Like Asteroids Spinning through Time and Space: Chronotopicity in The Whole Family

Devised by William Dean Howells as a jointly written, serialized novel about a middling American family and edited by Elizabeth Jordan, The Whole Family (1907-1908) has been defined above all by the contention among its twelve authors rather than their collaboration. Scholars have explored the discordant voices within and outside of the novel, including the writers’ outspoken critique of their peers’ differing literary styles, formal and thematic choices as well as the diverging interests of writers, editors, and publishers. Also, the authorial discord has come to represent the American family in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, a discord heightened by the diverse individual and gender perspectives that the novel opens up. This study redirects our attention to the text as a collaborative project aimed at the family novel in American modernist literature. By drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopicity, it demonstrates that the authors of The Whole Family jointly rework the traditional family idyll into an exhilarating composite family portrait, whose individual chapters experiment with multitudinous spatiotemporal perspectives, individual space-time experiences, and life sequences. At the same time, the chapters in themselves grapple with the tensions resulting from the modernist experience of multiplying time, space, and identity while the American family likewise undergoes major discursive changes.