SOURCE: “Howells and the Practicable Utopia: The Allegorical Structure of the Altrurian Romances,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 118-30.

[In the following essay, Uba explores the allegorical nature of William Dean Howells's utopian romances, A Traveller from Altruria and Through the Eye of the Needle.]

The utopian novels A Traveller From Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907) hold an anomalous position in the literary canon of William Dean Howells. Not only do they mark a shift away from his characteristic brand of realism but both individually and collectively they pose a problem of formal classification. In accordance with critical tradition, they are commonly referred to as “novels” or “romances,” yet the first term seems to refer in most instances to the generic definition of the novel as a long, fictional prose narrative (and thereby distinguished from poetry, the drama, and the short story), while the second, although more specific, mainly directs our attention to the works' self-evident departure from the realistic fiction for which Howells was and is principally known, the fiction of, say, The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Hazard of New Fortunes. In neither case do these labels tell us very much about the formal characteristics of either work or anything at all about the close relationship that these “books of one blood” (as Howells called them) were intended to share.¹

The tendency among most critics and scholars has been to emphasize the social and economic “message” contained in the Altrurian romances (and I use here the term employed in the standard critical edition), specifically their criticism of the capitalistic dispensation and their embracing of Christian socialism.² While the efforts in this direction have been of value in helping us better to understand the development, substance, and limits of Howells's social philosophy, as well as his perception of “plutocratic” America in the 1890s, the effect has been to treat the Altrurian romances as social critiques made agreeable through the cosmetic of fiction instead of as literary works containing within them social critiques. From the start this sociological tendency in criticism has led in some instances to the outright rejection of the artistry of the two works, to the claim that the “sociological criticisms are not conveyed in an interesting form of fiction” or that the works are “earnest if not artful” or, more kindly, that “the urgency of … ideas broke through the form of the novel.”³ In other instances generic labels have been applied to the works but applied casually and without careful consideration. In terms of literary taxonomy, the result has been unwonted confusion. Besides being termed “novels” and “romances,” the Altrurian works have been variously called “essays,” “chronicles,” “critical fantasy,” “random and indolent sketches,” “a morality play,” and even “a modern existential work.”⁴ To date, however, there have been no serious, extended efforts to examine the literary architectonics of A Traveller From Altruria and Through the Eye of the Needle. I will argue in this paper that the Altrurian romances are carefully designed and fully complementary examples of allegory.⁵ Implicit in this argument will be the assumption that an adequate understanding of meaning awaits an adequate understanding of form. Indeed, to extrapolate Howells's ideas without clear reference to the form in which they are embodied is to miss the intended connection of his utopian vision with ritualistic faith and ultimately with reality itself. For Howells was not merely describing a program in his Altrurian romances but in a larger sense practicing one.

An important clue to the structure of the two works is provided by Howells's insistence in his prefatory remarks that he retained a faith in the “practicability” of his utopia.⁶ Here he was echoing a term employed by Laurence Gronlund in his socialistic treatise, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1885), a work which had influenced Howells in the formulating of his own collectivist ideas. Gronlund noted how “practical” people would object to his proposed commonwealth on the basis of its being “impracticable.”⁷ But after raising the issue of practicability, Gronlund immediately sidestepped it, claiming that he was “not here concerned about how to institute that New Order—in the fullness of time when we reach the brink, a bridge will grow before us somehow. …”⁸ Howells's insistence on his utopia's practicability alerts us to the possibility that he was consciously attempting to meet the challenge implicit in Gronlund's statement. Indeed, it has been seriously maintained that one of the distinguishing features of Howells's utopian vision is his perception of Altruria as a matter of practical engineering, as an actual rather than a merely ideal possibility.⁹ Unfortunately, this position ignores all too much of the Altrurian texts themselves, for the foreshortened descriptions of the process by which Altruria was formed lead nearly everyone to the opposite conclusion: that Altruria is as impracticable as any of the utopias that constitute its literary forebears.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Howells does not simply contradict himself in simultaneously urging his Altruria's practicability and demonstrating its logical impracticability. Instead, he raises the possibility that his utopia is practicable in some other than ordinary way.

