The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 30 (2019)
Copyright © 2019 Naoko Sugiyama. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
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Democracy and the International American Girl:
Gender, Class, and Race in The Lady of theAroostook by William Dean Howells

Naoko SUGIYAMA*INTRODUCTION: HOWELLS AND WOMEN’S ISSUES
Democracy in the United States began with the statement that “all men
are created equal,” which was significantly revised as “all men and womenare created equal” in “Declaration of Sentiments” written by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and sighed by one hundred women and men at the first organizedfeminist assembly in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. This new declaration
demanded that American democracy include women and became one of thestarting points of the first wave of organized feminism, which eventually
won suffrage for women with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in
1920. William Dean Howells was conscious of the development of thisorganized feminist movement during his lifetime, and its dynamic
development coincided with his literary career. While he disliked female
radicals such as Victoria Woodhull, who advocated “free love,” heconsistently supported women’s demand for equality (Crowly, The Mask
46).
As a critic, he prided himself on being fair and evaluating female authorson equal terms with male authors. He argued against the essentialist
prejudice that as artists women are inferior to men. For example, when
*Professor, Japan Women’s University

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NAOKO SUGIYAMA

asked in an interview what the appropriate place for women in the literary
field was, Howells, looking “as nearly disgusted as his unfailing good nature
would allow,” answered, “Why, the place they can get.” Then he added that“one hears platitudes about woman’s lack of breadth and power ofgeneralization. They say she is intense but within narrow bounds, that her
genius is better suited to the short story than to the novel. I call that
nonsense” (Interviews 336). One of the most notable cases of his
undiscriminating attitude as a critic toward women was his evaluation ofCharlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” When thestory was rejected by the Atlantic, Howells used his influence and helped it
to be published in the New England Magazine and then reprinted it in his
anthology, The Great American Short Stories (1920), which, according toJohn W. Crowley, saved it from oblivion (The Mask 53).
For Howells, the problem of gender inequality was caused by an
insufficiency in American democracy, as “Declaration of Sentiment” stated.
In an essay titled “Unimportance of Women in Republics,” in which hecompared the European monarchies with the American republic, Howells
claimed, although humorously, that the United States needed moredemocracy and that it should treat women more equally so that American
women would not find European monarchies more attractive than American
democracy. Later, in his novel A Traveler from Altruria, he created a utopia
in which women have the same political rights as men, including the right toparticipate in political meetings and the right to vote. Being true to his idealof gender equality, he participated in the suffrage demonstration in New
York City in 1912 (Crowly, The Mask 47).1
Howells’s sympathy for women, based on his belief in democracy,
extended to his social criticism. He often pointed out in his essays andprivate letters how unfairly women were treated in society and often
expressed sympathy, sometimes mixed with guilt, toward the talented
women he personally knew. One such woman was his sister, Vic. According
to his autobiographical essay Years of My Youth, Howells was aware of her
wish to have a literary career and to live in a city, as Howells himself later
did. But she had to be confined to a poor rural life and take care of her malefamily members, including their mentally disturbed brother Henry, becausethat was “her duty” (Years 108). Another case was a young woman who
worked at his father’s printing shop, whom he describes in his letter toOliver Wendell Holmes in 1861 as follows:This girl had intelligence, taste, culture—she had read a great deal,

DEMOCRACY AND THE INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN GIRL

19

with the deep inner sense of the beautiful, belonging to so few readers.
. . . She was a woman who could have shone most brilliantly in any
society . . . she worked at her trade three years in our printing-office. At
last a very honest person, every way but in age her inferior fell in lovewith her and was to have been her husband . . . how wretched she musthave been in a union with such a person, had not the good death
forbidden. . . . She fell ill, and through cruel pain and long agony,died. . . . It seems a hard and cruel thing to say that the only thing one
can do is to die. But for her, what else remained? Either a monotonous
drudgery through life at the trade she detested, or a domestic round oftasks and stupid little duties. She could not have been religious. She did
not believe enough . . . she could not write well enough, or would notwrite ill enough to achieve that doubtful splendor and distinction of
female authorship. From her nature, I think, motherhood would nothave made her happy, for though passionate, I do not think she hadmuch affection—though here I may wrong her. What then? Only
death—(Selected Letters 73, 74)
In this essay, I focus on The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), which features
the character Lydia Blood, supposedly a typical “international American
girl” in a European setting, the type of character made famous by Henry
James in his novella Daisy Miller: A Study (1879), which was first publishedin magazine form in 1878. The gender issues of his time, represented in thisnovel in the form of the confrontation of American democracy with the rigid
and oppressive hierarchy in Europe and Europeanized American
communities such as upper-middle-class Boston, are expressed withnationalistic sentiment. In this novel, he advocates equality for women as an
American value that is best cultivated in a small town, cherished by downto-earth country people, and eloquently advocated with simple American
English.2 Gender issues, closely related not only to class but also to thecontemporary and arbitrary definition of race, are also not ignored in thisnovel’s international setting. The Lady of the Aroostook is representative ofHowells’s novels in that gender equality is portrayed as closely related toAmerican democracy. To understand this, it is necessary first to place it in
the context of the development of the trope of the international American
girl, including, most significantly, Daisy Miller.

