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Abstract
W. D. Howells' "Doctrine of Complicity," or his sense of the interrelatedness of human experience, is the major theme in nearly all his fiction. "Complicity" is both a description of human conduct in its partnership in wrong doing and a prescription for morally right conduct in which those interrelated human beings act altruistically. However, with the exception of his Altrurian romances, Howells' fiction focused primarily on a description of people who consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, are accomplices in that shared human destiny that is usually painfully short of an altruistic ideal. This study considers that theme in eight of Howells' novels: A Modern Instance, The Minister's Charge, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes, The Quality of Mercy, The World of Chance, and The Landlord at Lion's Head. In his examination of the complicit human condition, Howells implicitly raised the question of why altruism was so often conspicuous by its absence. The answers he found were multiple and complex but resided mainly in the economic inequalities that forced people to consider their own interests first and in a psychological determinism that precluded an understanding of those with whom they shared their imperfect world, both an economic equality and a true sense of others being prerequisites for altruistic living. The question of a morally managed universe was also crucial in Howells' examination of human nature. If one could not be certain of anticipated moral consequences, then the hope that altruism could replace egotism was unrealistic. Howells' fiction reveals a world that, as it was then constituted, offered little evidence of the working out of a moral law. Howells in his portrayal of "the riddle of the painful earth," as he often described the human condition, does not offer specific answers, but by clearly outlining those problems he saw facing late nineteenth-century America, he nonetheless suggests the direction that must be taken in reordering society.
