Annotations - William Dean Howells, "Turkeys Turning the Tables" (1892)

moral

In their introduction to The Altrurian Romances, Clare and Rudolf Kirk remark that, at around the same time that “Turkeys Turning the Tables” was published, “Howells' Altrurian essays were his answer to the problem of how to give literary expression to [the] socialistic concepts”(xx) that were influencing his thinking via such associates as Edward Bellamy and his co-editor at Cosmopolitan, John Brisban Walker. Quoting Howells's article “Bibliographical,” which precedes the second Part of Through the Eye of a Needle, they point out that Howells was considering the stories (that eventually became the novel trilogy) as “'a sort of sociological serial' in the form of a fable, in which he could suggest the possibility of a 'practical altruism' as a 'national polity.' Why, indeed, [Howells asked] should the Altrurian system be considered 'so very unAmerican,' and why should this idea not be woven into a loosely constructed story, suggesting the direction in which American democracy should develop?” (xxi).

This conception of sociological principles being “woven into” a story not only characterizes the style of “Turkeys Turning the Tables” but attention is drawn to the inevitably ethical dimension of storytelling by the metafictional exchanges between the “little girl” and her narrating father. Though she explicitly rejects a didactic story with a “moral,” the narrative forces the recognition – at least by this character – that ethical values are conditioned precisely by the stories and discourses that constitute realities. Later, the narrative shift to the turkeys' point-of-view motivates an ontological shift to a different experiential reality constituted by very different values. More immediately, in the dialogue following, a true story ("a true one") is promised by the narrator, ushering in a potential reflection on the relations between truth and fiction. Reflection is aided by the use of the dream-vision structure that allows the laws of "normal" external reality based on probability to be suspended in favor of the laws of fictional reality, which are based on what is possible and imaginable.