SOURCE: "Howells's 'Editha': An American Allegory," in The Markham Review, Vol. VIII, Summer, 1979, pp. 77-80.

In the following essay, Humma deems "Editha" as "an allegorical fable of American moral degeneration."

William Dean Howells's short story "Editha" has become, without a great deal of fanfare, a classic American story.¹ In anthologies of American literature it is the selection nearly always chosen to represent the author frequently spoken of as the "father of American realism." The story is peculiarly and quintessentially American. It bears, if on a more modest scale, the same relation to fin de siècle America as, for example, The Great Gatsby bears to the America of the 1920s: it succeeds in capturing a mythos of sorts, including that elusive thing called the "American character." In particular, "Editha" is allegorical in the best sense of the term—in the sense that Gatsby or that Hawthorne's "My Kinsman...