Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to harmonize, I cannot say. She had much more of the harmonizing to do, since they were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials before. When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.
“What is it?” asked Corey, who ought to have known better.
“Oh, nothing. I don’t think I shall feel strange among the Mexicans now.”
He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and then he put his arm ’round her and drew her closer to him. This made her cry on his shoulder. “I only meant that I should have you all to myself.” There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilization is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favor that this is so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving, the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people’s departure left the Coreys, is to be considered. That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean or unamiable people.
He remained three years away. Some changes took place in that time. One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines and Works at Lapham. The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt, which he was still laboring under, and gave him an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way, of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in common. Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind. Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!
For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just where the mistakes were—put his finger right on them. But one thing he could say: he had been no man’s enemy but his own; every dollar, every cent, had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands. He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had found them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.
There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in the cleanhandedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but her satisfaction was not so constant. At those times, knowing the temptations he had resisted, she thought him the noblest and grandest of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they would not be where they were now. He humbly admitted it all, and left her to think of Rogers herself. She did not fail to do so, and the thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.
* * *
I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish. Sewell had laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult with him about Corey’s proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had not given her their names, and he had not known Corey’s himself. Now he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed, for she declared that as soon as she heard of Corey’s engagement to Penelope, the whole thing had flashed upon her. “And that night at dinner I could have told the child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him herself, she would have known it too. I must say, I can’t help feeling a sort of contempt for her sister.”
“Oh, but you must not!” cried Sewell. “That is wrong, cruelly wrong. I’m sure that’s out of your novel reading, my dear, and not out of your heart. Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that.”
“Oh, I daresay this pretty thing has got over it—how much character she has got!—and I suppose she’ll see somebody else.”
Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession. As a matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen anyone, and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years after the disappointment, which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same spirit.
Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay, kept him and Mrs. Sewell overnight at his house; and he showed the minister minutely ’round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For this expedition he employed a lively colt, which had not yet come of age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler movables out of the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries, unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying dividends again—he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the present prevented this—he should put in steam heat and naphtha gas. He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the matter.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to catch up and stop ’em from going, but they all tumbled, one after another. It wan’t in the nature of things that they could be stopped till the last brick went. I don’t talk much with my wife any more about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you.”
“We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world,” replied the minister, “but I’m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever. And in your own case, as I understand, you don’t admit—you don’t feel sure—that you ever actually did wrong this man—”
“Well, no; I don’t. That is to say—”
He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle kindness of his, “I should be inclined to think—nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can’t be that our sins only weaken us—that your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face-to-face with a greater”—he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham’s pride, and said—“emergency.”
“Do you think so?”
>
“I think that there may be truth in what I suggest.”
“Well, I don’t know what it was,” said Lapham; “all I know is that when it came to the point, although I could see that I’d got to go under unless I did it—that I couldn’t sell out to those Englishmen, and I couldn’t let that man put his money into my business without I told him just how things stood.”
As Sewell afterward told his wife, he could see that the loss of his fortune had been a terrible trial to Lapham, just because his prosperity had been so gross and palpable; and he had now a burning desire to know exactly how, at the bottom of his heart, Lapham still felt. “And do you ever have any regrets?” he delicately inquired of him.
“About what I done? Well, it don’t always seem as if I done it,” replied Lapham. “Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it. I don’t know,” he added thoughtfully, biting the corner of his stiff mustache. “I don’t know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.”
AFTERWORD
As a young reader, I loved the Gothic tales of writers like Poe and Hawthorne. As a college student, especially as a graduate student, I became fascinated with the narrative experimentalism of Modernists such as Henry James and William Faulkner. I speculated that the narrative layerings of a James or a Faulkner were in a way related to the demons, ghosts, and hauntings of Poe’s and Hawthorne’s work. Just as a ghost or other supernatural figure in the early to mid-nineteenth century might reveal to a reader the hidden sins of a character, so too could the subconscious thoughts of a character buried in the narrative layers of James’ or Faulkner’s work reveal buried crimes or, to use the language of modern medical psychology not available to Poe or Hawthorne, the suppressed desires or repressed memories of those characters.
Realist writers, like William Dean Howells, held little appeal for me.
The truth told “plain and simple” was far less appealing to me than an “unmoral romance,” to use Howells’ terms. But I changed my opinion about the Realists, or at least about William Dean Howells, when I realized that Howells was mistaken in his estimation of himself as a Realist and about his own commitment to avoiding the indulgences of the Romance. In fact, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is as good a ghost story as we might find in any work by Poe, Hawthorne, or James.
But perhaps Howells knew this on some level. Perhaps he understood his indebtedness to the Romancers and his ultimate inability to escape wholly from them and the literary devices that he believed misrepresented humanity and deceived readers of fiction. In “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation” (1889), Howells acknowledged his inability to escape the pitfalls of Romance because he was “bred in [its] false school,” and that the best he could hope for was to leave behind a legacy upon which future novelists could build a Realist edifice that conformed to his ideals. Howells could critique the Romancers but he could not escape their influence.
In The Rise of Silas Lapham, the title character is haunted by the ghost-demon of his old partner, Milton Rogers, no less than Roderick Usher is haunted by Madeline Usher in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Arthur Dimmesdale is haunted by Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter (1850), Surveyor Hawthorne is haunted by Surveyor Pue in The Scarlet Letter’s “The Custom-House,” and the Governess is haunted by the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint in James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898). It does not matter if the ghosts and demons in these stories are “real” or not. (I would say Madeline is not, Pue is, and Chillingworth, Jessel and Quint may be.) What matters is that the authors all subscribe to the similar literary device of using a ghostly or demonic character to reveal or suggest the presence of the sins or crimes of the protagonist.
