JOurnal 15

Name: Erin

Journal 15 – William Dean Howell’s “Editha”

Write a sentence that summarizes the story’s overall message, and provide three direct quotes from the story that best illustrate this message.

The overall message if that romanticism and love are dangerous.

“All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him”

“She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her—be a hero, her hero—it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.”

“Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the answer had been all she expected. But before it seemed as if she could have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the killed which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name, and the company and the regiment, and the State were too definitely given.”

2. What tactics does Editha use to make George believe as she does about the war?

George does not want to fight in the war, but he realizes that he must do so if he wants to win Editha's love. Editha feels as if she needs to justify her love for George; she tells herself that she can only love a war hero. When he signs up and gets his orders stating that he will be shipped out, Editah gives him a letter and tells him to read it if he ever doubts his purpose.

3. Is there ever a time in which Editha truly understands what she has done? Does she ever experience an epiphany?

At the end of the story, Editha is telling her story to anyone who will listen. She has not learned that her romanticizing of war is a dangerous thing. Howells uses the story to demonstrate that romanticism can be a dangerous thing, and that a romantic ideal of war causes people to get killed.