Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Person
Editor's
Essay:
- William Dean
Howells'
- The Rise of Silas
Lapham
- Editor's note: this essay was originally written as part of a Master's Degree
program.
The
Civilizing of Silas Lapham: On Becoming a Person
Carl Rogers, the eminent psychologist, thoughtfully asserts that “each person
is asking, Who am I, really? [.
. .] How can I become myself?” With a preacher’s fervor, Rogers
proclaims that no one is “a fixed entity, but a process of becoming.” This
process, successfully executed, results in the putting away of
“defensive masks with which [one] has faced life” and the acceptance of “the locus of evaluation as residing within [one]self”
regarding all questions confronting the individual. Rogers, in a comment that ominously
foreshadows the misery of those who refuse this person-building transformation, declares,
quoting Kierkegaard, that “the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another
than [one]self” (107-124).
William Dean Howells has not presented to us a textbook of psychology; yet, among
the themes he seeks to investigate in Silas Lapham, the idea of personhood -- its
essential nature -- meets us on nearly every page. Almost every character in this novel
speaks to us, directly and between the lines, indicating an obsession with personal
inadequacy and a pathological need to be accepted by others; a confusion about one’s
place, not only in society but in life itself; an inability to enjoy life’s blessings
in the face of a pervasive, haunting sense of self-unworthiness. A work that invites
exploration on other fronts, Silas Lapham, in the following discussion, shall be
reviewed with these problems of personhood in mind.
“The business of America is business.” Once a popular proverb,
this long-ago bumper-sticker wisdom begins to encapsulate the zeitgeist of Lapham's
age -- he and those around him are more than a little infected with this one-dimensional
view. Howells time-shifts us to 1861 as Silas is about to march off to war; we are
prepared to witness tears and hugs, passionate goodbyes, and long last-looks. But this
parting scene is terribly marred – by wife Persis, no less, the more emotionally
inclined of the two – she does not leave him with sweet thoughts of home and hearth
and satin and lace, but with these unsatisfying final words: “I’ll look after
the paint.” Touching. Further such endearments are found in the atmosphere of
Lapham’s office complex: the CEO must maintain his professional distance and does so
with “gruff kindness” (an oxymoron); young men, addressed with hollow deference,
are referred to as “sir.” Politics and other elements of civilization are
explained in terms of the only paradigm that matters, merchandizing and office-talk:
“Seems to me, if our party hain’t got any other stock-in-trade, we better shut
up shop altogether.” All of these statements, and many others, beg the question: Does
one’s standing and value in life – as a person – have any necessary
connection to one’s money-making prowess?
Sexuality and money. Penelope, sweet Pen, that saucy-tongued miss and the
only Lapham with a beautiful mind, may be the most tragic figure of Howells’ work.
She is like Arthur Dimmesdale, caught in a downward spiral of bad philosophy, in her case,
not of a theological nature, but – we are not surprised to discover – of money
as a proxy for self-worth. She feels herself “more worthy” of Corey before her
father’s business fiasco; further, in the same vein, she has difficulty loving
herself enough to be happy when others, through no fault of her own, are “so
miserable.” As prelude to all of this, we find ourselves annoyed to witness the
Lapham parents totally obtuse regarding the possibility of Corey finding the provocative
Pen an attraction -- because Irene, they all summarily agree, is the “beautiful”
one. The Laphams blunder along here because, in this assessment, they fail to see a wider
principle, one that also applies to Si’s wealth – all externals fall far
short in terms of bolstering the essential worthiness of a person; and those souls among
them, more than others, who have developed the hidden person within, will not forever be
cast in the role of ugly duckling. This is all very ironic because if Irene were, in fact,
the beauty, Tom would be powerless to avoid choosing her. The fact that he does not
do so is proof positive that definitions of “beauty” within the Lapham clan are
in serious need of revision.
Holding court. In a book brimming with “lapses of taste” (McNamara
157) and outrageous performance, the Colonel, after numerous self-confessions regarding
not “keeping up,” in the closing hour of the Corey’s dinner party, with
mind sotted with wine, attempts to set new records for boorishness. Abandoning not only
“the reserve which he had maintained earlier” but any further attempt at polite
conversation, he proceeds to hold court. The men in his presence, now subdued in reverence
to Lapham’s military sacrifices, are not, in his eyes, persons to commune
with, not fellow brothers with whom to share a quiet moment – no! they are threats to
Lapham’s sense of self-worth. If he cannot defeat them on their intellectual
home-turf, he will create a new battlefield, one where he makes the rules and is sure to
win. He verbally parades the toys of his wealth before his captives; he blusters, he beats
his chest, he brashly, but condescendingly, professes dearest affection to all subjects
within his realm; he assures them of his humanity by revealing small failings of his wife;
he even clownishly insults them all with his offer to make a man out of young Corey.
“At last he had the talk altogether to himself; no one else talked, and he talked
unceasingly. It was a great time; it was a triumph.”
The story is told of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth who entertained a visiting
third-world country dignitary. Unfamiliar with the rules of high-society etiquette, the
unsophisticated emissary, to the utter disdain of nearly everyone seated around the grand
table, lifted his finger bowl from the lace tablecloth, raised it to his lips, and began
to sip its contents. But this unrefined one, oblivious even to his predicament, found
immediate rescue from one lady at the head of the table, his imperial hostess. The Queen,
with stately decorum and charm, acknowledged her guest and drank, in like manner, from her
own finger bowl.
