or logical, but without an ability to establish formal principles based on scientific or logical foundations they become useful tools. Is, for instance, the distinction between remote and proximate causes inappropriate because it is metaphoric? It is one thing to argue for an interconnected world. It is another to argue that a situation is affected equally by all others. If the distinction between proximate and remote causes cannot be determined scientifically—even logically—we can still attempt, to use one of Howells's favorite phrases, to place various situations in their "true proportion and relation" (SL 197).

Rather than reject a determination of responsibility because it relies on metaphors, Howells is concerned with the justness of metaphors to bring actions into their proper relation and proportion. Thus, for him, the assessment of responsibility remains a formal question, and his responsibility as a novelist is the formal one of bringing different spheres

of human action into proportionate relation to try to reveal the logics of various situations which reliance on transcendental principles would only obscure. Those logics determine who is to blame in an interconnected world in which otherwise we all seem complicit. But because in a temporal world no situation remains constant, Howells's formal solution challenges the premises of formalism by suggesting the need for constant revision of forms. Limited by his temporal perspective, Howells cannot reveal the logic of each situation in supernal clarity. What he can do is sharpen our focus enough to put us in a position in which we have a chance to risk determining the responsibilities of his various characters.

Of course, one formal demand of a novel (and a chapter) is that it must end. To turn to Sewell's doctrine of complicity in Silas Lapham 's sequel is to risk using it as an excuse to avoid the difficult task of judging how well Howells solves the problem of ending a book that calls out for endless revision. It is time, therefore, to turn to the conclusion of Silas Lapham .

VI

At the end of his novel Howells does not nostalgically return us to a precapitalist, agrarian economy founded on a set of natural values.^[44] Not disguised sermons, his novels were condemned by some for not offering models of virtuous action. Howells's failure to prescribe a set code of behavior is not, however, a sign of immorality. It is instead his way of showing that character develops only when tested by experience in a world without fixed values. What Howells does try to imagine are revised institutional structures that allow individuals and the economy better chances to develop responsibly, without stifling, paternalistic control.

One example is the institution of marriage. Andrew Delbanco has argued that a model marriage in Howells "was always, in its rock-bottom meaning, a barricade against the liberated self."^[45] On the contrary, as we have seen, Howells advocates neither unrestrained self-assertion in marriage nor rigid institutional restraints on the self. For instance, far from being a barricade against a liberated self, Tom and Penelope's marriage results from acts of self-assertion: Tom's against the wishes of his family; Penelope's against a sentimental code

of self-sacrifice. To be sure, their marriage will not work if confronted with unbridled egotism. At the same time, it will work in Howells's eyes only if it allows for further individual growth. Such growth will be unlikely under an inflexible code of behavior, and marriage needs to be imagined more flexibly to allow the development of an immanent logic growing out of the couple's particular mode of relating to one another. Paradoxically, then, Tom and Penelope's marriage is a "model" precisely because its outcome is uncertain.

Although marriage, as Howells imagines it, is subject to the unaccountable, it does not necessarily lead to economic development, which for him is necessary if more people are to have the possibility for individual growth. Nonetheless, Tom and Penelope's marriage is linked to another corporate structure that promises to serve that function. Tom supports his family by going to work for the West Virginia company whose competition contributed to Silas's economic ruin. According to his wife, Silas broke up his partnership with Rogers because he was unwilling "to let anybody else share in [the] blessings" (SL 47) of his paint. That unwillingness illustrates what for many in Howells's day was the problem with an economy dominated by large, individually owned businesses. Their alternative was not limited partnerships, like the one Silas had with Rogers. It was large, jointly owned corporations uniting the interests of a diverse society. For instance, Harvard's President Charles W. Eliot called "incorporation with limited liability ... the greatest business invention of the nineteenth century," because it responded to the conflict between "collectivism" and "individualism" by providing for structures that "are great diffusers of property among the frugal people of the country."^[46] Other reformers, including Christian socialists, like Bellamy, saw corporations as an important step toward a collective community.

Pease claims that the "business corporation that tacitly resulted from Penelope's marriage to Tom Corey" is "Lapham and Son," which is "structured like Lapham's ideal for the family, combining the commercial interests of a growing enterprise with the trustworthy self-reliance of its founder."^[47] In fact, Corey works for the Kanawaha Falls Company that started as a family-owned company but is now a large corporation. Presenting a possibility for economic growth without the individualist abuses of laissez-faire capitalism, it even incorporates Lapham's "works," allowing Silas to contribute to its success by manufacturing the Persis Brand of paint whose quality it cannot match but can help market. By allowing his decaying company to be incorporated by the

new one, Silas not only has his debts absorbed, he gains "an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all in his own hand" (SL 361).

