Book Review: The Shadow of a Dream

“It’s quite like such a man as Faulkner to want a three-cornered household. I think the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married, is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to them; it’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind.”

“Yes, I think you’re quite right there,” I said… and we went over together the list of households we knew in which the husband supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We agreed that it was the innocence of our life that made it so common, but we said all the same that it was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept the husband and wife apart…

I wish that I had read William Dean Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream before I wrote The Threefold Tie, because you’d better believe that I would have had a field day with the fact that a man, his wife, and his intimate friend apparently a common enough household arrangement in the nineteenth century that it had a name: a “three-cornered household.” Mr. and Mrs. March may consider the practice mischievous, but they nonetheless can name a list of such households - a whole list! - and it clearly hasn’t even occurred to them that they might cut the acquaintance. (Recall that this was a time when divorce could force the divorcee out of society: when Marcia gets divorced in A Modern Instance, she basically goes into seclusion.)

Our three-cornered household consists of Douglas Faulkner; his intimate friend the Rev. Mr. James Nevil, “the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner’s side, and which appeared to date back to their college days… very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes”; and Faulkner’s wife Hermia Faulkner (nee Winter), who at first “had been jealous of [the friendship], but now she had got used to it; and though [Faulkner] did not suppose she would ever quite forgive Nevil for having been his friend before her time, she tolerated him.”

She has a lot of tolerating to do, because when Faulkner takes ill, he and his wife head to Europe for a yearlong sojourn - with Nevil by their side. But Faulkner’s decline continues unabated, and by the time they return to the US, where they settle in a seaside cottage near Boston, it’s clear that the end is near.

(This is when the Marches appear on the scene to have the conversation at the beginning of this entry.)

By this time, Faulkner has become obsessed with a recurring dream. The exact content of the dream we don’t learn till near the end of the book, but based on Faulkner’s strange antipathy toward his wife, the reader can guess that the dream suggests she’s moved far beyond mere toleration of James Nevil.

One of the curious things about this book is that a lot of the action is, as it were, subterranean. Mr. March admits, much later, that he and his wife guessed the basic outlines of the dream almost at once. But at the time this lurking suspicion is expressed only in the vehemence with which Mrs. March rejects it: “that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then be subjected to - to anything that people were mean enough to think.”

Anything could mean, well, anything. One implication, made explicit only in the last pages, is that people might meanly think that Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner are having an adulterous affair. Another, never explicitly stated but seething just under the surface, is that people might think the same of Nevil and Mr. Faulkner.

This one comes nearest to breaking through when Nevil gets engaged (to a woman who is not Mrs. Faulkner) just a few months after Faulkner’s death. When Mr. March hears the news, he jocularly “threw myself forward in astonishment. ‘What! Already! Why it isn’t six months since - ’”

The joke is that Mr. Nevil shouldn’t get engaged after Mr. Faulkner’s death till he’s observed an appropriate period of mourning - as if he were Mr. Faulkner’s widow. And Mrs. March certainly understands the implication: “ ‘Basil!’ cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself very elaborately after that…She tossed [the letter] across the table to me with a disdain for my low condition that would have wounded a less fallen spirit.”

The engagement is broken, and after a more suitable interval for their widowhood, Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner get engaged. Then they learn the content of Mr. Faulkner’s dream, and then break up on the grounds that they must have been adulterously in love (unbeknownst to themselves) if Mr. Faulkner could dream about it. March urges the idea that they’re just as morbidly fixated as Faulkner was, and ought to marry and be happy, and in a different Howells book they might be allowed; but as it is, Nevil gets hit by a train, and Mrs. Faulkner dies a year later of a broken heart.

This is an interesting contrast to Mrs. Farrell, where no one dies at all, despite broken hearts all round and equally clear implications of gay passion. It seems to be the shadow of adultery that dooms them here (as it blights Ben Halleck’s life in A Modern Instance, although he lives through the book); that, or the fact that Howells wrote this book right after his daughter Winifred died after a decade-long decline, and may have been in a vengeful mood.

Or perhaps a reflective one, painfully fixed on the unfairness of human suffering. It seems, he muses, “abominably unfair that they should suffer so for no wrong; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some end unknown to the sufferer or the witnesses, and no anguish is wasted… or else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say that they were all three destined to undergo what they underwent, and that what happened to them was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since no wrong had been done, but simply fate.”