Before examining this notion further, we must first understand why Howells was ill-equipped to regard the utopia as practicable in the ordinary sense. His personal experiences with utopian communities are well-known. As a boy Howells spent a year in a log cabin when his father moved the family to the site of an old saw mill in Xenia, Ohio, with the intention of starting a utopian cooperative, at the center of which would be his own and his brothers' families. For young Will Howells the year spent with his family in isolation from the dour, suspicious neighbors who lived nearby was a period marked by joy. As an adult Howells was fascinated by the Shakers, whom he visited on several occasions and often wrote about and who were organized into various collectives each of which was called a “Family.” The Shakers particularly impressed him by the degree to which they succeeded in embodying the principles of ideal Christian family life.

Here were the experiential bases of Howells's Altruria, a cooperative society for which the dominant trope is the family.¹¹ But equally important, here also were the models of failure. For if the boy found the period in Xenia delightful, the man knew that for others the experience had been far from happy. For Howells's mother, whose “housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of [their] life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric,”¹² Xenia had proved particularly lonely and demoralizing. Even for his indomitable, incurably optimistic father the time came when, with one brother having died and the others having decided against joining him in Xenia, he had to abandon both home and mill and return, reluctantly, to the city. In My Literary Passions (1895) Howells was to admit that the dream of “a sort of family colony somewhere in the country” finally “came to nothing.”¹³ When, years later, he again wrote about the utopian experiment of his youth in his fictionalized chronicle New Leaf Mills (1913), he described the experience as a “series of large and little tragedies.”¹⁴

Ultimately, the Shakers' attempt at utopian existence was also a failure. Howells criticized the Shakers not for failing to realize their ideal but for paying too high a price for it. He charged that their doctrine of celibacy, the cornerstone of their collective family life and arguably the primary reason for their peaceful coexistence, involved the denial of an integral part of human experience. In an 1876 article in the Atlantic Monthly, he complained that the Shakers were unable to “transmit a cumulative force of good example in their descendants.”¹⁵ In reciting the story of Father Abraham (retold twenty years later in A Parting and a Meeting), who as a young man broke his engagement to a young girl in order to join the Shakers, Howells wrote: “But perhaps in an affair like that, a girl's heart had supreme claims. Perhaps there are some things that one ought not to do even with the hope of winning heaven.”¹⁶ He concluded the article by implying that the procreative family might very well constitute exactly that portion of heaven allotted to any of us. In a final scene, while the Shaker women gather around a young mother and her baby who are visiting the community, the wisdom of the Shakers' chosen path is made to appear highly doubtful: “If she were right and they were wrong, how much of heaven they had lost in renouncing the supreme good of earth!”¹⁷

Howells was finally dissatisfied, then, with both his Xenia experience and the Shaker Families; neither one could serve as an adequate model for his Altrurian state. As if in recognition of the fact that support for his vision of utopia did not reside in actual experience, he refuses to divulge the location of his Altruria—it simply exists as a sort of lost continent—and purposely defies rational belief with various of his descriptions. We are told, for example, that the “Accumulation,” the period during which industrial capitalism in Altruria was most solidly entrenched, “suddenly, one day … was voted out of … power” (p. 153). Just as suddenly, the Alturians abolished the use of money and ceased to covet material possessions and power. Wealthy capitalists rushed to embrace the perfectly equalitarian state. Furthermore, all of this radical upheaval (coyly called an “Evolution”) was accomplished “without a drop of bloodshed” (p. 154). Now Altruria has become a single vast, harmonious family whose members work and live simply, farming the land (the cities having been voluntarily abandoned), taking meals together, dressing alike, and devoting the greater part of each day to friendly discourse or to the pursuit of creative arts. The Altrurians' modest disclaimer about their civilization's perfection is belied by such catalogs of achievement as the following:

… to have given a whole continent perpetual peace; to have founded an economy in which there is no possibility of want; to have killed out political and social ambition; to have disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of death. (p. 175)

As the banker, the most discerning of the American auditors of the visiting Altrurian, Mr. Homos, says in regard to descriptions like the one above, Homos “has rendered Altruria incredible” (p. 176).

