Henry James, 1890

ARETE writes:

Thank you so much for your recommendation of Henry James’s novel The Bostonians (also discussed here, here, here and here.) I just finished it and I am reeling. I partly read it and partly listened to it through Librivox while I did my housework. I highly recommend Librivox to all my friends and you might pass that on to your readers and other “thinking housewives” whose hands are busy at their work.

It was these lines, referring to the wealthy suffragist Olive, that struck me the most from the first book, end of chapter 20:

[T]he very essence of the feminine lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity, if need be, of misconduct. …. Men must take their turn, men must pay!

For a long time now, I have thought that feminism has at its heart a rejection of the idea of virtue (and well that makes sense as virtue comes from the Latin for man.) For instance, humility is not something that a woman is supposed to have anymore — only men are supposed to be humble. Nor are women (according to feminism) supposed to be modest or kind or patient, but men are. In short, women have already been “virtuous enough” and they might sin heartily, egregiously, as they have already” expiated in advance an eternity of misconduct.” And to look around us I suppose we have entered into that brave new world now: into the “eternity of misconduct.” Now, thanks to feminism, women can behave badly without shame.

I find myself wanting James to tell us more about Basil’s ideas and the fact that he does not makes me wonder if they would have been obvious to his readers and not worth spelling out to them as much as he has to explain these new-fangled ideas of Olive’s.

I am also very much intrigued by his interest in the notion of private vs. public life. Feminism apparently views “public life” as all there is and women who reside totally in private as “slaves.” It made me think of Emily Dickinson’s poem:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Basil was determined to save Verena, to “ransom” her (like Christ does for his bride, the church) from that “admiring bog” to save her in such an intense way that moderns can’t understand. He said she was made “for privacy.” We have almost no concept of home life anymore so we immediately think of sex . Just about all we do in privacy is sleep and care for hygiene. No longer is there a private world, a home with conversations and thoughts and emotional support. We have outsourced all of our private life to institutions- most of whom are profit seeking. We now pay therapists to listen to us, and massage therapists to rub our backs as there is no woman at home to listen and care and touch. We have lost the notion that private life is the foundation of public life. Public life is what it is now for want of private life.

When Basil Ransom stands at the door in the Music Hall we should not see him as just some stubborn guy (whats the big idea? just let the girl give her spiel and then you can skip town together!) No, Basil knows that to let her get on that stage is the beginning of the journey that ends where we are today. And it has little to do with what she might say and much more to do with the public nature of the act. He would no more stand by and let her be exposed to “the public” for a short time before they left anymore than he would allow her to be sexually misused while he waited.

I also was struck with what Basil Ransom has to say about suffering when Verena seems to say that women have suffered more than men in Chapter 24:

The suffering of women is the suffering of all humanity,’ Ransom returned. ‘ Do you think any movement is going to stop that—or all the lectures from now to doomsday ? We are born to suffer—and to bear it, like decent people.’

 Oh, I adore heroism ! ‘ Verena interposed.

‘And as for women,’ Ransom went on, ‘ they have one source of happiness that is closed to us—the consciousness that their presence here below lifts half the load of our suffering.’

As Confederate civil war veteran, Ransom must know a thing or two about men’s particular suffering but he does not insist that men’s is more difficult. He only suggests that men and women share life’s inevitable burdens together instead of blaming each other for their sufferings (or running from them and pretending that a life without suffering is possible) .

The final lines of the book were shocking to me at first, I must admit:

‘ Ah, now I am glad!’ said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.

But read in the light of the discussion of suffering as an inevitable part of life for men and women it suggests that Verena gave up the empty promises of her speaking tours, of utopian idealists (“communists and vegetarians”) for the hard truth of spousal love: that is difficulties, poverty, exposure to danger and death all shared together.

Olive Chancellor, her name suggests both peace (olive branch) and war (The Battle of Chancellorsville was the the second bloodiest battle of the civil war, a brilliant confederate victory but a Pyrrhic one as they lost Jackson there). She wants women to be “emancipated” from their captors but doesn’t mind keeping a young naive woman captive herself in her quest for the “peace” that she assumes will come when men no longer rule the world.

I discovered from Wikipedia that St. Verena, cared for the wounds of soldiers as a nurse and especially concerned herself with teaching young girls.

Please forgive my disjointed thoughts there at the end. I thought that this was a brilliant book and I eagerly await any further book suggestions.

Laura writes:

I am so glad you enjoyed the book, and thank you for your excellent contribution to the discussion of The Bostonians, the greatest novel ever written about feminism and one of the greatest masterpieces of American literature.

