The Bostonians
by Henry James
♠
The great arguments of the modern era are, in
essence, contests of will. Anyone familiar with the cultural warfare of this new
century knows that the armies on either side of the divide display the golden
standards of morality and reason. One cannot say that those who win truly have
these benevolent forces behind their backs, surging them onward and upward to
victory, for morality is a sticky thing and reason can be manipulated for all
causes, evidenced by the fact that each side believes it is the one with higher
morals and better reasoning. Some might argue that despite the occasional
aberration, the pure lights of reason and morality will emerge from the morass
of imitators, and win out in history’s march toward progress. But any fool can
see that it is a simple thing to “reverse” history’s course, if that is what
you call depriving certain people of rights afforded to others, justifying
one’s actions with religious superstitions, and crushing the poor under the
heels of the wealthy. No, the side that wins has the stronger will, the larger
capacity to do what is necessary in the naked struggle for power. Sometimes the
side we prefer gets the upper hand, and sometimes it doesn’t.
It is the vulgar imposition of one’s will upon
another that is examined in The Bostonians, the tale of a group of suffragettes
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The subject matter is an especially
suitable vehicle because it brings the theoretical debates of the day, the ones
we normally find in newspaper editorials, into the realm of human existence—for
as anyone who has had parents, or participated in a relationship, or leered
longingly at some lithe young thing knows, no greater battle of wills has
existed, and continues to exist, then that between the sexes. The subject is
doubly suitable because it brings to the fore the friction between the
individual and society, which is invariably stoked by the question of marriage,
the thematic pillar of novels and plays from that era. The prospect of such a
novel may sound dreadfully dull, and it seems justifiable to be tired of such
ruminations. If we have read The Doll’s House once, then we assume we know what
is at stake, the moral of the story, and that there is no need to return to
that house, which we left with Nora some time ago. Not only is this a fallacy,
it is beside the point. Marriage and societal expectations are interesting to
James because they illuminate how individuals cling to ideas of what life
should be and how they should live it, and in the striving, shut out
contradictory voices and gloss over the truer aspects of their nature.
It must be said that The Bostonians is also delightful
to read. “Delightful” only because of James’s obvious
artistic excellence. The language is so exact, the characters so finely
calibrated, and the wit so mercilessly sharp, that it seems as if James could
cut diamonds with his pen. While other great writers may be as handy with their
tool, James is somewhat alone in his style, and while a Kafka, say, uses his
talents to shape dream-like monoliths of horror, James carves elaborate
ornamental facades, all in a sunny and loquacious manner, lulling the reader to
believe he is on a pleasant cruise when in fact danger lurks on either side of
the river, peeping out from the bushes. Perhaps it is a testament to an age
with better manners, that when James twists the knife into the reader’s heart,
he at least does so with a smile.
James’s style could be derided by the modern
reader as “old-fashioned.” This description is best represented by how he
allows suggestion and blatant exposition to play alongside one another (here, in his minor phase.) If the reader at any point wonders, “I wonder what he means by that,” James will rejoin the next instant by saying, “Well, it means this.” James’s style flies
in the face of that abused and overemployed maxim of
modern writing, “Show, but don’t tell.” Such a rule leads writers to compete to
see who can be as reticent as Hemingway, and the bad ones, the bulk of them,
are as cut off from human existence as Nick Adams himself, their words shining
like the dead trout in Nick’s hands. Furthermore, as William Gass has it, James is “a nuancer,
and believed in the art of qualification, the art of making finer and finer
distinctions (an art that some have said is the special province of
philosophy.)” In other words, James is not a mere storyteller, and so while his
characters speak rather prettily and are continually going for aimless walks,
it would be a mistake to view him solely as a product of his times—he is his
own kind of novelist.
In the following, we can see how James uses
exposition and detail to seamlessly combine physical traits, characterization and
thematic undercurrents in one long stroke, as he introduces the reader to Miss
Birdseye, an old abolitionist who is part of the suffragette movement:
“She was a little old lady, with an enormous head…
She had a sad, soft, pale face, which looked as if it had been soaked, blurred
and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of
philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their
transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon
them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of
old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details. In her
large countenance her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of
a smile, a kind of installment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that
she would smile more if she had time… Miss Birdseye’s apartment…completed Miss
Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to render that office to this
essentially formless old woman, who had no more outline than a bundle of hay.
But the bareness of her long, loose empty parlor told that she had never had
any needs but moral needs, and that all her history had been that of her
sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot glare of gas, which made it
look white and featureless.”
It might be argued that this is James at his most
subversively nasty. Some way to treat an old woman who spent her life
emancipating slaves! But there is a point as well, which is to show the fate of
someone who gives herself completely to the greater good, who is “in love only with causes:” she is
characterless, featureless, and lacking any trace of the humanity she is trying
to save.