Incredible, yes, but not impracticable. For if the Altrurian romances forestall belief based upon the dictates of common sense, if they lack plausibility to the practical-minded, it is only because they operate on a wholly different plane. They are, in fact, a formal assertion of Howells's utopian faith, in this way analogous to ritual, especially religious ritual, which can reduce complex areas of conflict to their most elemental levels, while implicitly summoning the conditions of reconciliation. By this means Howells was literally “able to practice” his Altruria.¹⁸

Probably the most ritualized type of literature is allegory. The Altrurian romances conform to what Angus Fletcher has called the two basic allegorical modes: the “battle” and the “progress.”¹⁹ While each romance sustains some mixture of modes, in general the structure of A Traveller From Altruria follows that of the allegorical “battle,” or rather what Fletcher calls its most common permutation of the “debate” or “dialogue.”²⁰Through the Eye of the Needle is akin to the “progress,” which commonly takes the form of the journey or quest.²¹

On one level the “battle” or “debate” in A Traveller From Altruria (which takes place at a New England resort hotel) pits America's socio-economic system against Altruria's socio-economic system. The individual behaves in a selfish or altruistic manner according to the system under which he lives, American capitalists defending the narrow self-concern bred by their system and Altrurian socialists the community consciousness fostered by theirs. Each system, moreover, claims to be carrying out God's will. Where Mr. Twelvemough, a popular romantic novelist (and the narrator of A Traveller From Altruria), argues that “such a status [as America now has], growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity must evince a divine purpose to anyone intimate with the designs of the providence” (p. 71), the Altrurian Mr. Homos contends that “we [Altrurians] believe ourselves the true followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life, as he made it His” (p. 169).

Underlying this level of the debate is a conflict over the very nature of man. Mr. Twelvemough invokes a well-known “Darwinian” analogy in asserting that American social divisions are due to “a process of natural selection” (p. 14) and in affirming that Americans “regard them as final, and as indestructibly based in human nature itself” (p. 16). It is only “human nature,” he argues, for a man to want to “squeeze his brother man, when he gets him in his grip” (p. 83). To one degree or another, most of the other well-heeled Americans in A Traveller From Altruria agree with these sentiments. A vacationing manufacturer observes that self-interest “seems to be the first law of nature, as well as the first law of business” (p. 48), and Mrs. Makely, a society woman, flatly declares that altruism “is opposed to human nature” (p. 92).

But Mr. Homos argues that it is not human nature to malinger or loaf, to hoard or to grudge, but to work cheerfully and to give and to help generously (p. 167). “I do not think you will find anything so remarkable in our civilization,” Homos tells his American auditors, “if you will conceive of it as the outgrowth of the neighborly instinct” (p. 106). If human nature is inherently altruistic, it follows that, as Homos says, “America and Altruria are really one at heart” (p. 23), and that even if conditions are not at the moment alike, still “America prophesies another Altruria” (p. 164). In the first part of Through the Eye of the Needle, which recapitulates the conflict of A Traveller From Altruria, Homos refers repeatedly to “the inherent good of human nature” (p. 342) and declares that “men have always been better than their conditions” (p. 275). Indeed, hope for radical change, according to Homos, lies in “the potentialities of goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator” (p. 290) and in “the heavenly need of giving the self” (p. 337).

The characterizations in A Traveller From Altruria further emphasize the structure of debate. While most of the characters achieve a modicum of individualization, almost all of them are typologized as well. To take the most extreme example first, the altruistic Mr. Homos is less a creature of flesh and blood, of mixed motives and human inconsistency, than a single, incarnated idea. His very name (from the Greek homos, one and the same)²² implies not an individual personality but an entire genus, not differentiation but an abstract similitude. At one point Mr. Twelvemough wonders,

… was he really a man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort of spiritual solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was in us, and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to each other? (p. 99)

Notwithstanding Twelvemough's assumption that at least he and his friends are distinct human entities, they too tend toward abstraction. Twelvemough's name is a comic allusion to the size of the books (the diminutive 12-mo) in which his popular romances presumably appear. His companions at the resort hotel are commonly identified not by name but by occupation, hence, the banker, the lawyer, the professor, the minister, and so on. Even when they are given names, it is only to reinforce the original typology, as in the case of the banker, Mr. Bullion, or the ironically named professor, Lumen. Moreover, what each character says tends to be a standard defense of his particular way of making a living.

