A Hazard of New Fortunes — Volume 3 — Text and Context

Fulkerson's Fetish and the Language of Ambition

The opening chapter reveals Howells's method of embedding social critique within seemingly light comedy. Fulkerson's banquet scheme is described in a long, paratactic sentence that piles up guests—'Mr. Depew,' 'Mark Twain,' 'the Cardinal'—as if sheer accumulation could guarantee success. But the narrator punctures this by noting that Fulkerson's enthusiasm 'stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense.' The repetition of 'nothing' enacts the deflation. More pointedly, March diagnoses Fulkerson's attitude toward Dryfoos as a 'fetish,' a term that recasts business deference as quasi-religious superstition. Howells uses March's analytical voice to frame Fulkerson's behavior not as mere eccentricity but as a symptom of a culture that worships wealth. The passage's shifting pace—from manic listing to reflective pause—mirrors the characters' own oscillations between ambition and doubt.

Two Worlds Collide: The Street and the Drawing Room

A single paragraph in Chapter V performs the volume's most striking juxtaposition. March and his wife have just left a party where they met the refined Margaret Vance, whom they describe as a combination of 'intellectual fashionableness and worldly innocence.' The dialogue is leisurely, appreciative. Then, at a street crossing, 'a wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air.' A woman flees a policeman; March's wife asks, 'Ah, but if that's part of the price?' The shift is abrupt, almost violent. Howells offers no transition, no commentary—only a silence that 'he broke with a sigh.' The contrast is not merely thematic but structural: the smooth, modulated prose of the drawing-room scene gives way to a jagged, exclamatory sentence. March's final question—'How impossible each makes the other seem!'—is left hanging, unresolved. This technique forces the reader to sit with the discomfort rather than resolve it through plot.

The Calculated Call: Manners as a System of Control

Chapter VI shifts to Margaret Vance's attempt to call on the Dryfooses, a family wealthy but socially adrift. The scene is a masterclass in indirect characterization through dialogue. Mrs. Horn, Margaret's aunt, speaks in conditional clauses and hedging phrases: 'I hope you've counted the cost; all the possible consequences.' Her language is a web of social caution. Margaret replies with a wry aphorism: 'Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if you don't want them. You merely have to let them alone.' The exchange reveals the unspoken rules of New York society—charity as a form of risk management, inclusion as a potential snub. Howells lets the conversation unfold without authorial intrusion, trusting the reader to hear the condescension beneath the politeness. The pace here is deliberate, almost static, a deliberate slowdown after the street scene's shock. This variation in tempo across chapters gives the volume its distinctive rhythm: manic ambition, jarring violence, then the glacial movement of social ritual.

Readers attentive to Howells's narrative craft will note how he uses changes in sentence length and paragraph structure to signal shifts in emotional register. The volume's three chapters move from Fulkerson's breathless lists to the street's abrupt cry to the drawing room's measured exchanges. Rather than resolving these contrasts, Howells leaves them in tension, inviting the reader to consider how the same city contains both the 'radiant girl' and the fleeing woman. This is a novel less about events than about the spaces between them.

I keep thinking about that charity visit and the arrest in A Hazard of New Fortunes, how politeness can feel so hollow next to raw injustice. It reminded me of something older, quieter—the way The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Volume 4 — Background and Themes lingers on the cost of a father's certainty. Both left me sitting still, just turning pages over in my mind.