SOURCE: "Women and Marriage in Abraham Cahan's Fiction," in Studies in American Jewish Literature, edited by Daniel Walden, Vol. 3, 1983, pp. 26-39.

[In the following essay, Kress discusses Cahan's portrayal of women and marriage, arguing that his characters' ambivalence about marriage parallels their ambivalence about assimilation in America.]

Much of Abraham Cahan's fiction reflects upon the institution of marriage in the lives of his Jewish immigrant characters at the turn of the century. Unlike writers of sentimental fiction, Cahan does not focus exclusively on the vicissitudes of courtship prior to a happily-ever-after marriage presumably to be enjoyed by the characters after the book is closed; rather, as the realist praised by William Dean Howells, he shows us glimpses of court-ship in a sweatshop, of difficult married life, of the pain of adjustment to life in the new world. In Cahan's fiction, the terrors of being unmarried are balanced against the claustrophobia of the married condition, and it is possible to see the immigrants' ambivalence about assimilation mirrored in the individual's—and especially the woman's—attitude toward marriage.

While Cahan does not create the strikingly bold women protagonists that we find in, say, Ibsen, he nevertheless avoids stereotyped portraits, frequently expresses the woman's perspective, and creates a series of memorable female characters. In the following essay, I hope to show that, throughout his work, Cahan presents a thorough analysis of the limitations of the institution of marriage, with particular emphasis on the point of view of women. I have chosen to deal primarily with those short stories written in English which treat marriage directly and avoid chronological order, because, in my view, Cahan's treatment of this subject does not change significantly during the course of his fictional career. Cahan's portrayal of character, his choice of interior settings, his depiction of enclosed city space, indeed the very shape of his narratives, compel attention to the constrictions of life for the immigrant woman; moreover, Cahan the realist not only challenges the assumptions and conventions of romantic fiction but also tests and defines the limits of the kind of realism advocated by Howells.

"The Imported Bridegroom" (1898) demonstrates the typical contours of a Cahan story about marriage. There are three major characters in the story and it will be helpful for our present purposes to tell the story from the point of view of each of them in turn. First the father. Asriel Stroon, a devoted father and successful businessman, suffers, as the story opens, from spiritual emptiness. He goes back to his home town in Russia, and is impressed by the brilliance of Shaya, a young Talmudic scholar. In the traditional way, he wants to choose the bridegroom for his daughter, and, spending a good deal of money to settle the competition for the scholar, he imports him to America, as a husband for his daughter and as spiritual insurance for himself in the hereafter. The daughter, Flora, is initially unwilling to accept Shaya, but then seems satisfied to marry him, and all goes well until Stroon discovers Shaya forsaking his spiritual heritage by entering libraries and eating unkosher food in a restaurant. Stroon denounces both Flora and Shaya, but Flora manages to bring about a reconciliation. The father then decides he will be "born again" by marrying his housekeeper, Tamara, and living in Israel, thus enacting in his own life the resolution he has wanted to control for his daughter, and ensuring his spiritual life, not by importing a bridegroom but by exporting himself and his new devout wife. Thus, at this level, all ends happily

What about the bridegroom? We know less of him since we are rarely granted access to his consciousness; he is an illoui, a prodigy of deep learning and spirituality, but also fond of a certain kind of mischievous fun ("he was detected giving snuff to a pig, and then participating with much younger boys in a race over the bridge." He comes to America with Stroon, allows his clothes to be exchanged for those of American fashion, meets Flora, and suffers her obvious distaste and distress. Nevertheless, in pursuing a secular education, he wins her love and prepares to become the doctor of her (and now his) dreams. All this must, of course, be kept secret from the father, but Stroon discovers the truth and then the guilty pair wed hastily. At the end of the story, when Flora tells him she has won her father's grudging approval, Shaya is delighted, but yet more interested in a meeting of his intellectual discussion group to whom he introduces Flora, and whose company he is most reluctant to leave even though Flora feels they should be celebrating their new union. Thus, for Shaya, too, the end is a happy one: he has a wife who pleases him, a handsome marriage settlement, and the opportunity to pursue his newly chosen studies.

