SOURCE: "'Editha': The Feminine View," in American Literary Realism, Vol. XII, No. 2, Autumn, 1979, pp. 278-82.

In the following essay, Furia provides an interpretation of the protagonist's motives in "Editha."

Like the anti-war poems of William Vaughan Moody, William Dean Howells's "Editha" was revived in the late 1960s and has since become a fixture in anthologies of American literature. That revival has been a mixed blessing, however, for it implicitly invites us to regard "Editha" as a simple parable about the patriotic delusions that spawn imperialistic wars. Howells's critics tend to oversimplify the main character by assuming that Editha's patriotic fervor is merely a sign of her naiveté.¹ If we probe beneath Editha's passionate commitment to the war in the Philippines, however, we find that her motives are far more complex: although she does not and indeed cannot admit it even to herself, Editha manipulates her sexuality to overpower...