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NAOKO SUGIYAMA“INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN GIRL”
CHARACTERS AND THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK
Howells himself, in his introduction to Daisy Miller, called Henry Jamesthe “inventor of the international American girl.” But as Chieko Takeda, inher book on the international novels of Howells and James, points out by
closely examining when and how James and Howells presented“international American girls” in their works and how they referred to eachother’s works in reviews and correspondence, these two authors influenced
each other in creating and developing the “international American girl”
character, probably starting with James’s short story “Travelling
Companions” (1870).3 Most likely, this short story inspired Howells tocreate Kitty Ellison, who was an important minor character in his first novel,
Their Wedding Journey (1872), and then as the heroine of Chance
Acquaintances (1873).
Before he wrote Daisy Miller, James praised Howells for creating Kitty
Ellison and Florida Vervain, another “international American girl,” inForegone Conclusion (1875). Daisy Miller, in turn, inspired Howells while
he was writing The Lady of the Aroostook. Howells went on to create otherinternational American girls, such as Lily Mayhew in Fearful Responsibility(1881) and Imogene Graham in Indian Summer (1886). It seems safe to saythat the “international American girl” character was developed in a dialogue
between these two authors. By comparing The Lady of the Aroostook with
Daisy Miller and pointing out their differences, I will illustrate how Howells
tried to represent democracy as an American value, with an “international
American girl” as its representative figure, and how he dealt with genderissues that are interconnected with class and racial equality in the context ofAmerican democracy.
Lydia Blood, the protagonist of The Lady of the Aroostook, is a nineteenyear-old woman from South Bradford, a small town in Connecticut. Because
she is an orphan, she was raised by her grandfather and her aunt Maria. She
works as a schoolteacher but is also a talented singer. She leaves home for
Venice because Mrs. Erwin, another aunt of hers, who is married to a
wealthy Englishman and lives in Venice, has invited her to live with her andstudy music more professionally. As a result of her grandfather’sarrangements, as well as some misunderstandings, she goes on board thecargo ship the Aroostook only to discover that she is the sole woman
onboard the ship. The ship, unlike passenger ships, has no female crew
members, and the other three passengers are all men—all of whom happen

DEMOCRACY AND THE INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN GIRL21

to be single, wealthy, young white Americans. All the crew members and theother passengers are astonished to find a young woman without a chaperone
on a cargo ship, but, while all of them except Lydia find this situation
awkward, they behave as if there is nothing unusual about it in order to saveher from embarrassment. All the crew members openly adore her beauty, her
stylish clothes, her talent as a singer, and her moral goodness. One of thepassengers, Staniford, at first looks down on her, as he assumes that she isignorant and unsophisticated because of her rural upbringing, but he iseventually impressed with her virtues and falls in love with her.
After the ship arrives at Trieste, Lydia leaves with Mr. Erwin, her aunt’shusband, to travel to her destination of Venice. Staniford promises to follow
her to Venice a few days later, where he intends to ask her to marry him in asocially proper setting with her guardians present. However, he is forced todelay the visit because his close friend and fellow traveler Dunham is badly
hurt in an accident and is hospitalized in critical condition. Meanwhile, in
Venice, Lydia is shocked to find out that it is considered inappropriate for awoman to be unchaperoned. Because Staniford fails to inform her of his
delay, she is tormented by doubt about whether he had not taken her
seriously but had only been flirting with her. She is also shocked to learn
that the same society that allows so little freedom to young, unmarried
women nonchalantly tolerates other immoralities such as extramarital affairs
and illegitimate births. When she discusses her miserable situation with Mrs.
Erwin, she indignantly criticizes men who look down on women who areunprotected by men. It also horrifies Lydia, who attends church as an
essential part of her life, that Mr. and Mrs. Erwin, in the European manner,consider church attendance a tiresome social obligation that is best avoided
whenever possible, and that they invite her to go with them to see an opera
instead.
“Oh, I see how my coming the way I have will seem to all thesepeople!” cried Lydia, with passionate despair. “I know how it will seemto that married woman who lets a man be in love with her, and that old
woman who can’t live with her husband because he’s too good andkind, and that girl who swears and doesn’t know who her father is, andthat impudent painter, and that officer who thinks he has the right toinsult women if he finds them alone! I wonder the sea doesn’t swallow
up a place where even Americans go to the theatre on the Sabbath!”(Ch. 24)