Now for Flora's perspective. The story begins with a brief closeup of a young girl sitting comfortably before a parlor stove "enveloped in a kindly warmth." The imagery of dusk, however, creeping into the room "in almost visible waves" prefigures the enclosure and envelopment of the story's formal closure. The narrative situation is a familiar one: a young woman, unmarried, is thinking about the sort of husband she wants—in this case a successful young doctor who will provide a life for her that will be very different, in her mind, from those of the other Mott or Bayard Street girls who marry businessmen. Within the terms of the social world she knows, her script is both predictable and acceptable, and, despite her father's opposition, she will succeed, for "when she took a resolve she could not imagine herself otherwise than carrying it out, sooner or later." But the imported bride-groom produced by her father is a blow to all these ambitions: a throwback to a Russian/Jewish past and not a passport to an American future, he fails to claim her interest. By a witty twist, however, the young man turns out to be not only handsome and appealing but also willing, in spite of the father's wishes, to educate himself in the values of secular American society, according to the daughter's desires. All seems to go well. Flora even manages to win her father's consent to the union. So far, she has managed to manipulate both men she has Shaya; Shaya will become a doctor; her father approves the marriage. All should end happily for Flora, too, but the final scene shows Flora, now tied to Shaya by marriage, but shut out of his life. He introduces her to his discussion group, and she feels "overcome by the stuffy, over-heated atmosphere of the misshapen apartment," and as if she has been "kidnaped into the den of some terrible creatures." She is devastated by feelings of "desolation and jealousy … of the whole excited crowd, and of Shaya's entire future, from which she seemed excluded."

The story enacts conflict on a number of levels. The father's desire to import the values of his Russian/Jewish background into secular American life, his wish to recapture his past (underlined by the shift to the present tense when he visits his home town, Pravly), his conflict with the changing values and aspirations of the younger generation, and, finally, the opposing needs of Shaya and Flora are never resolved. The conventional solution to fictional plot complication is, of course, marriage, and so all these tensions build about and within the institution of marriage. But this story, while it ends in two marriages, is not fully resolved: the father's marriage, seen as it is from his point of view, promises resolution, the daughter's marriage, seen from hers, is a dead end, a stifling and suffocating conclusion that foreshadows the exclusions and constrictions of the life to come.

From this analysis, we can begin to appreciate the radical differences between the lives of men and women in this story. For the men, there is space and movement across continents; for the woman, enclosure, stasis. Shaya quickly masters the geography of the city ("in less than six months he knew the city and its suburbs much better than Flora"), and investigates the Astor Library ("the 'holy soul' was clearly forging ahead of her in a world which she considered all her own"); Flora is almost always pictured in interiors, protected and confined. When Stroon's first plan for spiritual regeneration fails, he has other options; when Shaya comes to America, the whole world of secular knowledge and attainment is open to him; Flora's imagination is, however, controlled by a vision of the kind of husband she can marry and her future is a blank. Yet Cahan chooses to give great weight to Flora's point of view. The story begins and ends with her, and the final shape of the story is determined by Flora's sense of the limitations of her future. But there is irony in the form, too; for if Flora's opportunities are circumscribed, so, too, are the freedoms of Asriel Stroon and Shaya enclosed by the nature of the fictional form, the enveloping perspective of Flora.

"The Apostate of Chego-Chegg" (1899) also emphasizes the woman's point of view, and recounts the tale of two recent immigrants from Poland settled in a Long Island village. The protagonist is Michalina who, married to a Catholic, has renounced her Jewish religion and been baptized as a Catholic. The story explores the conflicts suffered by Michalina, married to a Gentile yet still attached to her Jewish faith and the tradition of her father. Complication is introduced in the character of Nehemiah, a rabbi, who subsequently gives up his faith, falls in love with Michalina, and offers to marry her. Michalina discovers that, according to Jewish law, her marriage to a Catholic is invalid and exists only in American secular law as well as, presumably, in Catholic law, and she decides to marry Nehemiah and return to her Jewish faith. Accordingly, the women of the Jewish community collect the money for a passage to England for Michalina, Nehemiah, and her baby daughter. But, while the secret preparations are going forward, Wincas, the husband, returns early from work, and Michalina realizes, amidst the curses of the community, that she cannot leave him.

The first thing to note about the story is that there are two apostates, Nehemiah and Michalina, but only Michalina is accounted as such:

Disclaim Judaism as Nehemiah would, he could not get the Jews to disclaim him; while Michalina was more alien to the Mosaic community than any of its Christian neighbors.

