[For the William Dean Howells Society at the 2007 American Literature Association Conference. Also, it may help to know that Elsa Nettels was moderating the panel.]

As the Coreys adjust to the knowledge that their son loves Penelope Lapham, Bromfield asks, “what have I done nothing for, all my life, and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure, if I’m to come to this at last?” (268). The “this” to which Bromfield Corey has at last descended, of course, is the marriage of his aristocratic family to the nouveau riche Laphams. And Corey’s lament here offers important grounds of distinction between the Coreys and the Laphams: whereas all his life, he has “done nothing,” Silas has worked hard—has done something. Indeed, this distinction isn’t unimportant in the values of the characters. When Corey pays a visit to Colonel Lapham’s office, Lapham by way of praising Tom tells his father: “His going through college won’t hurt him,—he’ll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won’t; don’t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn’t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along” (142). So clearly, the difference between the Coreys and the Laphams is predicated upon the distinction between doing nothing and doing something—or, since doing nothing, insofar as it can be thought of as in some sense affirmative, means manifesting leisure: the difference between just being and doing. Certainly, Old Corey’s occupation reinforces this distinction: since “he had plenty of money…It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all” (70). In other words, to the extent that Bromfield Corey has an occupation, he is a painter, but one who doesn’t paint.

So what does someone who does nothing do? Well, in the logic of the Coreys’ society, one talks. Which explains why, when Bromfield Corey wants to explain to his wife Anna just why he finds the Laphams so distasteful, he claims, “It wasn’t their behavior,—they behaved well enough—or ill enough; but their conversation was terrible” (269). And if we follow Corey’s explanation, we will get a sense of what made their conversation so bad: he says, “Mrs. Lapham’s range was strictly domestic; and when the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral paint all over me, till I could have been safely warranted not to crack or scale in any climate.” At least three lessons are made available here. First, if you want to entertain in society (in both senses of the word entertain), you must exhibit a range of subjects beyond a narrow daily pattern—or to put it another way, you must talk in such a way that you demonstrate that your life involves some leisure. Your conversation should, second, demonstrate the acquisition of some cultural capital, so that, in the library of all places, you don’t discuss the production and sale of a material good. And third, you would do well, like Corey here, to pick up a trope and run with it, adding your own twist. This third is crucial because Silas quite often attests to the preservative qualities of his paint, but he would never think to turn his enthusiastic talk about a product into an image of a speaker coating his listeners in the subject of his incessant and uninteresting chatter. All of which suggests that the distinguishing characteristic about people like the Coreys who belong in society is the way they talk.

Of course, “the way they talk” has to be understood here as multivalent. If the foregoing discussion illustrates the way these two families differ in what they talk about, differences also prevail at the level of how they talk. And of course, Elsa Nettels has documented Howells’s attention to linguistic difference in her study, Lanugauge, Race, & Social Class in Howells’s America. Discussing The Rise of Silas Lapham, she demonstrates the “Most deeply ingrained” distinctions between the Laphams and the Coreys to be “the habits of speech” (145). In my reading, what’s primarily at stake for Professor Nettels is Howells's attitudes toward language and toward his characters’ language—as well as how his attitudes toward his characters themselves are signaled by his representation of their language. For my part, I want to make a rather more modest argument (I am, after all, only offering a reading of The Rise of Silas Lapham here) about the instrumentality of language in the novel. I will argue that language functions in a complex process of distinction wherein: first, a dominant class makes more or less conspicuous its possession of linguistic capital; second, an underclass is made to feel its lack of linguistic capital; and third, the process of acquiring linguistic capital is mystified.

As we have seen, the Coreys’ metalinguistic awareness distinguishes them from the Laphams. And if one of the ingredients for developing and displaying linguistic ability is leisure, another is the Coreys’ dinner party—an event held in the service of lavishly spending their linguistic capital. Silas’s reaction shows us the efficacy of the Coreys’ efforts: he is “astonished…to hear with what freedom they talked,” and he feels inadequate for “not holding up his end of the line” (196). Between the conversations swirling around him and the wine causing his head to swirl, Silas finds that “When some one spoke to him he could only summon a few words of reply, that seemed to lead to nothing; things often came into his mind appropriate to what they were saying, but before he could get them out they were off on something else; they jumped about so, he could not keep up,” and so he just drinks more. And this feeling is, of course, crucial because the essential by-product of the conspicuous display of linguistic capital is convincing those who don’t have it that they should feel keenly that lack.