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By the time Staniford finally comes to see Lydia and clears up themisunderstanding and proposes marriage to her, she has already given up theidea of becoming a professional singer in Europe and is all but ready to go
back to the United States. Although Lydia learns that Staniford had a low
opinion of her at first, as she had suspected, she accepts his proposal, and thecouple marry in Italy and settle in California, where Staniford buys a ranch
and finds “occupation if not profit in its management” (Ch. 27).
As Annette Karr and others have pointed out, Lydia, as a typicalinternational American girl, has much in common with Daisy Miller; they
are both “innocent” in their particular American way, and therefore they areboth unaware of the “society” around them and the manners and customs
that “society” requires. Yet there are differences between the two characters,
and, although these differences have not been discussed as much, they arenonetheless important.
Daisy Miller stirred up mixed reactions from reviewers and readers,starting with Lippincott’s Magazine, which rejected the manuscript on thebasis that it was “an outrage on American girlhood” (James, Preface v). It istrue that from the protagonist Winterbourne’s point of view, Daisy’s
behavior does look outrageous. While he acknowledges that Daisy is, after
all, innocent and not flirtatious and admits his mistake by stating that he has“lived too long in foreign parts” (93), his judgment that Daisy’s conduct was
improper is shared by his fellow expatriate Americans and is neverquestioned.
Daisy’s sins consist of two parts. First, she goes out alone with a man she
is not engaged to. Second, she is friendly with men who are consideredinappropriate for her to socialize with, namely, servants and Italians with notitles. Whether she is innocent or “common”(23) or “vulgar” (46), there is noquestion that her conduct is perceived by everyone as inappropriate andoften foolish.
As for Lydia, while it is considered improper, from a Europeanized
standard, for her to be the only female passenger on the ship, everyone
acknowledges her respectability and treats her accordingly throughout thevoyage. Lydia’s friendliness with men of different social classes, such as thecabin boy Thomas and Captain Jenness, is never criticized but is perceived
as a sign of her democratic mind and moral superiority. She calls the cabin
boy by his name instead of calling him “steward” and sympathizes with him
when he tells her that his father was killed fighting for the Union in the Civil
War, thus revealing her democratic attitude along with her straightforward
patriotism. She feels honored to socialize with Captain Jenness, although his

DEMOCRACY AND THE INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN GIRL

23

manners are not sophisticated. He is pejoratively called “the marine animal”
by Mrs. Rivers (Ch. 18), a socialite in Messina, but as captain, he isrespected as the authority and father figure on board ship by American
democratic standards.
The most obvious parallel and contrast between the two books is found in
the episodes that involve riding in an open coach. Daisy, defying the adviceof Mrs. Walker, refuses to join her in her coach and keeps walking with ayoung Italian man, Mr. Giovanelli. Later, Daisy even rides in an open coachwith the same Mr. Giovanelli. Both incidents are witnessed by the local
American community, found inappropriate, and are taken as enoughevidence to condemn her as “vulgar.” In The Lady of the Aroostook, this
episode is duplicated with an important revision. While the ship is visiting
the seaport in Messina on its way to its destination, Lydia takes a walk to thecathedral with Captain Jenness, while Staniford rides in an open coach with
Mrs. Rivers, “with whom he had once violently flirted” (Ch. 18). In thisscene, Lydia sees Staniford in an inappropriate situation, not the other way
around. She herself is not being observed and evaluated. On the contrary,
she makes a moral judgement about Staniford from an American girl’s
innocent and, thus, morally superior point of view. Lydia is disappointed
that Staniford is willing to socialize with a married woman for whom he hasvery little respect.
As for Lydia’s violation of the rule that a young, unmarried woman does
not go out either by herself or with a man she is not engaged to, it isrepeatedly emphasized that she violates the rule because she is not evenaware of it. Unlike Daisy’s case, it is obvious from everyone’s point of viewthat she has no intention to flirt. Unlike Daisy, who defiantly goes out with
Winterbourne and Giovanelli even after she is informed that it is“improper,” Lydia is astonished to learn of the rule but does not defy it.
Thus, in The Lady of the Aroostook, it is Staniford’s moral quality that is
scrutinized, found suspect, and then corrected by the American moral
standard that requires mutual decency and respect for both men and women.
The gender inequality of the European social norms is explicitly emphasizedunder Lydia’s critical gaze, while Lydia’s innocent behaviors and her
intentions are never criticized.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AS THE MORAL STANDARD
In Daisy Miller, it is repeatedly pointed out that the problem of Daisy’s
misbehavior is, to a large extent, her mother’s fault, as she has failed to24