The flattening out of characters into near-abstractions ultimately serves to deny the ordinary empirical world populated by individually complex human beings and creates instead a sort of collective psychology, a single landscape of consciousness populated by recognizably basic and in this case competing ideas. Although he made the point only in passing, Alfred Kazin was correct in likening A Traveller From Altruria to a “morality play.”²³ Perhaps Kazin was thinking of the medieval allegory known as the “psychomachia,” in which a literal battle rages between the personified Virtues and Vices over the soul of an individual, an individual necessarily torn by ambivalence. It is generally agreed that the central figures in A Traveller From Altruria, the idealistic, community-spirited Mr. Homos and the materialistic, self-concerned Mr. Twelvemough, comprise antithetical aspects of Howells's own psychology.²⁴ Again taking a clue from Angus Fletcher, we may enlarge upon the ambivalence such yoking together of opposites implies. Fletcher remarks that “the allegorical hero is not so much a real person as he is a generator of other secondary personalities, which are partial aspects of himself.”²⁵ Not only may Mr. Twelvemough be seen as a partial aspect of the allegorical Mr. Homos but so too may the rest of the characters. On one level, then, the characters represent the full range of Howells's own ambivalence. But as identified units of a society they necessarily imply something more. In keeping with Edwin Honig's observation that in allegory the emphasis lies not with “personal confession but with the experience … of a social group,”²⁶ we may agree that the characters ultimately represent the ambivalence that Howells imagines to be at the heart of the collective American psychology. Through allegory we may understand that Howells does not intend merely to distinguish between those individuals possessing the right ideas and those possessing the wrong but to suggest, finally, that both sets of ideas—as in the psychomachia—coexist within us all.

Unlike the medieval psychomachia, however, and despite Howells's strong sympathies with Mr. Homo's views, A Traveller From Altruria fails to reach a resolution. As the Altrurian describes the happy conditions of his homeland (a description which takes up the last fifth of the book), one member of the audience, the professor, continually interrupts to protest Altruria's obvious literary “sources.” The banker complains, afterwards, “… it certainly seemed too good to be true” (p. 178), and even the minister, the most readily sympathetic of Homos's listeners, says, “When I reflect what human nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever come upon the earth?” (p. 178) Only the poorest, most disenfranchised auditors—the unemployed laborers and the members of the serving class—are persuaded by the Altrurian's words, but they are desperate for hope of any kind. In any case, there is no indication that their enthusiastic response will be translated into a concrete form of social action. Nearly everyone else who considers whether there is actually an Altruria and whether Mr. Homos is actually an Altrurian remains of “two minds” on both matters (p. 179).

Nevertheless, A Traveller From Altruria does not end where it begins. Instead, it constitutes one part of a more complex ritual. It is, in short, the formal constructing of the problem to which Through the Eye of the Needle is the solution. Where the first Altrurian romance describes the unresolved ambivalence at the center of the American psychology, the second one recapitulates that ambivalence, then proceeds formally to abolish it and thereby implicitly to summon the ideal state. In accordance with Fletcher, Through the Eye of the Needle marks a structural shift from the battle to the progress, from the debate to the journey or quest, and from the latent to the manifest form of ritual.²⁷ To undertake a journey or quest is automatically to be released from the paralysis of ambivalence; actually to reach Altruria is to attain that state in which all oppositions are reconciled. Howells alluded to this latter point as early as 1890 when, in his “Editor's Study” column in Harper's Monthly, he reported his imaginary “observations” of “the ideal commonwealth, the Synthetized [sic] Sympathies of Altruria” and told of being struck “with peculiar force” by one thing in particular that he saw there: “the apparent reconciliation of all the principles once supposed antagonistic.”²⁸

Before the actual journey to—and through—Altruria begins, Through the Eye of the Needle concenters the ambivalence represented collectively in A Traveller From Altruria within a single individual, Eveleth Strange. A wealthy New York widow who despises her wealth and her social position as arbitrary products of economic inequality, Eveleth is a perfect candidate for Altrurianism. She is particularly “estranged” because of the negligible effects of her humanitarian activities in a plutocratic system, as her complaint to Mr. Homos makes clear:

It isn’t that I want to be happy in the greedy way that men think we [women] do, for then I could easily be happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough. But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you will be disappointed. (p. 335)

But when Eveleth subsequently falls in love with Homos and becomes engaged to him, her ambivalence emerges. For Homos makes it clear that she must renounce her wealth in order to marry him, since money and marriage are utterly incompatible in Altruria. At first Eveleth hesitates, for the loss of her wealth—the sign of the one in successful competition with the many—threatens her with the complete loss of self-definition: “… when she came to look at herself again, after she had been confronted with the sacrifice before her, she feared that she could not make it without in a manner ceasing to be” (p. 361). Eventually, the engagement is broken, and Mr. Homos sails home alone.