The lead suffragette is Olive Chancellor,
a young woman “full of rectitude,” whose smile is like “a thin ray of moonlight
resting upon the wall of a prison,” so willfully trapped is she in the world of
causes, her severe conscience, and the moral duties she performs on behalf of
her oppressed sex. Olive, like Miss Birdseye, is an ascetic, renouncing earthly
pleasures for the movement, and stuffing her own petty emotions and desires
down in the darkest cellars of her existence. But while Miss Birdseye is
innocently oblivious to other aspects of existence, Olive suffers from a
hyperconsciousness, and is so beholden to the cause that she takes every
opportunity to examine and chastise herself, to rub away from her soul, like
dead skin cells, all that is not in unity with the mission. In doing so,
however, she misses so much, misinterprets her own motives and moods; she can
hardly admit that she loathes Miss Birdseye’s barren apartment, and then hates
herself for wondering “whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary
part of the enthusiasm for humanity.” She is as capable of scrutinizing herself
as she is of deflecting her own thoughts and feelings. Or as Mrs. Luna, Olive’s
complacent and shallow sister, puts it, “The amount of thought they give to
their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!”
From the first, we are also introduced to Basil
Ransom, Olive’s cousin. Basil is newly emigrated to the Northeast from
war-ravaged
The rub comes in the form of Verena
Tarrant, slightly younger than Olive, and new to the suffragette scene. Upon
her slim shoulders, however, rests the fate of the entire movement’s success,
for she is a gifted speaker, with a voice like silver bells and “an air of
artless enthusiasm, of personal purity,” whose nature is “to emit those
charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young attitudes, to shake her
braided locks like a naiad rising from the waves, to please everyone who came
near her, and to be happy that she pleased.”
Olive seizes on Verena,
believing that with the right tutelage and rigorous discipline, Verena can harness her gift and bring freedom to women
across the country. And we are led to believe that indeed Verena
would, because she provides some sweetness and freshness to the otherwise
austere and insipid movement. But it just so happens
that Basil, among many other men, is one of her admirers. It is Basil’s belief
that she was not made to serve the braying masses, “the vulgar multitude”—Verena is meant for love. He, like Olive, attempts to mold Verena into what he believes is her finest calling; he
wants her to shed herself of false ideas, enjoy the fruits of life, and become
his happy wife.
Thus plays out a wicked battle of wills for the
girl’s affection. Verena is the perfect setting for
the two sides to wage war, the best battleground, for she is perfectly innocent
and neutral. She has an extraordinary sympathy for all arguments, she offers
herself up to anyone, “only shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a
person in whom we have perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject
us to some sensation.” But unfortunately, her very happiness and freedom are at
stake, which are left in the unscrupulous hands of others, and we can only hope
she finds a third way between what can only be described as two evils.
While it may appear that James has a rather
cynical view of the suffragette movement and its members, it is important to
note that Basil’s views of manhood and domestic bliss do not escape scrutiny.
In other words, each army is somewhat ridiculous. In Olive’s and Basil’s
attempts to convince Verena on the right way to live,
and on the right ideas to have, we see that nothing in reality is as regulated
as a debate club; it is inescapable that in any argument about how societies
and individuals should be, we inject our own prejudices and personal ambitions,
idiotic beliefs and invidious traits to cloud the issue at hand. That is why
most arguments of the kind end in personal insults and stabs at our character,
and it is almost as if James is lamenting the fact that the future of human progress
depends on humans themselves. The only person who emerges unscathed from
James’s scorn, surprisingly, is Miss Birdseye, who has no desire to win, to
possess Verena; as it turns out, the people whose
causes we admire most are those who would prefer to lose, to not fight back
when their opponent brandishes the batons and water hoses, rather than bare
their hideous fangs.
With a great writer like James, it is possible to
pick up any volume from his massive oeuvre and be overwhelmed by its largesse
of riches. The reader is always tempted to scold anyone who is reading anything
else. However, despite how engaging and good a book it is, a “page-turner” one
might call it (since when did this become one of the highest praises we bestow
upon a book?), it must be said that it feels as if there is something missing
from The Bostonians. Perhaps the only reason why the reader would notice it is
if he is familiar with Isabel Archer, another James character who had
definitive ideas about how she should live, and how she should be free, only to
end up chained. While we suffer as Isabel unwittingly treads the road that
leads to tragic denouement, and beseech her to change course, we are somewhat
aloof to Verena’s predicament, and watch her with
interest and dismay, but less emotion. She is too much of a type, while Isabel
is a much more complicated character, almost a very person.
Still, there is something moving, something
recognizable, in the way Verena, Olive and Basil
cannot see themselves the way James and the reader can see all around them,
that there are innumerable things they are unaware of, that they don’t know why
they do what they do, and will not realize it until is too late. It gives the
uncomforting hope that one day we will look back on the raging arguments of the
day and see all the mistakes we were making. As James puts it, “These hours of
backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the
past in the light of the present, with the reason of things, like unobserved
finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind
them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.”
—RS