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teach her daughter proper behavior. Mrs. Miller is portrayed as a goodnatured but foolish person who has no authority over her children. In
Lydia’s case, she has two mother figures: her European aunt, who instructs
her in European manners, and Aunt Maria, whose American values are thebasis for Lydia’s behavior. These two mother figures are contrasted, andAunt Maria advocates American democracy by supporting Lydia’s innocent
behavior as a representation of her moral superiority.
Aunt Maria, who has lived in a small town in Connecticut all her life andhas no immediate knowledge of “society” either in Boston or Europe, is also
astonished when she learns that in Europe women are not allowed to go out
by themselves:“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Maria, petulantly. “I guess Lyddy’d know how
to conduct herself wherever she was; she’s a born lady, if ever there
was one. But what I think is—” Miss Maria paused, and did not say
what she thought; but it was evidently not the social aspect of thematter which was uppermost in her mind. In fact, she had never been at
all afraid of men, whom she regarded as a more inefficient and feeblerminded kind of woman. . . . “She will know how to adapt herself tocircumstances,” said Mr. Goodlow. “I was conversing last summer withthat Mrs. Bland who boarded at Mr. Parker’s, and she told me that girls
in Europe are brought up with no habits of self-reliance whatever, andthat young ladies are never seen on the streets alone in France and
Italy.”“Don’t you think,” asked Miss Maria, hesitating to accept thisridiculous statement, “that Mrs. Bland exaggerated some?”“She talked a great deal,” admitted Mr. Goodlow. “I should be sorry if
Lydia ever lost anything of that native confidence of hers in her own
judgment, and her ability to take care of herself under any
circumstances, and I do not think she will. She never seemed conceited
to me, but she was the most self-reliant girl I ever saw.” (Ch. 5)
When Miss Maria is informed that Lydia is the only woman on board theship crossing the Atlantic for six weeks, she is naturally worried but decides
that Lydia will know how to behave properly in any circumstance and will
have a good moral influence on the men around her, and Lydia actuallyaccomplishes both these things. In Daisy’s case, her “innocence” is anothername for ignorance, and it leads her to a fatal illness. In Lydia’s case,

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25

“innocence” means moral purity, a state of mind that refuses to accept any
custom and manner uncritically just because it may be taken for granted inEurope or in the supposedly more sophisticated society in Boston.
Lydia’s other mother figure, Mrs. Erwin, says that “I’ve lived too long inEurope to be of use in such a case [referring to the courtship of Lydia andStaniford], and I won’t have anything to do with it” (Ch. 26). Echoing
Winterbourne’s last words in the novel that he “lived too long in foreignparts,” Mrs. Erwin revises the sad ending. She urges the young lovers whoare “Americans together” to follow their hearts and not the conventions andstates that “this affair has been carried on so far on the American plan, and I
think I shall let you finish it without my interference” (Ch. 26, emphasis
added). Compared with Daisy Miller, The Lady of the Aroostook depicts a
triumph of democratic values personified in the character of an innocent
international American girl who is open-minded and nonhierarchical. Her
self-reliance does not result in tragedy, as was the case in Daisy Miller, butleads to a triumph of American democracy.
GENDER, CLASS, RACE, AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Another important difference between Lydia Blood and Daisy Miller is
Lydia’s dark features. While James does not give any physical description of
Daisy except that she is very pretty, Howells emphasizes Lydia’s darkness.
Lydia’s beauty is attributed by Staniford in a scientific fashion, though halfjokingly, to her being one of the “dark Puritans,” the darker branch of
Anglo-Americans, whom he argues are commoner in New England than fairpeople like himself imagine (Ch. 7). Her darkness is also associated withother racial and ethnic categories, such as Italians and French Canadians, in
Staniford’s mind. As it was common in Howells’s time to think of “Italian,”“American” or “Yankee” as racial categories, Staniford’s fascination withand aversion to Lydia’s attractiveness are both expressed in racial terms.
First, Staniford tries to explain her racial difference scientifically as beingcaused by geographical isolation:
You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these people’s minds. I used
to see a great deal of their intimate life when I went on my tramps, andchanced it among them, for bed and board, wherever I happened to be.
We cultivated Yankees and the raw material seem hardly of the samerace. Where the Puritanism has gone out of the people in spots, there’s
the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural

