[In the following essay, Bellamy examines the roles of idealism and rhetoric in Howells's "Editha."]

William Dean Howells's belief in the pernicious influence of idealism is never so obviously and appropriately dramatized as in his anti-war short story "Editha."¹ The story of the young idealistic woman who sends her lover off to the wars is only too familiar. So also is the outcome of Editha's foolish attempt to make a dragon killer of her George. George not only does not come back; his death is rather casually mentioned as a minor detail of the first skirmish. It is tempting to accept the desire for heroics evident in Editha as a sufficient explanation for the enthusiasm for war which pervades her society. There are, however, less obvious, but no less sinister, and far more deep-seated reasons why, as Howells puts it at the opening of his story, "the air is thick with war feeling."² Editha's idealism is merely the most visible manifestation of a death wish that is characteristic, albeit in more subtle forms, of most of the people in the story.

Editha's problem can be traced, in great part, to her typically Victorian sexual innocence. Her "duplex emotioning" (p. 339), or her tendency to divert sexual feelings to other enterprises, is apparent from her first hearing from George that war has been declared. Her passionate response to this news, uttered in the throaty pitch which she invariably employs for pronouncing patriotic clichés, has far less to do with her romantic regard for George than her excitement about the news itself: "She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat, 'How glorious!'" (p. 338). The sexual connotations of Editha's war feelings are evident in her "generous sobs" (p. 340), her "panting" (p. 344), and her frenzy as she clings to her lover's breast, whispering, "with closed eyes and quivering lips, 'Yes, yes, yes!'" (p. 346). In fact, the progress of Editha's argument, which culminates, incidentally, in a "climax" (p. 339), is correlative with George's gradual change from emotional (and sexual) dormancy the first time we see him—"his head down, and his figure relaxed" (p. 338)—to the martial excitement which overwhelms him the night he enlists. Editha's trump card is to make their marriage, or in other words the consummation of their relationship, contingent upon his enlistment.

It is important to remember, however, that Editha's machinations are not entirely responsible for George's fate. Despite his cynicism about great causes, and his more specific scorn for the "glory" of war, George's decision to accept a commission actually takes place at a town meeting which Editha does not even attend. Later that night, he returns to her house, intoxicated by both alcohol and the hysteria of the occasion. Manically pacing about on her veranda, he explains his about-face as a capitulation to the rhetorical sway of the crowd: "'There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up a shout for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a good joke to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can't do that with a crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was sprinkling hell-fire on them. "Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war." That was the style'" (p. 343).

Although he admits his susceptibility to the cathartic joys of rhetoric, George does not altogether repudiate his characteristic rationalism. The sophistry that enables him to maintain these contradictory tendencies simultaneously is the familiar illusion that his presence will help to '"just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all'" (p. 345). This puzzling contention is based on the supposition that a greater show of force will prevent war altogether. Of course, we have all heard this kind of insidious nonsense to justify armaments races, wars to end all wars, and the recent "pacification" of villages—i.e., wholesale destruction of life and property.

The capitulation of George, of all people, to this kind of rhetoric is meant to be indicative of how truly awesome rhetoric can be. There is more involved in George's failure of nerve, however, than a demonstration of the pestilential effects of a perversion of language. In other words, it would be well to look for psychological, as well as linguistic, reasons for George's reluctance to acknowledge the reality of death, the most obvious effect of war. Aside from the obvious powers of rhetoric, George is inclined to join the crowd because of fundamental feelings of inadequacy. The night of the meeting he refers to his inability to resist the mob's "adoration." In the sobering light of the next day, this need for adulation becomes a more basic desire for ordinary self-respect: "'A man that hasn't got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we won't go into that'" (p. 345). If we do "go into that," we find that the counterpart of George's implicit denial of death is the denial of selfhood that he glibly refers to in describing the outcome of the town meeting. George's decision to seek the comfort of the masses not only undermines his integrity, it annihilates his very being. And thus by a paradox he loses his life, or his self, in the very act of trying to save it by identifying himself with the crowd. Norman O. Brown, in his book Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning Of History, is explicitly eloquent about the set of paradoxes implicit in George's surrender of his individuality:

But if death is the aspect of life which confers on life individuality, independence, and separateness, then a priori the repression of death should produce symptoms which exhibit on the one hand a flight from independence and separateness and on the other hand the compulsive return of the repressed instinct.