Of course, Michalina's outcast status is a result of the fact that she has not only renounced her faith as Nehemiah has, but also converted to another; this makes him an appikoros and her a meshumedeste. But if we think further about Nehemiah and Michalina, we see that Cahan has made clear the difference between not only an atheist and a convert but also a man and a woman. At one point in the story, Nehemiah attempts to rouse Michalina from her despair by claiming, "'There are no Jews and no Gentiles, missus. This is America. All are noblemen here, and all are brothers'." Indeed, the words are telling, but he might have added that all women are daughters and wives. Nehemiah has given up his faith as a result of his own choice, his own spiritual development, an inner conviction that it is right and necessary for him to do so. Michalina has relinquished her faith because she has married Wincas and must take on the faith of her Gentile husband; it is unlikely that a man would convert for reasons of marriage—his wife would normally take his faith.

Indeed, the tale as a whole, while it seems to be the particular story of a woman conflicted in her loyalty among two faiths and three men—her father, Wincas, and Nehemiah—is rather a representative story of the social control of women by the patriarchy. Michalina is born with one name, Rivka (or Rebecca), assigned to her by her father, and when she gives up that identity, he mourns her as if she were dead, as if she were not. When she marries Wincas, she takes the name of her husband, converts to his faith, and is baptized with a new "christian" name. The conversion is a rich, suggestive metaphor for a woman's marriage in that the wife, like the convert, takes on the man's name, faith, community, his very identity. Michalina is treated as an outcast by her Jewish community, but, ironically she is only doing what every married woman must do. Her only way of resolving her conflicts is to marry again, this time the Jew, Nehemiah, which act will serve to "reconvert" her to the faith of her father. Now some aspects of this analysis would hold if Michalina were male, but the point is that the story illustrates supremely well a woman's lack of individual identity and autonomy in marriage, her constant reference to her father, her husband, her community, and her denial of self.

When Michalina decides to return to Wincas, the act is presented as a gesture of love, compassion, and loyalty. Surely it is; but surely, too, it is partly a recognition that to turn to another man in order to return to the faith of her father (and let us note that Michalina has no mother, that she married Wincas not so much for himself but in "revenge," against her stepmother, for in this world women are enemies in their competition for the favors of men) will bring her no closer to understanding and achieving her own identity and her own needs, no closer to any genuine resolution of her internal conflict. Since the woman's conversion takes place for the sake of another, she cannot solve the confusion between what she wants for herself and what she wants because she is, or must be, devoted to another. Hence, again, the marriage is a dead end. In the last paragraph of the story, Michalina runs to her husband and "the door closed upon the apostate." The words have an ironic double meaning; the door has closed behind her, but it has also closed in her face.

The claims of a father, the relation of a father to the daughter's choice of husband—these are motifs that run through both stories just analyzed. In both cases, the daughter seems to make a choice, seems to defy her father, but in both cases, she discovers that in making her choice, she dooms herself to choicelessness. The influence of the father is extremely important, as the title reveals, in "The Daughter of Reb Avrom Leib" (1900), which has as its background the festivals and holy days of the Jewish religion. Indeed, the story is formally divided into parts according to certain holy days, and most of the story's scenes are set in the Synagogue where Reb Avrom Leib is the cantor, or official singer. Aaron Zalkin, a businessman, entering the Synagogue after many years of absence, sees the cantor's daughter and is attracted. A visit "'to view the bride'" is arranged, and, after some Talmudic exchanges between suitor and father, we learn that, with all due irony, it will be a love match, for "Reb Avrom Leib fell in love with his daughter's suitor on the spot." Sophie, the daughter, is much less sure of her feelings and, once again, like the other daughters examined, is torn between pleasing her father and pleasing herself. The engagement is made, broken, made, broken again, until, after the death of her father, Sophie seeks out the one man who also loves her father as a "father." The last paragraph sounds with all the foreboding we have come to expect from references to marriage in Cahan's work:

"Will you marry me?"

"Yes, yes," she answered, impetuously. The street was dark. From the Synagogue came the hum of muffled merriment. It sounded like a wail. "Yes, yes," she repeated in a whisper. And, as if afraid lest morning might bring better counsel, she hastened to bind herself by adding with a tremor in her voice: "I swear by my father that I will."

The setting of the story and the final "wail" from the Synagogue underline the fact that patriarchal Jewish law and convention "bind" the woman into a marriage and her devotion to her father (or husband, or lover, as is the case in some stories) seals the trap. The conventions, the ritual, the commemoration of festival, the very use of language like "predestined one" to describe the suitor suggest the inevitability of a woman's destiny, the weight of tradition that works to suppress her individual identity.