Eveleth subsequently experiences a change of heart and proceeds to follow Mr. Homos. At this point the progress, or quest proper, begins. But it is not Eveleth alone who has resolved an ambivalence; as ritual her action resolves an ambivalence for all. While the American “Eve” is literally freed to pursue her objectives of marrying the Altrurian “Adam” and reaching Altruria (the one action being the perfect signature for the other since Altruria is a Family), America is ritualistically freed to pursue its related objectives, objectives which have been previously set forth in A Traveller From Altruria. In that earlier work, when the lawyer says, rhetorically, to the minister, “I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?” the latter replies (just as rhetorically), “I hope so” (p. 47). And when Mr. Homos asks if Americans consider marriage “the citadel of morality, the fountain of all that is pure and good in [their] private life, the source of home and the image of heaven?” Mr. Twelvemough quickly answers that “that is certainly our ideal of marriage” (p. 22).

Viewed ideally, marriage and the family are apt objectives in any ritual quest that would resolve ambivalence between self-interest and altruism. Laurence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth, for example, makes a specific allusion to domestic relationships in conveying the possibility of harmonizing self-concern and concern for others:

Now, in the Co-operative Commonwealth, where the interests of each citizen will be also those of the citizens at large, the development of sympathy will in time merge self-love and regard for our fellow-citizens into a concord kindred to that between husband and wife and parent and child.²⁹

If ideal marriage presupposes that the interests of the self and the other tend to coalesce, Eveleth Strange discovers, upon reaching Altruria, marrying Mr. Homos, and then journeying with him through the Altrurian continent, that it also presupposes harmony between the couple and the entire state. So it is that in Altruria anyone seeking permission to wed must come before the “marriage authorities” three times before the marriage license is granted. Each time the couple must submit to a cross-examination, the results of which must satisfy the authorities as to “the continuance of their affection” (p. 396) and as to their attitude toward “the duties they [are] entering into, not only to each other, but to the community” (p. 397). In addition, the couple must undergo separation from each other every third month for a certain period of time until they are finally permitted to marry. The precautions are clearly not punitive, though, but intended to ensure that each person will enter into the bond in a rational manner and in the understanding that if their union is conceived of as a social, as opposed to a purely private, estate, both they and their society will benefit.

As a single vast family, Altruria is a similarly appropriate object of the quest.³⁰ The Altrurians do not serve each other at the expense of the self any more than they serve the self at the expense of each other; instead, as in an ideal family, they merge themselves into a collective identity, which successfully responds to both needs. In A Traveller From Altruria, Mr. Homos points out that in his country “it is in nowise possible for the individual to separate his good from the common good” (p. 167). In Altruria, he submits,

… the possession of great gifts, of any kind of superiority, [involves] the sense of obligation to others, and the wish to identify one's self with the great mass of men, rather than the ambition to distinguish one's self from them. (p. 71)

When the banker protests that the Altrurian system is “alien” to the American people's “love of individuality,” Mr. Homos quickly replies, “But we prize individuality, too, and we think it secure under our system” (p. 118).

As ideal marriage and family life are appropriate objects of the quest, it follows that in securing those objects one may also discover (or re-discover) one's true “home.” The paradox of the return home through the journey outward, as Angus Fletcher points out, is in fact characteristic of allegory in general: “The allegorical progress may first of all be understood in the narrow sense of a questing journey. There is usually a paradoxical suggestion that by leaving home the hero can return to another better ‘home.’”³¹ Eveleth's name (Eve + Lethe) conjures an image of Man (Woman) mentally and physically exiled from the original Home. Now at last the archetypal figure of Eve returns, and in her returning, recalls. Speaking for her mother (who has accompanied her), as well as for herself, Eveleth writes to her New York friend Mrs. Makely: “I needn’t dwell on the incidents of our homecoming—for that was what it seemed for my mother and me as well as for my husband” (p. 367). For Eveleth's mother, Mrs. Gray, Altruria recalls the edenic myth of America itself. Almost at once the elderly woman decides that “she should like it in Altruria, for it took her back to the America she used to know” (p. 383). The notion that Altruria represents the true home, the culmination of all progress, is recapitulated in the desire of the sailors from a trading ship, as well as of a company of shipwrecked travelers, including the wealthy (and at first obdurate) Thralls, the aristocratic Lord and Lady Moors, and their respective servants, never to leave. They all share the feeling that Eveleth tries to communicate to the Makelys: “I can never persuade you, but if you could only come here once, and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and believing would be the wish never to go away, but to be at home here always” (p. 429).

