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Cyclopedia of Literary Places

A Modern Instance

Author: William Dean Howells (1837–1920)

First published: 1882

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

The two main locales of this novel are a small Maine town and Boston, the largest city of New England. The relationship of its two principal characters commences in Maine, where the wife is thoroughly at home, and continues in Boston, to which the woman cannot adjust at all, while her conniving husband finds it an opportune place to enrich himselfat others’ expense.

Equity. Small town in Maine in which the novel opens on a picturesque winter scene. The town initially seems attractive and in harmony with its natural surroundings. However, several variant meanings of the word “equity” suggests that W. D. Howells had ambivalent thoughts about the town. Equity is a place that fosters the basically simple and provincial outlook of a woman like Marcia Gaylord and constrains an ambitious and unscrupulous man like Bartley Hubbard, whom she marries. Human nature is not morally more pure in Equity; it merely faces less varied temptations there. Bartley is the kind of person who takes mean advantage of others wherever he is, but Equity, where transgressions of laws and mores quickly become generally known, offers only limited scope for his selfishness and arrogant disregard of others. This conservative community also imposes restrictions on him as a journalist and seeker of an interesting social life. In short, Equity cannot hold Bartley, and because Marcia is infatuated with him, she departs also, although it is the sort of place that suits her temperament.

Logging camp. Simple place, close to nature, where Bartley visits Kinney, a man of gentle nature and ingenuous admiration for the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Bartley himself acknowledges that only a person in what he calls “first-rate spiritual condition” can safely commune so closely with nature, but he is far less interested in nature than in the sort of “copy” Kinney, the camp's cook, can provide him. This man, at home in such surroundings, later becomes the easiest of all Bartley Hubbard's victims.

*Boston. New England's largest city, where Bartley takes Marcia after they marry. At first, she is overwhelmed by the fixtures and furnishings of the first-class hotel at which they stay but is appalled by the expense, when she learns of it. Soon they find more modest quarters and settle into big-city life. To Bartley's friend from college days, Ben Halleck, Boston is “more authentic” and more “municipal” than any other modern city.

Boston is a city of multiple newspapers and thus of numerous outlets for Bartley's writing. Bartley readily “takes on” the city, as one editor remarks, but Marcia remains an uncomfortable country person. When they attend the theater, the unsophisticated Marcia cannot take it in; Bartley enjoys it, but in the superficial way of a man unattuned to aesthetic values yet happy to be among the “swells” who patronize such entertainments. Boston cannot change either Bartley or Marcia, as Ben Halleck's sister learns when she tries unsuccessfully to create a social life for them.

After Bartley eventually deserts his wife, another friend obtains another “country” woman to stay with Marcia and their infant son as the only solace available to this inflexibly countrified woman. Not even Marcia's father, a crafty attorney in his own small town, can be of much service to her when he visits, for he loses his identity in the big city.

It is clear that Howells, who spent a considerable portion of his own literary and journalistic career in Boston, did not regard it as a city of sin. The Hallecks live a highly civilized life there, but both Hubbards, in their distinct ways, are immune to civilities. Bartley cannily profits from the weaknesses of Boston's honest newspapermen and sells tasteless material to less respectable ones. Through much of the nineteenth century Boston had reigned as the literary capital of the United States. Butbythe 1870'sitwasbecom-ing a commercial center, the implication being that a man like Bartley Hubbard could not have thrived there in the time when Kinney's hero Emerson had lived while composing his earliest works.

—RobertP. Ellis

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"A Modern Instance." Cyclopedia of Literary Places,Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CLP_0807.
APA 7th
A Modern Instance. Cyclopedia of Literary Places,Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CLP_0807.
CMOS 17th
"A Modern Instance." Cyclopedia of Literary Places,Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CLP_0807.