Despite the fact that nineteenth-century mores, particularly in the United States, were far more repressive of homosexuality than those of our own time, there was nevertheless a greater tolerance and far less suspicion of intimate friendships between women that included physical signs of affection. The word “crush” was often used to describe the feelings of girls in school who fell for other girls, for example, and the term was used without the “taint” of homosexuality. Although relatively more open to same-sex unions, contemporary American culture nevertheless bristles with a need to categorize human eroticism, a force that by its very nature resists definition and plays a role in most relations between people of either and both sexes, whether it is acted upon or not. In other words, when The Bostonians was published, James’s lesbian portraits were subject to greater ambiguity than they are now, and in certain passages, James plays on the vagaries of sexual identity, the shifting, indefinable motion between the masculine and the feminine: “It was true that if she had been a boy she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever” (p. 38). In hot pursuit of Verena Tarrant, Basil Ransom fantasizes an end to her involvement with the cause: “... but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex (what sex was it, great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself), would be relegated to the land of vapours, of dead phrases” (p. 307).
But Ransom has misunderstood the power of “vapours” and “dead phrases,” which play a transforming role in the novel, both in public and in private. Like a contagious fog over a city, these enunciations, no matter how hackneyed, are invested with the power to seduce and cast a spell over an audience—be it hundreds of people or just one. The dead phrases of both sides—the reactionary utterances of Mr. Ransom and the radical declarations of Boston’s feminists—are animated by the human voice, to which the story assigns an almost magical power. For the better part of the narrative, the most compelling voice belongs to Verena. She is the enchantress whose speeches hold her listeners “under the charm” (p. 56), as she delivers addresses that are more akin to musical performance than lecture. Like a sorceress in a fairy tale, Verena is “spinning vocal sounds to a silver thread” (p. 244). She also entrances Ransom. When he seeks her out in Cambridge, he understands that he is falling in love with her, and his vision of her is marked by the heightened brilliance that illuminates a beloved. He compares her to a nymph, and she makes him think of “unworldly places” (p. 207). Olive similarly imagines that her new friend’s wonderful qualities have “dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents” (p. 76). Verena Tarrant shines, but the source of that luminosity, her bewitching hold over audiences, over Basil Ransom and over Olive Chancellor, is connected less to the presence of particular qualities in her personality than to their absence. The girl lacks self-consciousness, and like Miss Peabody, she has no grounded, no defined self. When she repeats to Ransom a phrase she has spoken twice before during the course of the novel, “ ‘Oh, it isn’t me, you know; it’s something outside!”’ (p. 73), she is both reiterating what her prompters have told her and telling a truth about herself. James is getting at something I have always felt—that the public person inevitably slides into the third person, away from “I” and into “he” or “she.” The Bostonians explores an early incarnation of what will eventually become American celebrity culture. James saw it coming, and the novel anticipates the moment when human beings would be emptied of all inner human qualities and turned into images, commodities to be bought and sold on the open market for profit, a time when celebrities would fall into the curious but fitting habit of referring to themselves in the third person.
Before movies, radio, and television, publicity meant newspapers. In terms of the narrative, it is apt that Verena has sprung from a paternal seed that has no individual, no private character. Selah Tarrant isn’t only a humbug, he is a humbug obsessed with the idea of public recognition and the money to be made from it. Like a shuddering moth near a lamp, Tarrant is irresistibly drawn to the glare of publicity. He haunts newspaper offices and printing rooms hoping against hope that he will somehow be noticed. The most fervent wish of Selah Tarrant’s tawdry, corrupt little heart is to be interviewed by some newspaperman. There is an active journalist in The Bostonians, someone whose very name is an apology-Matthias Pardon. He hovers at the edges of the story throughout, showing up first at Miss Peabody’s and finally at the Music Hall, with appearances in between. An embodiment of the unconscious smarminess of the press, Pardon has scruples only in his patronymic. He is wholly unaware that his questions might be indelicate or intrusive and plows merrily ahead with his vapid articles. Although Pardon is a comic character, his vulgarity has sinister undertones; the man is morally vacant. “His faith, again, was the faith of Selah Tarrant—that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that it would be fastidious to question the terms of the privilege” (p. 116). It is hard to read this sentence without feeling its prescience. It is a faith that would eventually lead to the grotesque national spectacle of contemporary American life in which countless people humiliate and debase themselves in public for the dubious glory of being “on TV.”