Silas's vain hope should be read as a prideful as well as an empty hope. He had vainly hoped to control more wealth than any individual should. In contrast, the Kanawaha Falls Company unites the diverse interests (and strengths) of the Corey and Lapham families—and not only by hiring Tom. In The Minister's Charge we learn that by taking the risk to invest in the company's stock, Bromfield Corey has restored his family's wealth. (So much for a Howells who fears all forms of speculation in the stock market.)

Through the Kanawaha Falls Company's collectivism Howells imagines how to have it both ways. The dynamics of an unbalanced economy organized along corporate lines seem to provide for individual development while helping to balance competing social interests. Nonetheless, even though this corporation makes possible the increased wellbeing of more individuals, there is no guarantee that all will do so. In fact, what seems to be Howells's utopian corporate vision contains its own potential for unbalancing. First of all, as Silas's speculation in stocks indicates, the hazards associated with economic development increase, if anything. Second, as the telegrapher's strike alluded to in The Minister's Charge indicates, monopolistic corporations can deny "worthy workers" their "right to a living wage" (MC 341). Like the G. L. & P. Railroad, which had rendered Silas's stock in midwestern mills worthless, corporate monopolies can stifle growth.

A crucial difference between the West Virginia corporation and monopolies is that the former opens markets while the latter close them. Opening of markets is important for Howells because it increases opportunities to take advantage of chance. In contrast, the monopolistic closing of markets creates a sense of tragic inevitability in which human beings lose the opportunity to act freely. Silas, for instance, is left with no choice in his battle with the railroad. But his lack of choice does not mean that he is simply a victim of economic law. If the closing of markets eliminates possibilities for responsible human action, for Howells human action is often responsible for the opening or closing of markets. The position in which Silas is placed by the railroad is the same in which he places Rogers when he forces him out of partnership. Both actions may seem to be no more than taking advantage of a "business chance," but, as we saw in the case of Silas, an appeal to a transcendental "logic of the market" is a way to deny responsibility for one's actions.

The fact that Silas's action is repeated by the railroad indicates that for Howells the rise of corporations may complicate, but does not basically alter, questions of responsible human agency.^[48]

As I have stressed from the start, Howells's portrayal of different logics growing out of different situations undercuts an economic determinism. Nonetheless, the seepage of the business plot into all areas of the novel indicates that economic structures do affect the possibilities of action in other spheres as well as vice versa. Therefore, for Howells some economic structures help to open up possibilities for responsible human action while others tend to close them off. At the same time, responsible action within the economic sphere cannot be totally divorced from questions of responsible action in other spheres. Indeed, the West Virginia company's opening of markets repeats—with a difference—Howells's efforts to make visible the realistic possibilities for human action that otherwise might seem determined by transcendental forces such as The Market or Fate.

Nonetheless, readers of the late twentieth century might well ask whether Howells's narration of open-ended development is still a responsible one. First of all, to what extent does it depend on a human-centered exploitation of the environment summarized by Silas's "I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape" (SL 15)? Second, and related, to what extent does it rely on a discredited pattern of American exceptionalism? Hegel argued that the safety valve of the frontier protected the United States from the contradictions of European history.^[49] Attempts to balance social interests might always generate something that cannot be accounted for, but so long as the United States possessed a space to accommodate the unaccountable, it could develop without Europe's tragic necessity to resolve contradictions through dialectical confrontation. Rather than follow the exclusive logic of winners and losers, it could provide the best possible, if never perfect, social balance by encouraging the expansion of an unbalanced economy according to a logic of inclusion. With Frederick Jackson Turner about to announce his "frontier thesis," however, the narrative of American history seemed condemned to lose its exceptional character. Even so, Howells's ending suggests that a developmental space remains possible through the opening of foreign markets. Tom's assignment for the West Virginia company is, after all, to open markets in Mexico and Central America.^[50]

To members of an interconnected global economy with the limited resources of "Spaceship Earth," the need to maintain a developmental

narrative through expansion into third-world markets may seem irresponsibly to open up possibilities for individual growth in developed countries while closing them off for others. Perhaps it is no accident, then, that in our postmodern age developmental narratives and their link to Howells's sense of human agency have come under attack as modernity's belief in a munda novas becomes less imaginable. But it is not at all clear that such attacks can fully account for all of the possible ways of reenvisioning Howells's narrative. Indeed, the strikingly similar concerns that he shares with the efforts of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum to formulate a "developmental ethics" for the global distribution of resources raise the question of whether it is possible at this time to imagine a just new world order without retaining at least some aspects of Howells's account of human action within an economy of the unaccountable.^[51] If it would be against the thrust of my argument to claim that the "logic" of The Rise of Silas Lapham perfectly fits our present situation, it is not inconsistent to claim that its challenge for readers to face the hazards of responsible development remains.