The Bostonians was published in 1886 and was initially serialized in Century magazine. For those unfamiliar with the book, the plot involves a young girl, Verena Tarrant, the daughter of a mesmerist and quack, who has been taken under the wing of a Bostonian bluestocking, Olive Chancellor. The older woman is dedicated to women’s rights and becomes enchanted with Verena, whom she wants to be the spellbinding figurehead of her movement. Verena has the ability to mesmerize crowds with her otherworldly charm and innocence.

Basil Ransom, a cousin of Olive, is a Mississippi lawyer trying to make his way in New York. He falls in love with Verena. The story revolves around his efforts to take her from the intoxicating subculture of suffragettes and utopian reformers.

In Chapter 24, Ransom tells Verena that her movement is part of “the most damnable feminisation” of the world:

I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is — a very queer and partly very base mixture — that is what I want to preserve or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt.

In Chapter 21, we are introduced to Ransom’s general outlook and to his ambitions, which are seriously constrained by the fact that his family lost its fortunes in the Civil War and by his responsibility to support his widowed mother and sister. Ransom exemplifies Southern chivalry and Roman stoicism. His favorite authors include Thomas Carlyle and De Tocqueville. He is anti-democratic and deeply skeptical of all the promises of liberalism. James says, “I will not attempt a complete description of his ill-starred views,” and that is wise. The essential point is that Ransom is opposed to modern egalitarianism. He is the quintessential modern traditionalist.

Ransom would like to be a public statesman or an intellectual of some kind:

He had always had a desire for public life; to cause one’s ideas to be embodied in national conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment.

But he is unlikely to succeed. Editors reject his articles. Turning down one of his essays on a paper on “the rights of minorities,” an editor tells him his opinions are about three hundred years out of date. Ransom reflects:

The disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old, but too new.

James wrote The Bostonians too soon as well. He was way ahead of his time. But the book demonstrates that feminism was hardly novel to the sixties and seventies. In penetrating the psychology of modern feminism, particularly in his insights into Verena, who falls under the sway of Olive not so much for intellectual reasons but because she craves to be liked and admired, he issued a prophetic warning. Ransom believes the premises of feminism to be so much tinsel. If Verena were not so attractive, she would be laughed off the speaker’s podium. The tears James describes at the end refer to the unhappiness Verena will inevitably suffer in reality, away from the pseudo-reality of the lady reformers from Boston. James saw feminism for what it was: a flight from hardship, self-sacrifice and heroism.

                                               — Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

This is from almost twenty years ago. I like to think I was ahead of the curve in appreciating the full radicalism (I mean, the full anti-modern radicalism) of The Bostonians.

A reader writes:

Over the years I’ve pondered over the character of Basil and how he brought Verena out of her attachment to public acclaim and exposure and to his northern feminist cousin, Olive. I’ve thought about it in terms of “what if.” His character, combined with the insight I got from watching The Singing Revolution (on how the Estonians regained their culture and freed themselves from Soviet oppression without bloodshed), has got me to thinking.

What if each man, like Basil, felt he belonged to a special breed of people that he must preserve, through his masculine drive to throw off oppression, rescue the helpless and occupy his won territory. What if there were a way to throw off the feminist influence by first living your culture. In the case of Estonia, the countrymen decided they would sing their historical national songs and wear their historical national costumes at the festival each year. After they had sung the “stupid songs” in the festival (which is what they called the Soviet songs) they surprised the officials by bursting into loud renditions of all their cultural songs. Though the soldiers tried to drown it all out with their loudspeakers, they could not overcome 20,000 voices.

The Estonians were not allowed to fly their flag, so they just displayed the colors separately, on poles, or in the way they dressed. They declared Estonian the official language and only spoke that language, so that the Russians that occupied their land could barely do business. They also issued their own national passports to the Estonians. When the Russians surrounded the parliament building (all caught on tape) the Estonians, without weapons, advanced six people deep with arms linked, to trap them and their tanks so that they could not move. The Russians had to negotiate with them to allow them a pathway to escape out of the building. The camera shows the tanks and the soldiers with their guns, running away from thousands of unarmed people.

Now how this is connected with Henry James’ Southern gentleman, could be interesting. When I first read the book I was a little worried that Basil might be fascinated enough with his cousin’s cause, to go along with it. Instead of coming into the world of the woman he loved, he somehow got her to come into his. In a sense, he had his own language and still flew his own flag.

The north may have won the war, but the South was still in the hearts of its people. I have to smile as I think of the defeated Southerner coming north and quietly conquering the agenda of his cousin Olive and the parents that were using Verena for their own sensational show. When I read it many years ago, I thought of the Southern generational lands and customs that were, and are still, so cherished, that they can exist in the hearts of the people and be transported with them to any situation. The Estonians kept their beliefs and their traditions locked up in their hearts, and their flags hidden in their closets for 20 years or more. They really always had a country, but it was demoralized and discouraged.

Please follow and like us: