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William Dean Howells’s “The Midnight Platoon” and the Post-Sentimental Fallacy

First published without a title in Harper’s Weekly on January 23, 1897, William Dean Howells’s sketch, “A Midnight Platoon,” has long been read as an example of the shortcomings of popular late nineteenth-century urban fictions that turn ostensibly realistic portrayals of poverty into spectacles for self-affirming middle-class consumption. Writing in 1946, for example, Edwin Harrison Cady cites the “The Midnight Platoon” as an illustration for his argument that “Howells always drew back from the consideration of disturbing facts” (237). Similarly, in his 1981 study, William Alexander asserts that “The Midnight Platoon” reveals the “selfishness of [Howells’s] position” (115), and in his 1995 book, James R. Giles uses the sketch to condemn Howells’s characteristic “evasion of responsibility” (80). More recently, Joseph Entin has argued that “The Midnight Platoon,” akin to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, renders “potentially disturbing scenes” of poverty and class conflict, only to contain them by “protecting the reader’s position of specular distance and security” (319). Reading “The Midnight Platoon” in line with the conclusion of the narrator’s friend as an uneasy reaffirmation of the privileged status of the “Better Classes” averts critical attention from the sketch’s indictment of this sort of spectatorship, cultivated by “Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper men trying to make literature out of life” (154). In making the observer the focus of its observations, Howells’s “The Midnight Platoon” centrally concerns itself with what William James in Principles of Psychology calls the “habit” of detached spectatorship that “keeps the social strata from mixing” and the individual “within his orbit” so that the taking of any concrete action to change the status quo seems impossible (121, 125). In the Principles of Psychology, which Howells praised as “a rare contribution to knowledge” in his July 1891 review for Harper’s Magazine (314), William James lambasts “the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (125). Having singled out Rousseau as “the classical example” of the “contradiction between knowledge and action” that afflicts those who can only “recognize” rights and wrongs “in their pure and abstract form,” James claims that “[t]he habit of excessive novel-reading and theater-going will produce true monsters in this line” (125). “The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachmen is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale,” James observes (125). “One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up” (126). In “The Midnight Platoon,” Howells takes James’s criticism of the novel-reading “sentimentalist” a step further, showing that the emerging habit of post-sentimental representations of and encounters with poverty are no less fraught with the tendency to abstract the plight of the poor and thereby to absolve oneself of any social responsibility to act. As Joseph Entin has observed, late nineteenth-century accounts of urban life by writers such as William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and Walter Wyckof “represent efforts to fashion post-sentimental modes of narrating the poor–to circumvent what many realists and naturalists perceived as sentimental literature’s overly emotional identification with the underprivileged and over-wrought stylistic tendencies” (314). Perhaps taking a cue from Stephen Crane’s “The Men in the