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nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the
fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism.
They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds
pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked up that scoundrel. (Ch.
6)
When Staniford is more attracted to Lydia, while still trying to deny it, hedescribes Lydia’s attractiveness in more explicitly dark terms. After the
discussion of his possible future life as a rancher on the frontier, where he
will marry “a savage woman who will rear [his] dusky race,”4 he states asfollows and then agrees with Dunham that Lydia reminds him of the portraitof Evangeline, the popular heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic
poem, with her dark hair and eyes:“That girl . . . is a type that is commoner than we imagine in New
England. We fair people fancy we are the only genuine Yankees. I
guess that’s a mistake. There must have been a good many dark
Puritans. In fact, we always think of Puritans as dark, don’t we? . . .
This girl has the clear Southern pallor; she’s of the olive hue; and hereyes are black as sloes,—not that I know what sloes are.” (Ch. 7)
Later, when Staniford admits to himself that he is fascinated by Lydia’s
physical darkness, he compares her to Italian women, and he tells her:“I’m sure that in the life before this you were of the Southsomewhere. . . . You have the color and the light of the South. Whenyou get to Italy, you will live in a perpetual mystification. You will go
about in a dream of some self of yours that was native there in otherdays. You will find yourself retrospectively related to the olive faces
and the dark eyes you meet; you will recognize sisters and cousins in
the patrician ladies when you see their portraits in the palaces where
you used to live in such state.” (Ch. 14)
Lydia’s darkness is a marker of her sexuality, as Crowley and others havepointed out, but as the above quotations demonstrate, it is depicted andemphasized only from Staniford’s point of view. In other words, it reveals
Staniford’s sexual preconception that connects female sexuality anddarkness rather than any inner sexual characteristic of Lydia herself.
Staniford associates female sexuality with physical darkness, which isDEMOCRACY AND THE INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN GIRL

27

considered a sign of cultural inferiority. This “othering” of sexuality in racial
terms in Staniford’s mind, however, obviously contradicts Lydia’s
characteristics. And this seeming contradiction of Lydia’s physicalappearance and her sexual and moral virtues exposes the gender and race
hierarchy that Staniford takes for granted.
Moreover, Lydia’s dark beauty reminds us of another “international
American girl,” namely, Rhoda Aldgate in Howells’s 1891 novel An
Imperative Duty, who, like Daisy Miller, Lydia, and other international
American girls, is innocent and unaware of society around her but, unlike
other international American girls, has an African American ancestor. It is
likely that Howells was already aware of the arbitrary nature of American
definitions of race and subsequent racial prejudices based on them. In
connecting female darkness with indigenous Americans and Italians, whose
racial identity Howells compares to that of African Americans in An
Imperative Duty, Howells explores the process of “othering” of women frommen’s point of view and implies that it contradicts American democracy.
CONCLUSION: DEMOCRACY COMPROMISEDIn terms of gender issues, Lydia makes a compromise and betrays her
own sense of morals and self-respect. Namely, she follows Mrs. Erwin’s
advice not to be “just with men” (Ch. 26). She learns that Staniford had atfirst thought that she was not worthy of his respect. Whether she should
accept a man who looks down on women because of a false value system isthe issue on which her sense of self depends. She asks him an apt question
about “what you thought when you found me alone on that ship with all ofyou. . . . I want to know whether you were ever ashamed of me, or despisedme for it; whether you ever felt that because I was helpless and friendlessthere, you had the right to think less of me than if you had first met me here
in this house [of wealthy and socially respectable Mr. and Mrs. Erwin]” (Ch.
27). He answers evasively, “I will leave you to say.” This does not satisfy
Lydia, but its “generous uncandor” is enough to persuade her that theirmarriage is “right” (Ch. 27). The narrator is obviously critical of Staniford’s
attitude and attributes it to his sexist belief that Lydia does not have the rightto ask such a question (Ch. 27).
Thus, Lydia’s relationship with and marriage to Staniford is questionable
to say the least. But as in the case of the young woman who worked in
Howells’s father’s printing shop, referred to in his letter that is quoted above
and who is likely to be a model for Lydia, Lydia does not have any other