In Cultural Haunting (1998), Kathleen Brogan traces out the history of ghosts in Western literature. Brogan explains that, in their simplest iterations, ghosts reveal “Personal, psychical encounters with the taboo” and set “in motion the machinery of revenge or atonement.” In this function, ghosts are indebted to the Classical Furies from the Greek tradition, supernatural figures who sought vengeance upon the unjust. Poe riffs on this idea of the Furies in his story “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), in which a murderer feels compelled to confess his crime and thereby bring punishment upon himself. Madeline Usher plays the part of avenging ghost when she attacks her incestuous lover/brother and presumably kills him as vengeance for burying her (and their secret sin) alive. Hawthorne’s Surveyor Pue is something of a kinder, gentler version of the Furies, for he offers Surveyor Hawthorne an opportunity for atonement through art when he hands Hawthorne the draft manuscript and fabric A which tell the “outline” of Hester Prynne’s story. Roger Chillingworth is more demon than ghost, but he plays a similar role in the life of Arthur Dimmesdale, both tormenting the man for his past sins but also thereby offering him a chance at redemption.
Brogan proceeds to explain that later, “more sophisticated” versions of the ghost “serve to illuminate the more shadowy or repressed aspects of characters,” to “externalize a character’s state of mind or inadequately repressed feelings.” This is the aspect that fascinated me as a student—the ghost as the manifestation of a psychic condition. I think James’ Governess conforms nicely to this example. Whereas Madeline Usher or Roger Chillingworth exist materially in their respective tales, their presences being confirmed by the perception of others, the reality of the Governess’ ghosts is suspect. Critics still debate whether Jessel and Quint are to be regarded as real or as the representations of the Governess’ repressed and transferred sexual desire for the boy Miles as a surrogate for his father, the employer and true target of the Governess’ affections.
To use a trajectory implied by Brogan’s work, Milton Rogers, as Silas Lapham’s demon-ghost, would seem to be a supernatural figure situated somewhere between the psychically simple figures of Madeline Usher or Roger Chillingworth and the more psychically sophisticated figures of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. Rogers is especially similar to Roger Chillingworth. Like Chillingworth, Milton Rogers is a living man presumed to be dead; uses seemingly supernatural means to torment the man who wronged him; and in doing so offers the possibility of redemption to his victim.
Perhaps Howells is rolling over in his grave to hear me make these claims, but in a sense it does not matter if he intended to write a ghost story or not. At a lecture at the University of Virginia in 1957, a student asked William Faulkner if he resented having Freudian interpretations imposed upon his novel The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner said he did not mind, and explained that an author does not have to consciously create symbols to produce them nonetheless:
Well, I would say that the author didn’t deliberately intend but I think that in the same culture the background of the critic and the writer are so similar that a part of each one’s history is the seed which can be translated into the symbols which are standardized within that culture. That is, the writer don’t have to know Freud to have written things which anyone who does know Freud can divine and reduce into symbols. And so when the critic finds those symbols, they are of course there.
I maintain that such is the case with Howells and The Rise of Silas Lapham.
To use some narrative theory to explain what I mean, we can say that there is a story and there is a discourse. The story is what actually happens, what Howells might call the truth of fiction. The discourse is the art of how the writer represents the story, which can be direct, meaning it uses symbols like ghosts and demons, or indirect, meaning the author uses rhetorical strategies like Faulkner’s italics and parentheses or James’ free indirect discourse. In his championing of Realist principles, Howells claims, in a sense, to collapse these two phenomena of story and discourse. Were Howells to have recourse to these terms as we use them today, he might say that his discourse is designed to tell the true story. But, in fact, he’
d be wrong. Howells not only uses the character of Rogers as a discourse strategy; he permeates the novel with symbols, allusions, and archetypal patterns that beg the reader to think of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Thus, rereading The Rise of Silas Lapham, I can’t avoid seeing the ghosts—or the demons and witches, for that matter.
Let me share a few examples of Gothic discourse in the novel. Howells routinely uses allusions that associate the Corey family with the Salem witches, which reinforce the suggestion that Tom Corey has somehow “bewitched” (124) the Laphams, both Silas and his daughters. Bromfield Corey refers to the accused witch Giles Corey as an ancestor (61); later he claims Salem as his “ancestral” home (187), and at the dinner party he discusses with Lapham other ancestors, such as Polly Burroughs, whose surname is associated with witchcraft in Salem (191). This all builds up to the scene when Tom Corey’s love for Penelope has been revealed and is wreaking havoc upon the Lapham family, and Mrs. Lapham declares that “‘the witch is in it’” (225) to describe Tom Corey’s effect upon the family.
Central to my argument is the fact that Milton Rogers is frequently portrayed as being either like a ghost or like a demon. Early in the novel, Rogers appears as if from the ether to torment the Laphams, looking not just “dust-colored” and “clerical” but “dead” (42). Mrs. Lapham says, “‘I don’t see how he always manages to appear just at the moment when he seems to have gone fairly out of our lives, and blight everything,’” to which Silas responds, “‘I supposed he was dead’” (43). This prompts Mrs. Lapham to scold Silas for his past crimes against Rogers, which the narrator tells us brought doubts and questions to Lapham’s mind with “an inextinguishable vitality” that “slept, but . . . did not die” (46).
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