The Bostonians [Paperback]

... of American history. That was Henry james, the mordant celebrant of the society he loved to flee. Henry James was both more and less than a Man of his times; he was a demi-god of observation, aloofly scrutinizing the foibles of everyone around him, a perpetual onlooker perhaps because he never found a means to participate. I suspect he made many people uncomfortable, particularly later in his career when one might well have dreaded becoming a character in his next novel.

"The Bostonians" is an early product of James's observatory. At first glance, it's an elaborately funny satire of Brahmin Boston and its elite intellectual reformers. Note that "funny" contains "fun". The Bostonians is a FUN book! If more readers approached James expecting to have fun, there would be less misperception of his books as 'difficult.' For biting satire, the Henry James of "The Bostonians" could go round for round with his contemporary Mark Twain. But "The Bostonians" is also a pioneering 'psychological' novel. The narrative is certainly "third person omniscient" but James artfully fits that narrative into the mentalities of the two principal characters - Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom - as penetratingly as fingers in a glove.

Olive is a Bostonian of 'sufficient means', with access to the upper reaches of a class she despises. Bluntly -- though James is never blunt -- she's a man-hating closeted Lesbian. (Anachronistic qualifiers! But in a novel of 1884, the intimate portrayal of such a character's mind was beyond the skill of any other writer.) Olive is neurotically shy, perhaps agoraphobic, and acutely sensitive to any antipathy. She's also a mistress of manipulation, a clever, bitter, lonely woman, quite easy for the reader to dislike, and her interest in the young beauty, Verena Tarrant, is ultimately more selfish than idealistic. Olive is of course an ardent feminist, a 'suffragette', and her small circle of associates are recognizable as archetypes of the feminists of the Gilded Age in America. Curiously, Olive is also the character whose psychology most closely matches that of Henry James, the acute observer forever on the fringe of others' lives.

Basil Ransom is a Southerner, a veteran of the Civil War consumed with frustration at the loss of his plantation wealth, bitterly nostalgic for the chivalric ante-bellum way of life, though the ugly facts of the "peculiar institution" of slavery never seem to color his nostalgia. Basil is stately, tall, handsome, genteel ... and blatantly narcissistic, an impractical fool who fails utterly as a lawyer in New York City, a place he loathes. Nevertheless, he considers himself something of a reformer also, a reactionary prophet who imagines that his essays in fringe publications will somehow someday bring society to its senses and restore the gallant manliness of the Old South. He is, of course, scornful of feminism, a blatant male chauvinist (Anachronistic terms again!) who seriously argues that Verena's destiny is to be his ornament. Sly Henry James, nevertheless, presents Basil quite sympathetically; incautious readers might take the ardent male as the 'hero' of the narrative, might take his side in the competition he wages against Olive for possession of Verena Tarrant. Believe me, that would be a sadly superficial interpretation.

The apex of the romantic triangle in this novel is the immature beauty, Verena Tarrant, the prize for which Olive and Basil will wage their psychological battles. To be anachronistic once more, she is an 'abused' child, a victim of manipulative parents and painfully susceptible to manipulation from both would-be possessive lovers.

A hundred and some years have passed since James invented Basil Ransom, and it's difficult to imagine how readers might have perceived that prickly character in the late 1800s. Today, he seems odiously familiar, the stiff-necked die-hard reactionary, the Lost Cause mythologizer. His 'gentle persuasions' addressed to Verena are pure rant and cant; his little essays in reactionary ideology might have earned him a bright career on the Talk Radio of 2010. When I read "The Bostonians" first, in the 1960s, I'm afraid I was too green and optimistic to recognize the pertinence of James's insights into American character. I thought the book was a depiction of a quaint by-gone era. It's not. It's now!

[Beware! If you don't wish to know how the contest ends, don't read this paragraph!]
The celebrated last sentence of The Bostonians, which projects a future of 'tears' for Verena, is not ambiguous in the least, whatever any critic has written about it. Only a reader ludicrously ignorant of marriage and of abusive relationships could fail to comprehend that Verena will indeed have tears to shed. Her ardent deliverer, Ransom, will soon enough wallow in his own futility. Poverty and frustration will overwhelm him, and he WILL blame her. Ransom will become, in remarkably few unwritten pages, the brutal domestic tyrant and wife-abuser that we modern readers recognize implicitly in his character. In short, this is a tragic ending craftily disguised in the uproarious humor of Verena's elopement with the gallant Basil.

It's interesting to compare The Bostonians with another 'feminist' novel of the same decade, George Gissing's "The Odd Women", which also depicts involves a romantic conflict between a man and a woman of opposing wills. Gissing's novel is quite good, a well-crafted narrative with vivid and plausible portraitures, but it remains external. Next to The Bostonians, Gissing's work seems quite old-fashioned. When I first read The Bostonians for a college literature class, the professor declared rhapsodically that it was" the greatest novel of the 19th C." I silently scoffed then, but now I suspect he had a point.

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