Through the Eye of the Needle, then, is an allegorical “progress” which formally abolishes a paralyzing ambivalence within the American psychology. Matters of individual utopian faith are subsumed within the larger instrumentality of ritual; practical ways and means become secondary to the formal processes of summoning. But this does not mean an avoidance or rejection of reality. On the contrary, as ritual the Altrurian romances invoke reality on its most profound, collective level. In order to confirm this reality, Through the Eye of the Needle takes as its final task the formal elimination of the possibility that Altruria is only a “dream” (that is, that it is either a complete fantasy or a reality purely solipsistic).³² At the end of A Traveller From Altruria Mr. Homos himself raises the key question: “… now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so different, I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life had not hitherto been a dream, and Altruria not some blessed vision of the night” (p. 178). The lawyer then acknowledges that he has been experiencing similar feelings about Altruria. And in the first part of Through the Eye of the Needle the suggestion that the Altrurian and his country are perhaps not real or material becomes an increasingly common refrain following word of the engagement of Mr. Homos and Eveleth Strange. “It must be very weird,” one New Yorker says, in commenting on the engagement, “something like being engaged to a materialization” (pp. 350-51).

During periods when Eveleth feels certain that Altruria is real, she tries to conceive of plutocratic America as having been the dream. On one occasion she writes, “As my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and try to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort of nightmare from which we have happily awakened” (p. 429). On other occasions, though, she shares the doubts of Robert, the manservant of the by now happily stranded Lord and Lady Moors, who continually fears that he may “wake up in the morning and find … it all a dream here” (p. 440). As she tells Robert: “… that was the way with me, too, for a long while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria isn’t true” (p. 440, Howells's italics).

To confirm the “reality” of Altruria (as well as the “unreality” of America), Howells contrives a final journey. First, the captain and crew of the trading ship (which had been blown off-course) plan a return to America in order to allow the captain to bring the rest of his family back to Altruria. Eveleth observes that for the captain, no less than for members of his crew, the return home will establish, finally, whether America or Altruria is the reality:

[The captain] remarked casually that is was just as well, maybe, to be going back, because, for one thing, they would know then whether it was real or not. I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Well, you know, some of the mates think it’s a dream here, or it’s too good to be true. (p. 380)

But for Eveleth as well the voyage will have important meaning, for she is prepared to regard the second half of the journey, the return of the captain and his ship to Altruria, as the formal affirmation of the utopia's reality and the final elimination of the possibility of its being a mere dream. Through the Eye of the Needle climaxes in the sighting of the returning ship and in Eveleth's unrestrained joy: “… they have sighted the Little Sally from the terrace! How happy I am! … and I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real!” (p. 441) With the return of the ship, Eveleth's own ritual journey has again been formally “practiced,” the last paralyzing uncertainty ritualistically removed, and the Altruria that Howells never ceased to yearn for implicitly summoned.

The Altrurian romances are more than essays or commentaries disguised as fiction. They comprise an intricate allegory that identifies a fundamental ambivalence within a man and a society, an allegory that projects that ambivalence in the form of a verbal battle or debate, as well as concenters it within a single wealthy American “Eve,” and that ritualistically resolves it by initiating a journey to the ideal state where all opposites are reconciled, a literal journey to marriage and the family, an imaginative journey “home.” As ritual and as allegory the Altrurian romances are not concerned with ordinary probabilities or likelihoods and are not subject to their laws. At the same time, viewed in this light, A Traveller From Altruria and Through the Eye of the Needle reveal the full extent of their moral seriousness, while exhibiting the artistic unity that they have all along possessed.

Notes

1. W. D. Howells, “Bibliographical,” The Altrurian Romances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 3. All page citations will be to this edition.

2. The standard critical edition is noted above, n. 1. In regard to the social and economic ideas contained in the Altrurian romances, see, for example, Howard Mumford Jones, “Introduction,” A Traveler From Altruria (New York: Sagamore Press, Inc., 1957), pp. v-xi; Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958), pp. 197-200; Robert L. Hough, The Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), pp. 57-81; and Clara M. Kirk, W. D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria, 1889-1894 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962).

3. Athenaeum, 1, (1907), 786; Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 195; Clara Kirk and Rudolf Kirk, “Introduction,” The Altrurian Romances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. xxii.

