The Whole Family - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

In the rather pedestrian opening chapter Howells introduces the Talbert family, middle-class New England proprietors of a silverplate works that turns out ice-pitchers and other mundane household items. Daughter Peggy Talbert has just returned from her coeducational college engaged to a harmless but rather weak young man named Harry Goward.

It was Howells' intention that each of the eleven subsequent authors would examine the impact of Peggy's engagement on a different member of the Talbert family. But the very next chapter, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, immediately sent the novel careening off Howell's intended trajectory. Freeman made her assigned character, the "old-maid aunt" Elizabeth Talbert, into anything but a quiet old spinster. Instead she created Aunt Elizabeth as an older but vibrant and sexually attractive woman who doesn't mind getting noticed by Peggy's fiancé.

This was, as project editor Elizabeth Jordan later wrote, the "explosion of a bombshell on our literary hearthstone." Howells, never particularly comfortable with frank sexuality, recoiled from Freeman's spicy conception of a character he had intended as a harmless old lady. Contributor Henry Van Dyke, who would eventually write the concluding chapter, reacted in a half-humorous, half-worried letter to Jordan:

Heavens! What a catastrophe! Who would have thought that the old maiden aunt would go mad in the second chapter? Poor lady. Red hair and a pink hat and boys in beau knots all over the costume. What will Mr. Howells say? For my part I think it distinctly cruel work to put a respectable spinster into such a hattitude before the world.

As subsequent critics have pointed out, the rest of the novel became an effort by the later writers to cope somehow with this introduction of Aunt Elizabeth as a sexual competitor with Peggy for her fiancee's affections. Although some of the writers had their doubts about Freeman's work, at least her reimagination of the spinster aunt gave the book a narrative impetus.

Eventually, after many twists and turns introduced by the subsequent contributors, Harry Goward is dismissed as a suitor, Aunt Elizabeth is sent off to New York City, and a more suitable mate for Peggy is found in a college professor named Stillman Dane. Peggy marries Dane and the couple sails off to Europe with Peggy's brother Charles and his wife Lorraine for a honeymoon tour.