It is intrinsic to the psychoanalytical point of view to assert the morbidity of human sociability.

Society was not constructed, as Aristotle says, for the sake of life and more life, but from defect, from death and the flight from death, from fear of separation and fear of individuality.

One of the hallmarks of the neurotic personality is a lifelong fixation to the infantile pattern of dependence on other people.³

I have quoted Brown extensively because he explains the dialectical relationship between George's loss of individuality in what is simultaneously an apparent denial of and a subconscious yearning for death. But perhaps even more important is the light Brown sheds on George's "strangely worded wish" that Editha go to his "mother to see what she could do for her" (p. 347). Mrs. Gearson's living room, "very low inside . . . so dim, with the closed blinds" (p. 348) is emblematic of her ill health, her grieving for her son and the womb to which Editha returns, by proxy as it were, for George. Brown's description of the relationship between the fear of life (or individuality) and the desire to return to the state of prenatal oblivion (or crowds or death) shows how George, like Editha, has "erotized" death. Mrs. Gearson's reference to the "glory" of the soldier returning home with an "empty pantaloon" (p. 349) tends to confirm the relevance of Brown's remarks on the castration complex to Editha's more obvious suppression of sex:

It is because the child loves the mother so much that it feels separation from the mother as death. . . .

One effect of the incapacity to accept separation, individuality, and death is to erotize death—to activate a morbid wish to die, a wish to regress to the prenatal state before life (and separation) began, to the mother's womb. . . . The implication is not only that the morbid or regressive death wish underlies the Oedipal project in infancy, but also that it underlies the adult genital . . . organization of the human body.⁴ Hence, as Freud so often said, in choosing a wife we still seek our mother, and in the genital act, "the vagina comes into the inheritance of the mother's womb" (p. 115).

George's desire for oblivion is thus expressed through sending Editha back to his mother as a sort of "second death." The episode is also, of course, suggestive of Brown's (and Freud's) claim that the fiancée is surrogate for the mother.

This identification of Editha with Mrs. Gearson is more thematically fitting than it might at first seem. Mrs. Gearson's diatribe against Editha for sending George off to war is impressive. She manages to punctuate the climax of her denunciation by raising her "helpless body" from the chair, to which she is usually confined, "to hang limp at full length" (p. 349). The description of Mrs. Gearson the last time we see her is strikingly similar to the description of her son's posture the first time we see him at the opening of the story. There is something radically wrong—despite the accuracy of Mrs. Gearson's condemnation of Editha's idealism—with the Gearsons' characteristic limpness, not to mention the mother's sickness, her darkened chambers and the pride she seems to take in the fact that George was a "timid boy" (p. 349). In fact, the story has already established a relationship between physiological sickness and neurosis in the case of Editha; she finally goes to bed with a fever, neither patriotic nor sexual this time, when she learns of George's death. Moreover, the perverse uses to which rhetoric has already been put ought to make us wary of swallowing any sort of eloquence, even Mrs. Gearson's psalm-like diatribe, without reservation. It is quite possible that her pacifism has been acquired through a disillusioning experience like Editha's; in any case, we are told that the intensity of her convictions is largely the result of her husband's losing an arm in the Civil War. Nor has she been able to instill in George anything more than a cynicism and a morbid fear of death which, according to Norman O. Brown, amounts to a fear of life. Perhaps most illuminating, in this regard, is her attitude toward her son's timidity; it seems as though the fear of separation is as strong on the mother's side here as it is on the son's. Again, according to Brown, it is the lack of courage to face this separation, or first death, that paradoxically prevents so many people from ever being truly alive.

The tendency of dialectical opposites to converge, as in the case of a fear of life and death, is helpful in understanding why George's cynicism is so vulnerable to, if it is not in fact adaptable to, Editha's idealism. The opposite of idealism is not the kind of realism which Howells so consistently and highly recommended, but rather the cynical attitudes of Naturalism, a world-view and a mode of fiction which Howells felt distorted life just as much as the idealism of the Romance.⁵ Realism, as a psychological attitude, would neither attempt to deny nor glorify death, but to accept it as a necessary counterpart of life.