4. Kirk, W. D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria, p. 4, et passim; B. A. Sokoloff, “William Dean Howells and the Ohio Village: A Study in Environment and Art,” American Quarterly, 11 (Spring 1959), 66; Cady, 197; Oscar W. Firkins, William Dean Howells, A Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 153; Alfred Kazin, “Howells, A Late Portrait,” Antioch Review 1 (1941), 226; George C. Carrington, Jr., The Immense Complex Drama: The World and Art of the Howells Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 166), p. 103.

5. The general notion that the Altrurian romances are somehow allegorical is not new. Clara Kirk refers to Howells's thinly disguised allegory of the ‘plutocracy’ of the United States,” W. D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria, p. 9, and Carrington calls the characters “evidently allegorical,” p. 104. Neither writer, however, pursues the thought.

6. “Bibliographical,” The Altrurian Romances, p. 4.

7. The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism, ed. George Bernard Shaw (London: William Reeves, 1885), p. 91 (Gronlund's italics).

8. Gronlund, p. 91 (Gronlund's italics).

9. See Stanley Cooperman, “Utopian Realism: The Futurist Novels of Bellamy and Howells,” College English, 24 (March 1963), 464-67. In maintaining that Howells (as well as Bellamy) saw his utopia as “practically (if not immediately or completely) possible,” however, Cooperman does not see how seriously his parenthetic remark compromises his position.

10. This is the point of attack of the professor, a cynical character in A Traveller From Altruria, who says with disdain, “With all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon, from Plato, through More, Bacon, and Campanella, down to Bellamy and Morris, he [the Altrurian who visits America] has constructed the shakiest effigy ever made of old clothes stuffed with straw” (p. 176).

11. In one form or another, the reference to Altruria as a family occurs well over a dozen times in the two works. For a discussion of the family enterprise at Xenia as a model for Altruria, see Alma J. Payne, “The Family in the Utopia of William Dean Howells,” Georgia Review, 15 (Summer 1961), 217-29.

12. W.D. Howells, My Year in a Log Cabin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), p. 15.

13. My Literary Passions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), p. 37.

14. New Leaf Mills: A Chronicle (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913), p. 37.

15. “A Shaker Village,” Atlantic Monthly, 37 (June 1876), 703.

16. “A Shaker Village,” p. 705.

17. “A Shaker Village,” p. 710.

18. As early as 1890 Howells had “practiced” the implicit summoning of Altruria when he described in an “Editor's Study” column how he had awakened one morning to find that “the ideal commonwealth” had replaced the “imperfect republic of the United States of America.” In the same column he hinted that what he had been experiencing were “allegorical visions” or “allegorical interludes.” “Editor's Study,” Harper's Monthly, 82 (December 1890), 152-56.

19. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 151.

20. Fletcher, pp. 157-58.

21. Fletcher, p. 151, et passim.

22. Cf. Clara M. Kirk's suggestion that Homos implies “‘common man’ or Man in the abstract.” W. D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria, p. 83.

23. Kazin, p. 226. See n. 5 above.

24. See, for example, Kirk, W. D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria, pp. 3-4, 11, 71, and Payne, p. 223.

25. Fletcher, p. 35.

26. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959; rpt. Providence: Brown University Press, 1972), p. 172.

27. Fletcher points out that “the progress is manifestly a ritual form, but the battle may not at first appear to be so,” p. 159.

28. “Editor's Study,” p. 152.

29. Gronlund, p. 175.

30. The image of Altruria as a family resonates with its image as an island, since both convey the possibility of social regeneration through their connections with birth. Northrop Frye has noted the association of the island with the newborn infant floating undiscovered on the water (in the Altrurian romances no one knows the precise geographical location of Altruria). See Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 203. Mr. Homos modifies the image but retains the connection with birth when he says, “… our country is our mother.” A Traveller From Altruria, p. 162. Significantly, the representatives of the American businessman and the society matron, Mr. and Mrs. Makely, reject the possibility of symbolic re-generation: “The Makelys had no children, but it is seldom that the occupants of apartment houses of a good class have children. … It would be inconvenient.” Through the Eye of the Needle, p. 284.

31. Fletcher, p. 151.

32. The “dream” that I am speaking of here should not be confused with the dream-like landscapes characteristic of allegory in general. In the latter case the effect is not to deny reality but to achieve a certain kind of deeper, collective reality. As Edwin Honig points out, the dream in this case “compounds the private experience of the dreamer with the typical experience, symbolically expressed, of all dreamers. … After its personal character is understood, one proceeds to the generic expression …” (Honig, p. 81).