The paradox of publicity is that it enacts a reversal between the private and the public. The press, especially the part of the press that reports on culture, continually converts what is meant for public consumption—art—into mere gossip about people’s private lives: “For this ingenuous son of his [Pardon‘s] age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business” (p. 115). Pardon lurks on the sidelines of Verena’s rise to stardom, hungry to scoop the story. The afternoon before the event at the Music Hall, the journalist searches high and low for Olive and Verena without success, and finally insinuates himself into the family house, where he hammers Olive’s sister with demands for “’any little personal items’” (p. 390) she might provide about either the speaker or her coach. The public, Pardon says, is almost as interested in Miss Chancellor as in Miss Tarrant. Under the banner of the public and publicity, the grand cause to emancipate women, a cause Olive champions as a force for “human progress,” is transformed into vulgar prattle about domestic arrangements.
Although both Basil and Olive regard Verena as an otherworldly presence, she is decidedly not. Verena has lived her entire young life on the public stage, a life that has robbed her of all inner fixity, all knowledge of her own desires, and it is precisely this floating, externalized quality that makes her exceedingly vulnerable. The girl who can sway the great public will be brutally manipulated in her private life. It is to James’s great credit that a malleable character like Verena, a person who is rather like an empty vessel filled over time with the “dead phrases” of others—first her father‘s, then Olive’s, and finally Basil’s—is nevertheless a fully believable human being. Her friendship with and loyalty to Olive Chancellor, her attraction to Basil Ransom, and her sweet, confused desire to please them both has all the poignancy of a child trapped in a custody battle. Verena’s dawning awareness that she has an inner life and personal desires turns on a secret she keeps from Olive. She does not tell her friend that she has seen Basil Ransom in Cambridge. This, the narrator writes, is “the only secret she had in the world—the only thing that was all her own” (p. 268). Understandably, she is reluctant to give it up.
There is nothing more private than a secret, and a secret is, of course, silent. Silence belongs to solitude, the voice to the outside world. Unlike the voluble Verena, Olive is afflicted by silence. Nervous in the extreme, she sometimes finds herself dumbstruck and must struggle through her fits of muteness before she can find her voice. Despite a passionate desire to speak in public, she suffers from a nature so private it has become a debility. There is an aspect of the ventriloquist in James’s spinst
er. She speaks through Verena, finds her voice in another body. It is Olive, Verena tells Ransom, who writes the speeches. “‘She tells me what to say—the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!’” (p. 208). This is intimate territory, the occupation of one person by another; and there is violence in it—the grasping, feverish desire not only to commingle with the beloved but to take total possession of her. Words take the place of sexual penetration in The Bostonians. Words enter Verena, and words cause her destruction. The most powerful words, however, belong not to Olive Chancellor but to Basil Ransom.
Like Olive, Basil longs to find a public forum where his ideas might be heard. His effort is stymied, not by pathological shyness, but by the simple fact that his ideas are too unpopular, at least in the North, to find much of an audience. Although he has written several essays and submitted them to publishers, they have been turned down. The narrator informs us that in one of these rejection letters, an editor suggested to Ransom that three hundred years earlier he might easily have found a journal willing to print his thoughts (p. 175). He has simply come too late. As an unpublished author, Ransom is rendered voiceless in the public sphere where he longs to speak. His frustration mirrors Olive’s, and his motives for chasing Verena are equally intricate, despite the fact that his end desire is the opposite of Olive’s. He wants to render Verena mute in public. To borrow the words of Mrs. Burrage, he intends to “shut her up altogether” (p. 290). We know Ransom has elaborate arguments for this position and that, like his feminist opponent, he is sincere. Neither Mr. Ransom nor Miss Chancellor is guilty of cant, but the Mississippian is also the indigent but proud survivor of a ruined South, where his mother and sisters still live in the penurious circumstances of defeat. Olive, too, lost her only two brothers in the war (an echo of James’s soldier siblings), but despite their deaths, as a northerner she didn’t lose a way of life. Ransom’s family lost everything but its gentility, and early in the novel, as he sits in Olive Chancellor’s parlor and waits for her to make her first appearance, the reader is introduced to the tinge of resentment that colors his experience: “He ground his teeth a little as he thought of the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him feel unhoused and underfed” (p. 16). Ransom is a man whose every move and word is affected by the memory of suffering, and like Olive, he has clutched at ideas that reflect his feelings of personal injury and an unrecognized, but nevertheless evident, hunger for vengeance.