But Mrs. Corey is not Queen Elizabeth. While the Colonel may have won first prize
for certain improprieties that night, Mrs. Corey, quite artfully, displayed her own brand
of incivility. She well knew that Silas and his bunch, in their consternations about
gloves-or-no-gloves, about white-tie-or-black-tie, were, in her home, far out of their
element. She did nothing to ease their discomfiture and anxiety. Her words and actions
– and her sins of omission, ones accruing to her account by virtue of her superior
knowledge – reveal in Mrs. Corey a smallness of heart, a lack of excellent spirit, a
stunted and shriveled inner person.
“The locus of evaluation residing
within oneself.” Those who shirk the responsibilities of their own personhood
easily play the role of victim, even in subtle ways. Silas blathers that a wife must be
“good enough” to keep a man straight, a virtue he esteems to be “the best
thing in a woman.” He even claims that Persis serves as his conscience, that she
“won’t let me do anything about those mills.” We infer that he would have
liked to – and, as such, he earns little reward from us for his forbearance.
The
illusion of superiority. Those who deny the
human capacity for change and growth are left to defend their own selves as a finished
product – and if that product is not one to their own liking, it is often all too
convenient to minimize others in order to feel good about oneself. Silas callously
relegates women to second-class, almost sub-human, level. They are the ones who, in a
display of weakness, are wont to enquire about the health of another; they are
silly-minded enough – so unbusiness-like – as to engage in joking repartee.
Silas is certain, very certain, as to the nature of a real man. Dunce-like, he
pontificates that Tom shall be made a man in spite of his college education; and
later, the Colonel’s highest compliment for Tom is that he has shown himself to be a
natural-born businessman – we quickly come to understand that when the Colonel
praises anyone, he does so only as an indirect means of glorifying himself. Irene, too,
infected with this spirit, admits that she dislikes poetry – but, worse, if she were
to accept it, only American poets need apply.
While, in the opinion of this
reviewer, Howells’ Silas Lapham is not a great book, it does present to us a
small number of worthy insights into the human condition which warrant consideration.
Civilization is often defined in terms of broad swaths of history, of masses of men and
woman, of the rise and fall of kingdoms. Howells, rightly so, reduces all of this to the
development of single persons: “It’s a curious thing, this thing we call
civilization [. . .]. It’s really an affair of individuals. One brother will be
civilized and the other a barbarian” -- a simple truth, but very profound. Our own
choices, our decisions to courageously meet life and our own selves, to move forward in
the face of all adversity – all of this requires a heroism of epic proportions, the
existence of which is sufficient to bend and fashion even the flow of history; indeed, it
is the only thing that ever has made a difference.
At one point, Persis, glowing
with uncharacteristic wisdom, offers to us Howells’ perception of the nature of
growth in personhood: responding to her husband’s hubristic clucking about
buying-and-selling others, she asserts, “Oh, it isn’t exactly what you’ve got,
and it isn’t what you’ve done exactly. It’s what you are.”
Howells has lifted this idea from philosophers who speak of goodness as that object of
desire which men and women aspire to have, do, or become
– a weighty point requiring further discussion. It is stating the obvious to suggest
that Howells’ novel presents to us all manner of example of those who attempt to
substitute possessing and doing for the summum bonum, the greatest
good of all – that of actually becoming the good, becoming, in fact, a fully
formed, fully aware, fully responsible, human being – a person. At the end of
the book, like the very first hints of thawing after a North Dakota winter, we witness the
smallest movement on the part of Silas toward a richer personhood. The man who had
formerly wished to die before humbling himself before anyone, now, in small steps, begins
to talk about his failures in life – but what the left hand gives, the right quickly
takes away for his final words reveal that he has learned absolutely nothing; that, if he
could, he would do every last deed in his life all over again!
The most interesting question, I think, that Howells poses in his work asks why
some are burdened with a “false ideal of self-sacrifice.” This notion is
discussed as backdrop to Pen’s cock-eyed refusal to accept Tom’s love. The
minister’s straight-forward answer to the parents’ conundrum – that it is
better for only one rather than for two to suffer – seems self-evident
enough. And why should Penelope be so over-wrought by that which she did not create and by
the furtherance of which would only add to the total misery of the group? This problem,
viewed within the larger context of the entire writing, must lead us to answers which are
linked to the quest for personhood. Are the protestations of Pen designed to protect
Irene? Or is this all a smokescreen to hide something else? We do know that Pen eventually
admits that one of her greatest fears was to be unworthy of Tom in the absence of her
father’s money. This tendency to seek support in externals, the approval and
gifts of others, it may be correct to assume, finds further expression in her relationship
with Irene. Pen desperately desires release from being seen as the fox guarding the
henhouse; she, ostensibly, had been attempting to pair Irene with young Corey – or
had she? Pen’s image as a worthy person, in the eyes of others and herself, was on
trial – the threat of adverse judgment concerning which was enough, for a time, to
send her running for the nearest convent.
Truly, in all of these person-related issues, we are dealing with a most potent
principle of human life. In Silas Lapham we learn that men and women, very often,
will risk sex, love, money, fame, character, and life itself to avoid meeting that most
awful and terrible of entities – the hidden person within. We cling, desperately, to
what Carl Rogers referred to as “defensive masks” – and we will continue to
cling until the pain of that pathological attachment becomes greater than the pain of
openness and self-exploration.
Works Cited
- McNamara, Kevin. “Silas Lapham in Olomouc.” College Literature 23:2
(1996): 157.
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- Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton, 1961. 107-124.
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