The funereal "wail" sounded in the last paragraph of "The Daughter of Reb Avrom Leib" is echoed in "A Ghetto Wedding" (1898). Goldy and Nathan are making wedding plans, and Goldy wants to save enough money to carry the event off in style. But times are difficult and their money is shrinking, and so Goldy hits upon the plan of using what money they have for an extravagant wedding and relying on their guests to furnish them with sufficiently generous gifts to set up house. This is realistic fiction, however, and many guests cannot afford to accept the invitation to the wedding; those who do come give only meager presents.

Before the wedding, Goldy spends many days in her new apartment waiting in vain for gifts to arrive, and Cahan emphasizes through repetition the "vacuity" of the "empty little rooms," a theme which recurs in the somber description of the wedding celebration: "the few waltzers looked as if they were scared by the ringing echoes of their own footsteps amid the austere solemnity of the surrounding void and the depressing sheen of the dim expanse of floor." Yet the imagery becomes even more dismal in reference to Goldy. As the ritual of veiling the bride commences, Goldy is "pale as death" and looks "as if the bard were an executioner come to lead her to the scaffold." The traditional song of the bard. "'Wail, bride, wail! / This is a time of tears,'" has a ghastly effect, causing the bride to faint and the bard to earn the name "'murderer.'" During the wedding supper itself, Goldy tries "to imagine herself dead."

At the end of the story, walking home from the wedding, the couple's spirits are higher: "they felt a stream of happiness uniting them" and "the very notion of a relentless void abruptly turned to a beatific sense of their own seclusion." Most critics, focusing on this language, read the story as uncharacteristically optimistic or even "sentimental," and see the married couple as united in their Judaism against a hostile world. But Cahan is not sentimental or inconsistent; even in the midst of describing the couple's bliss, his use of somber "d" sounds in the following sentence belies the seeming romance of the ending: "they dived into the denser gloom of a sidestreet." It is true enough that Goldy and Nathan have been disappointed by their lack of wedding gifts and will have a difficult time struggling against poverty, nor is this romantic fiction where the ordinary facts of material life are unimportant; nevertheless, the pervasive language of emptiness, death, and darkness seems out of proportion to the material hardship and is not cancelled out by the momentary happiness described at the end. We can only assume that Cahan is telling us something not only about Jews in a Gentile world but about marriage itself, and we should note that, clearly here, the imagery of death and murder of self is associated with the woman, and recall, too, that the daughter of Reb Avrom Leib called her father "'murderer,'" when he was pushing her, unwilling, into the arms of Zalkin.

One of Cahan's most interesting stories dealing with the poverty of immigrant life is "Circumstances" (1897) which explores the marriage of an immigrant couple, Boris and Tanya, who come to America as a land of freedom from prejudice but who find their lives depressed by poverty and Boris forced to work in a button factory. Boris will not allow Tanya to work and so, in order to improve their finances, they take in (much against Tanya's will) a boarder, Dalsky, who is studying to be a doctor. Given the close living quarters, Tanya's lack of consuming interests, Dalsky's fresh appearance, his success at pursuing his studies in the face of Boris' failure to find the money and energy to pursue his, the inevitable happens. Circumstances press, and Tanya falls in love with Dalsky.

Tanya is presented as an intelligent, educated woman. She graduated from a Russian gymnasium, and when the story opens, she is excited about receiving the latest issue of Russian Thought (we recall Flora reading Dickens at the beginning of "The Imported Bridegroom," though Flora's cultivation is clearly much shallower). The heightened language used to describe Tanya's avid interest in the journal is usually reserved for sexual passion: she was in a "flurry" of enthusiasm, "feverishly" reading, "burning to glance over the beginning, the middle, and the end of the article simultaneously." True, Tanya's intellectual attainments are treated with some irony by her husband, and, indeed, the narrator, but nevertheless, these genuine interests must be set against the actual details of her life which she spends housekeeping, making soup, and waiting, waiting for her husband: "'The whole day I am all alone, and when he comes he plunges into some book or other or falls asleep like a murdered man.'"

