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   maldoror Student
   College - Senior

   "Editha" can be seen as Howell's response to romantic literature.  According to Howells, romanticism is dangerous.  Howells believed that the author should write for the masses, and not deal with the exotic, heroic, or unusual.  He believed in a highly democratic purpose that limited what the author should do.

   Howells was pro-realism.  He was against sentimentality in fiction.  Sentimentality is a fiction that moons over the past and highlighted by excessive emotions.  In the story, Editha Balcom loves her country, and wants George Gearson to fight in the war, I believe it was the Spanish-American war.  Editha considers herself a patriot, and has fallen prey to the propaganda surrounding the Spanish-American war.  The newspapers of the time, particularly those of Hearst and Pulitzer, were full of faked accounts of war atrocities.

   George does not want to fight in the war, but he realizes that he must do so if he wants to win Editha's love.  Editha feels as if she needs to justify her love for George; she tells herself that she can only love a war hero.  When he signs up and gets his orders stating that he will be shipped out, Editah gives him a letter and tells him to read it if he ever doubts his purpose.  The letter is a typical device in sentimental fiction.

   George is killed almost immediately.  Editha and her father, Junius, go west to inform George's mother of his death.  George's mother has already been informed, and has received the letter that Editha wrote to George because it was in his belongings.  The Balcoms, Editha and her father, represent the Romantics, and George and his mother, the Gearsons, represent the Realist.  George's mother does not receive Editha and her father well.  She is furious; she tells Editha that George was a kind soul who did not believe in war.

   At the end of the story, Editha is telling her story to anyone who will listen.  She has not learned that her romanticizing of war is a dangerous thing.  Howells uses the story to demonstrate that romanticism can be a dangerous thing, and that a romantic ideal of war causes people to get killed.

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   Posted by maldoror on Saturday May 9, 2009 at 10:17 AM