Politics & Power Quote by William Dean Howells

Howells draws a cultural border with the precision of a realist and the slyness of someone who knows he is simplifying on purpose. Europe, in his framing, lives in quotation marks: “histrionic and dramatized” suggests not just theater but a daily habit of performance, manners, and inherited scripts. It’s a jab at old-world social choreography - the kind of polished self-presentation that can look like depth while functioning as camouflage.

America, by contrast, is pitched as a country that hasn’t yet had time to turn identity into costume. “Direct and sincere” is praise, but it also smuggles in a warning: sincerity is a style too, and it can curdle into self-righteousness. The sharpest clause is the aside: “except when it is trying to be European.” That’s Howells skewering American cultural insecurity - the compulsion to borrow Europe’s prestige by importing its drama, etiquette, and aesthetic seriousness, like an accent put on for the benefit of the room. The line implies that the most “American” thing is not innocence but an anxious performativity about not performing.

Context matters. Howells is writing in the late 19th-century moment when the U.S. is getting rich fast and trying to get classy faster: Gilded Age wealth, transatlantic tourism, art collecting, social climbing. As a leading advocate of literary realism, he’s also staking a claim for an American art that doesn’t need European ornament to be legitimate. The quote works because it’s less a travel note than a diagnosis of status: cultures don’t just live differently; they learn different ways to prove they matter.