Once Ransom’s attraction to Verena has become conscious love, his pursuit of her is increasingly described in terms of force. “In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality—of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature, which seemed to have no limit” (p. 227). Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack” (p. 337), that he is engaged in a “siege” (p. 357). By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” (p. 409) and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away” from Olive and the waiting public (p. 414). The war imagery is obvious. James is pointing to a second, far more personal version of the North/South conflict, but Mr. Ransom’s victory over Miss Chancellor, his conquest of Verena and her future in domestic bondage, isn’t achieved by “muscular force,” but by talk.
It is interesting to note that Ransom’s decision to chase Verena in earnest, despite his poverty and dim prospects, is fueled by the rather flimsy justification that one of his essays has at last found a publisher. A single publication does not change Ransom’s financial future, but he seizes upon it as a sign of a new public voice, which invigorates him in his quest to silence Verena’s. The newly acquired stature as public speaker gives credence to Ransom’s private utterance, a marriage proposal, just as his antifeminist ideas justify his very personal advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression that Olive feeds to Verena can’t contend with Basil’s verbal seduction. His most potent phrase turns out to be his accusation that Miss Tarrant isn’t real. He tells her that in her desire to please others, she has come to resemble a “‘preposterous puppet”’ commandeered from behind the scenes, and the suitor turns his love object’s own phrase against her: “ ‘It isn’t you, the least in the world’” (p. 313). What she originally believed was selfless devotion to a cause, a belief that allowed her to proclaim with pride, “It isn’t me,” is transformed through Ransom’s steady rhetorical assault into an accusation of fraud: “These words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation” (p. 354). Sentence by sentence, Ransom enters the inner sanctum of her doubts. Although he has touched on a truth and offers Verena the hope of “standing forth in ... freedom” (p. 313), his is finally a promise of continued captivity under another name. Verena’s fate is sad, but she is too wobbly and empty a character to be tragic, and Basil Ransom’s hunger for Verena Tarrant is augmented by the stature of his adversary, Olive Chancellor, who, unlike Verena, is truly his equal. In terms of the book’s politics, this irony creates a final and terrible resonance. It also redeems James from the charge that The Bostonians is somehow against women. It is a book uncomfortable with causes but deeply, intimately comfortable with women.
In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes, in her profound sorrow and humiliation, heroic:
As soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was (p. 412).
“In the arts,” James wrote, “feeling is always meaning” (quoted in Edel, Henry James: A Life, p. 250). For me, these words illuminate not only the novelist’s ars poetica but also James’s great strength as a writer. His experience of the world and his great empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs—religious, political, or philosophical—must inevitably become a form of lying.
Late in his life, he tried to explain his wariness of system to two politically engaged writers: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. As a member of the committee that had rejected a play by James, Shaw told its author in a letter, “People don’t want works of art from you. They want help, they want above all encouragement” (quoted in a note in Selected Letters, p. 380). In his response, James argued that “all direct ‘encouragement’—the thing you enjoin me on—encouragement of the short cut and say ‘artless’ order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading” (Selected Letters, p. 379). Wells had hurt James by publishing a cruel attack on the older writer in a satirical book called Boon, The Mind of the Race (1915), in which he had, among other t
hings, criticized his “view of life and literature.” To Wells, James wrote, “I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner” (Selected Letters, p. 430). And later in the same letter, he elaborated further, “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process” (p. 431). James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is “for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift” (p. 431).
James was probably too subtle for his correspondents, but the idea of “extension” makes sense to me because art and the world can’t be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art it creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means. I have lived with James’s characters and stories for many years and they do not leave me. They have become part of who I am, and I can’t help but feel that their creator, who worried over his paltry sales and lack of popularity with the reading public, would have been very happy to know how I feel. He would have been glad to know that his work has lasted and grown in importance, and that I am only one of many people who have been permanently altered by his books.