Howells's detractors too often miss his complicated fictional strategies that transfer to readers the task of responsibly judging what constitutes responsible action. One strategy is his self-conscious manipulation of point of view that undermines any illusion of a transcendental perspective that he might have created. If Flaubert begins Madame Bovary with a first-person narrator who shortly gives way to third-person omniscience, Howells begins with a third-person narrative only to introduce a first-person narrator late in his novel. One function of Howells's use of a first-person narrator is to displace the authority of any one character—including Sewell—to serve as Howells's spokesperson. Certainly the narrative "I" has more authority than any character. Nonetheless, the "I's" authority is itself limited. Indeed, in his few intrusions the narrator calls attention to his inability to penetrate the interior of characters to report their feelings and intentions (SL 359, 360, 362). Thus, readers are forced, as in Holmes's theory of the law, to make judgments based on the results of actions, not motives. Rather than link an omniscient perspective to God, Howells speaks of a "wicked omniscience in Rogers" (SL 321), whose first name, Milton, recalls Paradise Lost and Satan's effort to usurp God's role.^[52]

In undermining his narrative omniscience, Howells invites readers to enter a contingent world of chance, in which determination of responsibility is risky business because it can never be made with certainty. For Howells the realm of human agency is precisely this realm in which

people, subject to chance, nonetheless, risk taking advantage of it. Such a vision of agency might seem to bring us back to the period's laissez-faire theorists. They too wanted an unregulated economy in which everyone can take advantage of the economic chance world in which we live. Indeed, to identify situations in which people take advantage of chance as those in which human agency is possible does not solve the problem of responsible human action. Taking advantage of chance can, as in the case of Silas's exploitation of a "business chance" with Rogers, be an act of selfishness, or it can, as in the case of Penelope and Tom, be a legitimate assertion of self.^[53]

Nonetheless, Howells suggests a form of moral accountability different from that of boundary thinkers, with whom, otherwise, he has much in common. That difference has to do with his positionality within history. Laissez-faire thinkers claim to place us in an economic world in which everyone has an equal opportunity to take advantage of chance. But their vision depends on imagining an originary moment outside of history, in which contracting parties enter exchanges with equal standing. Starting instead with the imbalances that he confronts within history, Howells presents a different version of our economic chance world.

The ideal vision of equitable capitalist growth implies that balanced agreements result in mutual profit for all contracting parties. Confronted with the reality of the situations in which one person profits at another's expense, laissez-faire apologists argued that such situations were the natural outcome of economic laws. In contrast, Howells implies that more often than not, profits gained from taking advantage of such business chances result from historically conditioned imbalances among contracting parties. If boundary ideologists assumed that contracting partners have equal standing, Howells's attention to status reminds us that the mere assertion of free will is not enough to put oneself on an equal footing with another. Howells does not, however, assume that an equitable society will result if we simply correct social and economic imbalances. Instead, he offers the disconcerting warning that frequently our balancing efforts, as important as they are, generate yet other imbalances. Subject to, if not completely determined by, a chance that they cannot control, human beings will never balance their accounts within history, although a progressive history is in part generated by attempts to do so.

Because people never perfectly balance their moral accounts, Howells does not offer models of definitively moral behavior. We can never be

certain if noble actions result from moral character or chance. Did Jim Millon receive a bullet aimed at Silas because he happened to be standing where he was, or did he self-consciously position himself to save his friend? Did Silas refuse to sell worthless stock back to Rogers because he was "standing firm for right and justice" (SL 332) or because by chance the railroad's offer for the mills came in the next morning's mail?^[54] It is no accident that both of these actions concern metaphors of standing, since Howells suggests that responsible action is determined neither solely by one's predetermined standing in society—as in a status-oriented culture—nor by what others think of one's actions—as in a totally commodified culture—but by a combination of where one is placed at birth, where one places oneself in life, and what others think of that placement. What readers think of characters' actions does not totally determine whether or not their actions are responsible, but readers' judgments do play an important part in determining the moral economy of the world Howells presents, a moral economy always subject to revision precisely because our judgments, as important as they are, will never provide a perfectly balanced account of all of the book's actions.