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option but to marry. According to the same letter, the young woman’s
physical features significantly resemble Lydia’s: she has “a strange kind of
beauty” that reminds Howells of “that engraving of Evangeline to be seen ina million shop windows” with dark eyes and complexion that he had neverseen “except among the women of the lake-shores” (Selected Letters, 73–
74). It seems safe to assume from this quotation that this young woman wasin Howells’s mind when he was creating Lydia Blood. Lydia, however, ismore explicit about what she wants in life as opposed to the young woman
described in Howells’s letter. She wants to be a singer but only wants to singin church, and she wants to make a modest and virtuous living. She does notlike teaching, and after her experiences in Venice, clearly, a professional
career as a singer is not what she wants. Her talent, like that of the young
woman Howells refers to, turns out to be nonmarketable.
Even though Staniford says that he will mend his ways and promises tolive up to her moral standards, it is obvious that it is not such a serious
matter for him. When Staniford flirts with Lydia earlier in the voyage in amock aristocratic fashion, Lydia, trying to be taken more seriously, says thatthey are “all republicans,” but he refuses to be serious and keeps his
flirtatious attitude (Ch. 14). For Staniford, democracy between men andwomen is just an amusing conceit.
It is significant that Miss Maria has the final say in the novel’s ending.
Unlike her European counterpart, Mrs. Erwin, who instructs Lydia tocompromise her moral standards to get married, Miss Maria does not value
marriage very much. She is not impressed with Staniford’s wealth nor his
social status and approves of him only because “he does seem terribly
wrapped up in Lyddy” and because “we ain’t any of us perfect” (Ch. 27).
Miss Maria is an economically independent single woman and, in fact, acreative artist who designs and sews dresses for Lydia, which everyone
admires, and she seems content with her situation. Her straightforward
opinion of Lydia’s marriage, though put rather humorously, reminds us that
Lydia’s is not a happily-ever-after story but the beginning of a possibly
problematic life with a husband whose moral standards are obviously lower
than his wife’s. Miss Maria’s disregard of gender and class hierarchies,
rather than Lydia’s, is presented as the true representative of American
democracy. While Lydia compromises her belief in democracy in order to
get married, Miss Maria, who makes no such compromises, gets to have thelast word in the novel.
Howells believed in such a democratic ideal, and, as stated in the
introductory part of this essay, he expressed his belief in the equality of

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29

women, despite the general atmosphere of his time and his fear of possibly
drastic changes in the gender structure of society. In The Lady of theAroostook, Lydia’s innocent trust in American democracy contradicts thereality of gender and racial inequality in the United States, where racial
othering is intermingled with the exclusion of women from the fullcitizenship of “all men,” although women and men were supposedly createdequal as the nineteenth-century feminists claimed. Her innocence and moral
instinct, which is supposedly representative of American democracy, turns
out to be problematic in terms of gender, if not class. The contradiction
between democratic values and the American reality in terms of race, by
implication, also remains problematic in this novel.
NOTES
This essay is based on my oral presentation on May 24, 2018 at theAmerican Literature Association’s 29th Annual Conference, held in San
Francisco at the Hyatt Regency. Both this essay and the oral presentation
were supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant-inAid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) number 15K02356. I would like toexpress my gratitude to the William Dean Howells Society for giving me theopportunity to make a presentation and for their encouraging and usefulcomments. I also thank my colleague Mikayo Sakuma and my dear friend
Ben Bedard for their advice and comments.
1
As for the general tendency to perceive democracy as an American value and therefore toassociate it with patriotism among the contemporaries of Howells, see Robert L. Hough’s The
Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator, 12, 13.
2
As for the New England colloquialisms used by Lydia and other characters, see Elsa
Nettles’s Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America, 121–125.
3
See also, Olov W. Fryckstedt’s In Quest of America: A Study of Howells’ Early
Development as a Novelist (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), 134–161.
4
Staniford is quoting from Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842), in which aninterracial sexual union is presented both as an idyllic bliss and as a perversion. About thispoem’s interracial imagery, see H. L. Malchow’s Gothic Images of Race in NineteenthCentury Britain (Stanford UP, 1996).

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Cady, Edwin H. The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837–1885 of William Dean Howells.
Syracuse UP, 1956.
Crowley, John W. The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. E. Howells. U of Massachusetts P, 1989.
―. The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. U of North Carolina P,

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1985.
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