The only character who seems intuitively to understand this relationship between life and death is, oddly enough, Editha's mother. Her vitality and independence are in marked contrast to George's mother's sickly dependence on a nurse. Mrs. Balcom's self-sufficiency, the grace of her movements, and the precision of her attack upon her daughter's attempt to manipulate George into enlistment correspond with Howells's description of her as a "cat-like" creature (p. 341). The independence of her feline contentment, as she rocks herself on the veranda, recalls Brown's insistence that only animals are given the sort of identification with their bodies that enables them to be individuals: "Our proud views of humanity as a species endowed with an individuality denied to lower animals turns out to be wrong. The lilies of the field have it because they take no thought of the morrow, and we do not. Lower organisms live the life proper to their species; their individuality consists in their being concrete embodiments of the essence of their species in a particular life which ends in death" (p. 105). Content as Mrs. Balcom is within herself, she feels almost no need to speak. To the news that war has been declared, she merely says, "Oh my!'" (p. 341). To Editha's mention of the relevance of this event to George, "she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her mind with the spoken words, 'Well, I hope he won't go'" (p. 342). To Editha's rejoinder that she hopes George will go, Mrs. Balcom, as "unimpressionable" as a cat, sits rocking "herself with an interval of cognition. What she arrived at in speech was, 'Well, I guess you've done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom'" (p. 342).

And this is all Mrs. Balcom says. Evidently, she does not experience the same sort of pleasure in hearing herself talk as Editha, or Mrs. Gearson, once she gets going, or even George, given his performance at the town meeting, or considering his career interests in the ministry and the law—two professions that place a high premium on rhetoric. (In the dramatized part of the story, George's fondness for oral gratification is limited to drinking lemonade and ice water, and to the after-effects of whiskey. For her part, Mrs. Balcom's "cognition rarely arrives at speech." This characterstic taciturnity is, of course, in large part symptomatic of the depth of her imperturbability Nor, for that matter, do the demands of realism allow Mrs. Balcom to explicate, a là Norman O. Brown, the dialectical implications of her simultaneous acceptance of life and death. On the contrary, Mrs. Balcom is a seemingly typical, middle-class woman who is in any case unable to communicate even the rudiments of her wisdom to her daughter. In "Editha" this inability is far more troubling than the absence of explicit sexual behavior for which Howells is so often criticized. In fact, the sexual mores of the late Victorian era are especially appropriate for what is essentially a story about repression. If "the passion of love"⁶ is not actually dramatized in "Editha," it is at least implied by its conspicuous absence. The task is to discern this passion between the lines of rhetoric that are meant to disguise or pervert it. Debunking idealism or discerning repression—whether we prefer Howells's term or Freud's and Brown's—amounts to largely the same endeavor. Beyond that, all we are given is the inscrutable silence of the Cheshire cat, content within herself, but unable to communicate with the neurotics that surround her.

Notes

¹ Howells's most concise attack on what he called idealism, or the tendency of the Romances of his day to describe an ideal, Platonic world, appears in the second chapter of Criticism and Fiction (1891).

² "Editha" is often anthologized. My pagination is based on Sculley Bradley, Richmond Beatty, E. Hudson Long and George Perkins, eds., The American Tradition in Literature, II, 4th ed. (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1974). The first quote is on page 338. Subsequent references are given in parentheses in the text. William J. Free's fine article, "Howells' 'Editha' and Pragmatic Belief," Studies in Short Fiction, 3 (Spring 1966), 285-292, studies "Editha" from the point of view of the philosophy of pragmatisim. This perspective is enlightening, but it fails, despite its emphasis on empirical standards, to deal with the unconscious motivations that lead to war.

³ Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U Press, 1959), pp. 109, 105, 106, 109. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically.

⁴ The Victorian repression of genital sexuality becomes, according to Brown's idea, a sort of double repression in that he sees even "the human family and the genital organization of the human body" as neurotic, compared with the original, infantile state of polymorphous perversity.

⁵ Howells's criticism of Naturalism is implicit in his insistence that American novelists describe "the more smiling aspects of life" as well as his explicit condemnation of what he considered the French Naturalists' morbid "tradition of indecency" (Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara and Rudolf Kirk [New York: New York U Press, 1959], pp. 62, 71). Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically.

⁶ Howells defends his avoidance of "the passion of love" on the grounds that "several other passions" are experienced more often than love, especially the "passion of guilty love" (p. 74). This statistical defense of the failure to describe sex, or even mention fornication or adultery, is less effective than Howells's own dramatization of the results of sexual repression in "Editha." After all, it is one thing to ignore sex altogether; it is quite another to describe people who are intent on avoiding it, or any other sign of animal vitality altogether.