The Business of Marriage in The Rise of Silas Lapham

In a novel so intimately about, in small but intense moments,[1] true love's importance over the preservation of social status (from the Coreys' perspective) or self-sacrifice (which Penelope and periodically her mother and father seem committed to make), it's odd that romantic union is permitted to be figured under the trope of "business." As Silas instructs Penelope, when he first invites Corey over after the latter has revealed his love for Penelope, "Recollect that it's my business, and your mother's business, as well as yours, and we're going to have our say."[2] And if there's one thing the Coreys share with the Laphams, it's this metaphor for marriage (even if they take the opposite position): discovering the confusion everyone has over Irene and Penelope, Mrs. Corey says, "I could almost wish the right one, as you call her, would reject Tom. I dislike her so much," to which Bromfield Corey responds, "Ah, now you're talking business, Anna" (268). Is this why when the marriage finally happens, since Silas has lost his business, it is merely enervated denouement?

I'm not sure what's to be gained by taking this view because it presumes that the business model of marriage has profits to offer its investors. And in this view, it's tough to see what the Coreys would gain by such a merger (the Laphams would clearly reap social capital), since as they repeat it's not an infusion of cash the family wants so much as Tom wants to do something (and perhaps pay for himself). So in other words, Tom's profits from joining the business don't explain his father's understanding of the marriage as an economic enterprise. And yet, more than anything, my rhetorical question is just one way of getting at the question of why what seemed so urgent around the middle of the book causes something between ambivalence and indifference in readers and the narrator by the time Penelope consents to marry Tom. If the romance between Pen and Tom is only a correlative for Silas's passion to belong in society or to have position, then it's easy to see why readers and the Laphams don't care about the marriage in the end. In the case of Silas, "Adversity had so far been his friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and doubt and heartache, the manhood [3] which his prosperity had so nearly stolen from him" (359). And yet, far too much is invested in the characters and in their passion for readers not to be disappointed in the treatment of the marriage. The passion of the lovers is not reduced by the withdrawal of the Laphams from Boston. So what I think we're left with is the explanation that the partnership made available by the conjugal merger was always impossible anyway, because of the "uneffaced" and "uneffaceable" differences between the Coreys and the Laphams (even if the differences between the Coreys and Penelope "remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable" [359]).

Finally, it must be this incongruity of class that makes the Laphams incompatible with the Coreys—and which makes the marriage relatively unimportant in comparison to the fall, not the rise of Silas Lapham. The problem is, Silas hasn't the guile to succeed in society or in business. When in the former, he can't shut-up after drinking too much wine. In the latter, he can't overcome or ignore the guilt of misleading someone. He is, in sum, a bad liar, and of course, this doesn't make him a bad person. But it does make him unfit to thrive in the city. And what, I think, finally makes the marriage of Tom and Penelope unimportant is Tom's failure to bridge the gap between everything the Coreys are and the Laphams aren't. I take this reading of Tom from a pivotal moment after the Coreys' dinner party. When Silas apologizes for his behavior and berates himself, Tom cannot stand it. And as he leaves, he reverts to his trained attitudes.

He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham helpless to prevent his going. It had become a vital necessity with him to think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him the night before in the company of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognized his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded.… The very innocence of Lapham's life in the direction in which he had erred wrought against him the young man's mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in his shame than in his trespass. (211-12)

The problem is not that Tom feels embarrassment over Lapham's behavior. It is not even that Tom hates Lapham for his boorishness. All of that can pass. The problem is that Tom cannot question his loyalty to his class. He can—and he has—repressed the behavior, the manifestations of his class, but (to flip the usual trailer-park joke) you can take the boy out of his class, but you can't take the class out of the boy. And you can't take the class out of the boy because in recognizing the performative nature of class (and seeing the trained behavior as something Silas will never acquire), Tom fails to examine the radical contingency of the performances themselves. In other words, Tom identifies the wrong problem: his question is "I know these are artificial behaviors, but why can't Lapham perform them?" when it should be "Why are these artificial behaviors legitimated as effective markers of class in the first place?" And thus, rather than interrogating the value of class, Tom takes refuge in his "allegiance" to his class. So rather than weakening the barriers that divide the Laphams from the Coreys by questioning them, Tom reinforces them by saying "to himself that he was a Corey, as if that were somewhat" (212).

So even though he finds a way of being with Penelope, he cannot efface the differences between her family and his (and perhaps between her and his family). But of course, this does not make Tom a bad person. It is merely a measure of the efficacy of his training (that "exclusiveness to which he was born and bred") upon him. Amidst this pivotal moment, "Tom knew that at the bottom of his heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission in the end. It was almost with the girl's voice that it seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his indignant resentment…" (212). Tom takes this persistent "girl's voice" to be that of Pen begging him to forgive her father. But in thinking he has forgiveness to grant, is this "girl's voice" not the voice of his father, calling him back to aristocracy—that which truly will "control him at last"? Is this not the ultimate reason for the enervation of Tom's and Penelope's marriage celebration? They may achieve some individual bliss, but they miss their opportunity to offer anything to any community larger than themselves.

[1] One imagines that these intense moments, which indicate the novel to be more properly about PenelopeLapham and Tom Corey than about Silas Lapham, are what makes this the best known of William Dean Howells's works. It is, in other words, the Tears, Idle Tears—effect that interests readers (especially those such as the fans of Tears, Idle Tears in the novel) as much as the rise and fall of Silas.

[2] William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Penguin, 1983: 252. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

[3] It's worth a quick analysis of the gendering that goes on in the novel. When Silas first meets Tom, he thinks he can make a "man" of him. And it is Tom's masculinity that Bromfield Corey recognizes when he tells his wife, "It appears that he wishes to do something—to do something for himself" (96). The Corey girls recognize that doing something is masculine when they discuss the roles of courtship: Penelope says, "'Rene, you haven't got to do anything. That's one advantage girls have got—if it is an advantage," and Irene responds, "It must be awful to have to do" (122-23). And Tom's father ties feudalism (as opposed to Lapham's entrepreneurship) to femininity: "We shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes me at the root of the whole feudal system.... I supposed you wished to marry the girl's money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father" (67). In other words, men work (do), whereas women enjoy the money by simply being. Finally, even Irene's similarity to her father (note that when she first experiences heartbreak, it is her father that she wants to walk with—and not to talk) that makes her the superior housekeeper to Penelope (who has the good sense of her mother, but also the inability to do the work around the house). Ultimately, it is probably Tom's masculinity (which makes him unlike his effeminate father) that makes him a better match for the effeminate Penelope than for the masculine, if beautiful, Irene.