So during the dinner party, Silas becomes aware of his own inadequate store of linguistic capital—and he has already been aware of a broader lack of social capital, at least since he bought the land on the Back Bay, given that although people like the Coreys don’t know where people like the Laphams live, Silas can claim, “I know where they are” (29). But the discovery that the Coreys didn’t know where to find the Laphams brings to Irene and Mrs. Lapham two unpleasant surprises: not only are they “made to feel” “that they lived in an unfashionable neighborhood” (24), but they also realize how little they understand the complexities of language and communication: all Anna Corey says is, “Nearly all of our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill,” but somehow, “There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies had gone; and on comparing notes with her daughter, Mrs. Lapham found that the barb had been left to rankle in her mind also” (29). Unfortunately, they can’t quite figure out why they feel insulted: “Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report that the fact had been stated with anything like insinuation, but it was that which gave it a more penetrating effect.” In other words, there’s something more than just the literal signification in Mrs. Corey’s words, and recognizing this fact, Irene and Persis become aware of Anna’s superior linguistic abilities—and hence, of their own inadequacy.

It turns out that making speakers of all classes feel a deep sense of linguistic insecurity was something of a “thriving industry” in the 1880s—though I don’t have time to say much about the more than 70 editions of “verbal criticism” and “manuals of good usage” that appeared during this decade (Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence). I mention these popular grammar manuals primarily because I want to argue that they play an important role in the process whereby language serves as an instrument of class struggle. In essence, they become agents of mystification preventing the impoverished from learning quite how to acquire linguistic capital.

To back up a bit and see how grammar functions in The Rise of Silas Lapham, consider a moment near the beginning of the novel: Silas has determined to build the house on ← Beacon Street, and his daughter Irene doesn’t quite believe he’s sincere. Silas playfully interprets Irene’s incredulity as opposition (his gesture is especially prankish since Irene is the Lapham they all imagine will benefit most from moving) and taunts her when her sister Penelope casts her vote in support of the move by saying, “I guess the ayes has it, Pen.” The narrator then tells us, “At times, the Colonel’s grammar failed him” (38).

But what kind of grammar can fail its speaker? Used in its transitive form, the verb failed here suggests that Silas’s grammar disappoints him or his expectations, or that it doesn’t fulfill its duty. But there’s no sense that Silas himself feels disappointed or let down by his grammar. So the point is really that, judged by some standard external to Silas, his grammar has let him down—or failed to fulfill its duty inasmuch as its duty is the construction of grammatically “correct” sentences, or has failed him by revealing his lack of facility with a “standard” grammar. But where does this standard exist?

Before answering that question, we should recall that the standard clearly exists for Bromfield Corey. He tells his son that he expects a daughter-in-law to have a little “youth,” “beauty,” “good sense,” and “pretty behavior,” but he confesses he wants “her people” to be “rather grammatical” (64). As we have seen, the narrator certainly judges Silas to be (at least sometimes) ungrammatical, and even Tom acknowledges Silas’s shortcomings when he claims that “in spite of his syntax I rather like him” (65). And of course most readers will recognize that the narrator means by her comment about the Colonel’s grammar that the plural ayes should take the plural verb have and that Silas’s grammar is “incorrect.” But to put the point this way—that is, to use the locution “Silas’s grammar”—is to remind ourselves precisely that Silas possesses a grammar, even if it is judged incorrect. So what kind of grammar suffices as a grammar but “fails” as a correct grammar?

Putting the question this way reveals that we are really dealing with two grammars. In Patrick Hartwell’s analysis, when people talk about grammar, they usually have one (or more) of five meanings in mind. I’ll only discuss the three relevant types of grammar here. First, an internalized grammar (or “the grammar in our heads” [111]) patterns the usage of the language we speak; this internalized grammar may be inflected by dialect, but insofar as we make consistent syntactical constructions, we are following a form that we recognize as natural to us and from which we rarely deviate. We might also call this first grammar usage. Second, “linguistic etiquette” or usage preferences fall under Hartwell’s Grammar 3. Grammar 3 is prescriptive—and amounts to what most nonprofessionals call “good English” or “standard English” or “proper usage.” So: Silas’s Grammar 1 fails to comply with the narrator’s sense of Grammar 3, and to the extent that readers recognize the narrator’s judgment as a judgment against a Grammar 3 standard, they will think (as the narrator may) that the incongruity is between Silas’s grammar and “correct” grammar.