But given the circumstances and limitations of Tanya's life, she can only measure options in terms of the available men. The passion she directs at Russian Thought, thwarted, must be turned to another object: Dalsky—seemingly more intellectual, more interesting, more appealing than the abject Boris. When Tanya realizes her plight (and, significantly, she realizes it through comparing herself with Anna Karenina), she immediately has a confrontation with Boris. Interestingly, she cannot speak to him of her changed feelings, but she can write them down. What she writes is clearly melodramatic and derivative, borrowed from second-rate literary models, but the very act reflects a need on the part of a woman who, though educated, is deprived of work, choice, and—as an immigrant—of language, to write her own text, assert herself, take charge of her story in her own words. It is worth recalling that, at the beginning of the story, Tanya lights on an idea, expressed in Russian Thought, which Boris had disputed "with a patronizing and slightly ironical tone," when she had voiced it herself. She eagerly reads him the passage, and, when he accedes without a battle, she retorts: "Of course, once it is printed in Russian Thought, it is 'rather an interesting point,' but when it was only Tanya who made it, why then it was mere rubbish." The published word, then, has an authority, a power which is denied her speech, and her written words to Boris are a pathetic attempt to be taken seriously—not to suffer patronage or condescension. Additionally, the letter reveals her moral clarity: since she no longer loves Boris, she cannot live with his. She does not, however, flee to Dalsky, but has the courage to eke out a wretched life in a sweatshop. The story ends with Tanya struggling over a machine and recalling the promise of her graduation from the gymnasium; meanwhile, Boris weeps out his despair in the "dead emptiness," of their now deserted rooms.

The stories analyzed so far reveal the woman's point of view in detail. Others do present primarily the man's perspective—but that is almost always conveyed with much less compassion by Cahan. Typical is the story of Yekl, or Jake, to give him the American name he prefers, in the short novel, Yekl (1896); Jake comes to America with the promise that he will shortly send for his wife and young child. The freedom of American life intoxicates him, and he postpones sending for them until his father's death forces his hand. The sight of his wife, who clings to all the old ways of his home town, disgusts him and their relationship deteriorates to the point of divorce. Meanwhile, Jake, who has been much taken with the American women of the dance halls, decides he will marry Mamie, not unaware that she probably has a respectable bank balance. In this realistic fiction, their moment of passion takes place on the roof of a tenement building, with washing flapping round their ears—again that imagery of envelopment and enclosure. Further, the escape from one wife to another is signalled by images of claustrophobia and suffocation. Confined in a Third Avenue cable car, Jake is on his way to marry Mamie while feeling "painfully reluctant to part with his long-coveted freedom so soon after it had at last been attained," and conscious that his future "loomed dark and impenetrable." But Jake, through his double-dealing and dis-honesty, has forfeited our sympathy which is deflected to his first wife, the woman who arrived in America without possessions, without language, whose entire life was directed toward pleasing Jake.

Other men suffer (though they, too, fail to win our compassion as the women do) not because they marry, but because, like David Levinsky in Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), they fail to. In "A Providential Match" (1895), Cahan paints an ironic portrait of a man who has bought the passage of his future wife from Russia. He is devastated on her arrival to discover that she has met her "Providential" husband on the boat, and he must watch the two of them walk away. In "A Sweat-shop Romance" (1895), a man who is too timid to support his woman friend when she is insulted by the wife of their mutual employer, finds himself standing outside her door listening to the sounds of her engagement to another.

The imagery of restriction and constriction, then, is prevalent in Cahan's work. In Cahan's city, one is always coming up against walls or closed doors; whether the focus is on the one outside the door, wanting to beat it down, or the one inside, suffering enclosure, the pressures of isolation and suffocation are similar. The city seems to promise expansion, space, opportunity but the reality is, invariably, a sweatshop, a small suite of empty—or near empty—rooms, and a street which is not a passage through but a cul-de-sac. At the beginning of "A Ghetto Wedding," Grand Street seems to be buzzing with crowded life and energy, but the bright display of material goods is set against the "empty purse," the "empty" rooms of Goldy and Nathan, and the dark "sidestreet." Most of the immigrant dwellers view the city's goods only from the outside, faces pressed against the glass. David Levinsky, whose "rise" is measured by the frequency with which he changes and improves his places of business, finds the changes merely superficial and his emotional life blocked off. Further, few of the stories convey any sense that the characters have a future, indeed, in this regard, David Levinsky explicitly bemoans his lack of progeny but none of the couples discussed has a child except for Michalina whose daughter will surely inherit a legacy of conflict and alienation. Many of the characters believe that they have free will, that they can control the life of a future husband, shape the course of a wedding, take revenge on a stepmother, and leave a husband, but they inevitably find themselves hemmed in by economic reality, the past, fate, circumstances, conventions, and traditions. The new world only seems to be new; the old traps merely appear in different disguises.

