Will the Real Silas Lapham Please Stand Up?

I need to write a post soon about Miss Engler’s list of books. Miss Engler was a substitute teacher in Hazelwood schools in the 1970s. One day she handed out a mimeographed list of books she thought young people should read. I’m 99.9% sure that I’m the only student who ever paid any attention to that list, but it served as my canon for a couple of decades – replacing the list of titles adapted for Classics Illustrated! I must admit that my ragged copy still has several titles not underlined. Amazingly, though, after fifty years, I ticked off two more books from Miss Engler’s list in just the last few weeks: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. More about Jekyll and Hyde next time.

Silas Lapham was apparently a widely known, widely read American novel in the 1880s. Today, I’m sure few people have heard of it. (It did not appear in Classics Illustrated.) It’s a mystery to me why Howells and this novel aren’t more widely known. Miss Engler, you and I may be the only ones who remember!

Howells wanted to be and was considered a novelist of Realism. If you want to know more about that movement, read The Rise of Silas Lapham, not only for the benefit of the example but also because the characters outline the tenets of Realism by talking about novels and they way they ought to be. Some characters in the story have been reading a novel in which one girl leaves her attraction to a young fellow unfulfilled in deference to another girl (her sister, maybe?), and the Laphams and their friends complain that this novel they’re reading gets overly romantic and overly emotional by setting up the first girl as a heroine because she willingly suffers. I don’t know if the book the characters read was a real book, but Howells determines to show us the realistic way this plot should be depicted: the Lapham daughters find themselves both attracted to the same eligible bachelor, and one feels that her happiness is less important than her sister’s pain. Yes, these things happen, Howells tells us, but no one earns a halo. Far from being a case of heroism, the self-sacrificing Lapham sister causes a problem for the whole family, and a minister explains to her that her choice is causing three people to suffer, not just one. She eventually relents but meets a new obstacle in The Fall of Silas Lapham. (Of course, it had to happen!)

I don’t know if Howells would have appreciated my reaction to that part of the plot. He thought overly emotional novels were unrealistic and therefore inferior, but I found this story very interesting precisely because of the complex emotions of the characters involved. I definitely see that the lens he applied to life differed from that of previous generations of writers, and in the portions less about the daughters and more about their father’s paint business, the novel reminded me of Babbitt. But this is still a Babbitt of the Victorian era without the cynicism and sense of loss of Sinclair Lewis’s time. I’m sure that 140 years of perspective helps make this clearer to me than it might have been to Howells.

One thing I’m not at all clear on, though, is the nature of Lapham’s business dilemmas. I looked up reviews after finishing the book hoping someone would explain to me his options near the end of the book as he was deciding what to do with his paint venture once his fortunes began to drop. I got no help understanding the peculiar terms and practices of mergers in nineteenth-century America, but I was surprised to discover that many readers think Lapham struggles morally during this crisis. On the contrary, I saw him as an extremely moral man whose struggles involved something more interesting (in my view) than a choice between being honest and making more money: Lapham’s biggest problem has to do with balancing his ethical business choices and his duty to take his wife’s views into account. It doesn’t look to me like a crisis of morality but a crisis of epistemology: Lapham will certainly do the right thing, but how can he be sure that his understanding points to the ethical path more unerringly than his wife’s does? If you read this book, let me know what you think!