An Uninspired Analysis of William Dean Howells' "Editha"

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. 

    Revelation 6:8 

“Mein Führer, I can walk!”

    Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Published seven years after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, William Dean Howells’ short story “Editha” concerns the process whereby the titular character convinces her fiance, one George Gearson, to enlist. After some cajoling on Editha’s part, George does finally volunteer to fight. George goes to war. George fights. And George dies. So it goes.

Editha’s role in the story turns the Spanish-American War into a bizarre psychosexual drama. George’s willingness to fight for his country becomes confused with his willingness to fight for Editha.

She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her--be a hero, her hero--it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander.

It’s almost enough to make Freud blush. Editha presents the Spanish-American War as a means whereby George can prove his love for her, and if not that, then his masculinity. How many men have gone to war (or gotten into a drunken brawl, for that matter) to do the same? George himself voices similar concerns. “‘A man that hasn't got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we won't go into that,’” he says. But Editha, cribbing her lines from the papers of the day, is insistent, piling cliché on cliché to convince George of the righteousness of the war. Some choice lines include “You don't belong to yourself now; you don't even belong to me. You belong to your country...” and “God meant it to be war." Hearst reporting turned pillow talk.

The jingoistic attitudes expressed by the American press--and by proxy, Editha herself--find a ready parallel, curiously enough, in Spanish history. Following the expulsion of the moors and subsequent unification of the Iberian peninsula under the rule of Ferdinand the II of Aragorn, Spaniards clad in glimmering morrións set off for the New World in search of riches and converts for their LORD. Thus was the Spanish empire born. And so too was the American empire.

When the final (officially sanctioned) shots of the American Civil War had been fired on May 6, 1865, the newly empowered United States government began casting its predatory eyes about for an enemy; seeking unity and a coherent new national character in a common enemy. An enemy it found in Spain. As Howells writes, “There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country."

There is a horrific timelessness to the rhetoric Howells critiques and lampoons in “Editha.” George’s assertion that “the way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at once” recalls both the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the promotion of so-called “shock and awe” tactics in the Middle East. One is left with the distinct impression, after reading and metabolizing these words, that the continued existence of all nations is predicated on war and slaughter; that, as if by some cruel cosmic enantiodromia, civilization serves only to deliver man back to a Lockean state of nature, red in tooth and claw.

There is no better figure for this paradox than the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the height of human achievement--the ability to divide the constituent matter of the universe, of reality itself--was used to reduce an entire population to blackened bones. Maybe Judge Holden had it right:

It makes no difference what men think of war… War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.