The institutional trap which most frequently absorbs Cahan's imagination is marriage—and Cahan's fiction presents us with a full indictment of marriage, beginning with the courtship. In The Rise of David Levinsky, we recall the scene in the Catskills where men look over the "merchandise" and assess "matrimonial possibilities" in terms of flesh and diamonds. In "A Providential Match," we learn that the woman has never spoken to the suitors who "sought her hand and her marriage portion." "A Marriage by Proxy" offers a more satirical view of marriage, suggesting the absurdity of an institution where couples who do not even know each other contract to marry. Marriage in this world is an arrangement, usually negotiated by the father, for virtual strangers to live together for economic reasons: the bridegroom is bought in "The Imported Bridegroom" and the bride in "A Providential Match." Those women who resist being married for their money, like Gussie in The Rise of David Levinsky, cannot expect happiness either, for, as we have seen, marriage is the primary option for women in Cahan's society. Moreover, the women are more or less friendless; the only bonding between women such as that in "The Apostate of Chego-Chegg" or the friendship between Mrs. Kavarsky and Giti in Yekl is directed toward helping the woman either make the best of her current marriage or settle in another.

Woman's role is defined and limited by marriage, and her life is spent living through or supporting fathers, husbands, children. In The Rise of David Levinsky, we learn that the greatest honor for a man is the privilege of passing his days in studying the Torah; the greatest honor for a woman, therefore, since she is excluded from full participation in religious life, is the privilege of supporting him in this occupation. David Levinsky's mother, in effect, dies for her son, attempting retaliation against some Gentiles who have harmed him, and Dora, one of the women to whom Levinsky is drawn, lives for her children, for the day when her daughter, Lucy, will be "both educated and happy." And when Lucy marries for safety, for money, Dora can only wonder hopelessly, as she contemplates the waste of her daughter's life and her own, "Of what good is education, then?" Life is hard for all the immigrants, and Cahan certainly does not simplify the problems of maintaining integrity and identity in the new world, but it is especially hard for women whose identity must be submerged in that of others. Women have marriage and marriage means conversion to the life of the husband and death of the self. It is always risky to speculate on what has formed the imagination of the artist, but it is tempting to claim that the imagery of death, conversion, and exclusion might readily inform the vision of an immigrant who feels excluded from a culture and wants desperately to be assimilated or "married." But to assimilate means not only conversion, or the renunciation of language, customs, dress, beliefs, but the death of the individual autonomous self. Moreover, as an immigrant, an outsider shut out from the centers of influence and with no voice in the official culture, Cahan must have had a special sensitivity for the woman's peripheral role in society and for her irresolvable conflict: to marry is to risk absorption in the identity of another; not to marry is to risk displacement. Many critics have pointed out Cahan's ambivalence about assimilation, but it is worth emphasizing how skillfully Cahan conveys this anxiety through his treatment of the woman's attitude toward marriage. And if the irresolution of his endings serves to raise questions about assimilation, it also surely raises questions about marriage.

Cahan's fiction offers poignant, compassionate portraits of women; and while these women are often morally superior, they are not particularly outstanding, and not capable of transcending circumstances and convention. And perhaps this has, in part, to do with the problems of writing realistic fiction. As we know, W. D. Howells was advocating that American writers reject romantic and sentimental models; for the influential Howells and his growing body of disciples in the late nineteenth century, realism was the new unorthodoxy which would challenge received ideas about art. Cahan wrote of ordinary immigrant people in ordinary working class situations for the most part, and many students of Cahan's work have pointed out that his socialism and his commitment to literary realism are linked, that the critical realism encouraged by Howells would show things as they are and thus provoke social change. Nonetheless, by exchanging romantic fictional conventions for realistic ones, Cahan is forced to confront the limitations of mat mode and to demonstrate that Howellsian realism is by no means revolutionary; for in depicting life as the Howellsian realist says it is, Cahan must only show the ordinary person, the typical situation, the predictable outcome. Thus art, imitating life in accordance with the particular principles of realist selectivity and reacting against romanticism, must itself come up against dead ends. Cahan's fiction presents us with a compelling set of reasons for changing the world, but, at the same time, both formally and thematically, his art demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty of personal or political transformation.