But how does standard usage become recognizable? As the term “standard usage” suggests, Grammar 3 itself isn’t correct; it is nothing more than a usage that has been legitimated by various discursive and pedagogical practices of the dominant class in a linguistic community. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown us in Language and Symbolic Power, what appears as natural for the dominant class or bourgeoisie really amounts to the dominant class’s habituated practices normativized for all classes—that is, the dominant class’s Grammar 1 legislated as Grammar 3 and christened with the term “standard” or “correct.” So if we ask, For whom is usage of Grammar 3 really natural? we will see that speaking with standard grammar—or what Bromfield Corey might refer to as being “rather grammatical”—appears natural most commonly for speakers coming from a bourgeois habitus. Clearly, this offers a distinct advantage to the offspring of the dominant class, since growing up in a bourgeois habitus means that whatever linguistic practices surround you will become natural (or habituated) for you—until and unless you enter another habitus. On the other hand, someone like Silas, having grown up poor in rural Vermont, comes by Standard Edited English as something like a second language. He hasn’t internalized the culturally dominant dialect, and so all attempts to speak it are struggles against his habituated dialect. When the Colonel struggles with grammar—when “his” grammar fails him—he is merely revealing the effort required to display the manners of the dominant class. And seen from this angle, teaching “standard grammar” looks a lot less like “education” and a lot more like enforcing bourgeois norms.

But in fact, teaching grammar doesn’t typically accomplish even this. Most advocates of a Grammar 3-type standard don’t assume a technical vocabulary to describe standard usage, whereas formal academic instruction in grammar has such a vocabulary (number and gender agreement, infinitives, participles, and so forth)—and Hartwell labels this grammatical taxonomy Grammar 4. When we think of teaching grammar, we think of deploying and transmitting these technical terms as guidelines for bringing students’ usage (or Grammar 1) into line with Grammar 3. The problem is, as Hartwell demonstrates, taxonomies like Grammar 4 are almost entirely ineffective (and at times counterproductive) at making students’ usage mirror more closely the standard usage. Just as the book of etiquette the Laphams buy to prepare them for dinner at the Coreys provides plenty of facts about manners but does nothing to make the Laphams feel comfortable with their manners at dinner, books of grammar call attention to conventions about language without being able to effectively change what people do with language. Extended immersion in a particular habitus, it turns out, is a far cry from knowledge about the behaviors of agents in that habitus, and the only way to get the former is to find yourself immersed across a period of time. Emphasizing the latter, then, is only a way of concealing the fact that almost the only way to enjoy extended immersion in the habitus of the dominant class is to be born to it.

Being born to aristocracy, it’s no surprise that people like the Coreys are never failed by their grammar. What is a surprise is that Penelope Lapham demonstrates far more linguistic aptitude than the rest of her family. She can choose to speak in dialect, but just as she sometimes affects a different relationship with her father by calling him “the Colonel” or with her mother by referring to her as “Persis,” Penelope seems largely in control of her grammatical choices and hence aware that she has options. So if Penelope has a richer register of linguistic capital, it’s not a surprise, as many critics have noted, that she is the Lapham daughter that Tom falls for. At the time they meet, these two kids are of the same class economically and linguistically, even if they are worlds apart in terms of their social activities. And while recognizing that the three categories—the economic, the linguistic, and the social—aren’t quite discrete, even recognizing that Pen’s social capital is indeed enriched by her possession of other kinds of capital, I wonder if the relative importance of the three isn’t suggested by Tom’s interest in Penelope despite the fact that, as we are told early on, “The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently” (27). At any rate, even if Pen’s sense of humor is a little over the top for Bromfield Corey’s tastes (and all he can muster is a “feint of liking” it), we are in the end reminded that “the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable” (359). And given the Coreys’ relief at not being faced with a “succession of Lapham teas,” since the Laphams have removed to Vermont (360), presumably the same possibility for effacing differences is not considered to extend to the rest of the family. In other words, it is clear that, not just for Tom but for the entire Corey family, Penelope is more palatable than the other Laphams. And since the distinguishing characteristic of Penelope is the way she talks, linguistic capital turns out not just to be important as a defensive strategy when protecting one’s position in the class struggle, but also the key to a good offense.

I want to end by briefly considering how this reading—that the significance of linguistic capital, not just for class struggle in the novel but for the meaning of the novel—is reflected in the title, or to put it the other way round, how the titular rise refers to the rise in status enjoyed by the Laphams when their daughter marries a Corey. It is, after all, their daughters the Laphams think of when they consider the long term in Boston: when deliberating over whether to build the house on the Back Bay, they acknowledge that “if the girls are going to keep on living in Boston and marry here, …we ought to try to get them into society” (29). Moreover, the right kind of marriage has been precisely a “rise” for Silas in the past. Just after Silas and Persis meet Rogers on the Back Bay, their argument compels the narrator to ponder the resilient “silken texture of the marriage tie…” In the midst of this contemplation, we learn that “Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it had been a rise in life for him” (49). Given this particular thrust of the term “rise,” I would suggest that while it’s true that, in Professor Nettels’s words, “habits of speech” separate the Laphams and the Coreys throughout the novel, it’s also the case that “habits of speech” are capable of uniting Laphams and Coreys.