The “Enormous Fact” of American Life: Divorce in William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance

After the Civil War, in which the United States was threatened with the divorce of the nation itself, many writers, historians, and artists sought still more actively to create an American tradition, indicative of a desire to reunite the nation by giving it a national character. Thus, divorce has poignant figurative and literal meanings in American culture. Howells emphasizes the political and personal force of the word “divorce” when he writes that divorce is not only an enormous fact in American life but a theme he considers “only less intense and pathetic than slavery.”3 In his hyperbolic comparison of the theme of divorce with slavery, Howells invokes the horrific tension which sparked the Civil War and makes the awareness of divorce “only less” central to American history and, thus, to an American identity, than the awareness of slavery and the Civil War.