A Plea for Eros (15 page)

The apparent contradiction reveals Jamesian semantics. In each case, he is speaking to a particular friend, and his imparted wisdom reflects his understanding of each person’s psychological needs. James must have felt that Grace’s abstract effusions needed taming. On the other hand, he was giving Hugh paternal literary advice. In the world of James, there are no absolutes, no final truths, no static realities. The solidity he urges on Grace Norton is only a relative one. Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect. In
The Bostonians,
Henry James turns the public and private inside out, and the engines behind that reversal are external and internal—a particular cultural atmosphere and sexual passion.

In terms of setting, the novel moves away from the “organized privacy” of Olive’s rooms at the beginning of the novel to a public building at its very end: Boston’s Music Hall, where Verena is scheduled to speak and where the story reaches its piercing crescendo. In between are scenes that take place in private, semi-private, and semi-public places. The second environment is Miss Peabody’s dim, drab, and “featureless” apartment, where Mrs. Farrinder is supposed to address a gathering of the sympathetic. The reader’s introduction to Miss Birdseye (a character all of New England took as a swipe at Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne’s sister and sister-in-law of the novelist) has a comic pathos that well illustrates the novel’s worried strain between the general and the particular: “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.” Even poor Miss Birdseye’s face has become impersonal and unfocused, as empty and unfurnished as the rooms she occupies, an interior that causes the bourgeois Olive a pang and makes “her wonder whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm for humanity.” As the novel’s most extreme altruist, Miss Peabody suffers from a loss of self.

The far more complex Olive Chancellor wishes with her whole being to emulate the selflessness of the aging abolitionist, lo escape the pains, rigors, and tormented confinement of her own body. For Olive, however, the Emancipation of Women is far more than another good cause to support; it is a deeply personal echo of her own psychological and sexual imprisonment. Even before she lays eyes on Verena, the reader knows that Miss Chancellor has dreamed that she might “know intimately some
very
poor girl.” The shopgirls she approaches, however, are wary and confused by her attentions, and inevitably mixed up with some young “Charlie,” an impediment Olive comes to “dislike … extremely.” Olive Chancellor is clearly in love, and her love for Verena conveys the hunger of sexual longing, but it would be a serious misreading of the novel to suppose either that Olive and Verena are “doing it” behind the scenes or that Olive has fully admitted to herself that the desperation she feels about Verena is connected to her desire for physical love.

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.” 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.”

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 bulk of the narrative, the most compelling voice belongs to Verena. She is the enchantress whose speeches hold her listeners “under the charm,” 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.” 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.” Olive similarly imagines that her new friend’s wonderful qualities have “dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents.” 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!” she is both repeating 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, Terrant 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 Setah 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—Mathias 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 he 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 that privilege.” 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 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 peoples private lives: “For this ingenuous son of the age [Pardon] all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for the newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business.” 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” 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. Verenas 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.” 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 spinster. 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!” 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 assume 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. 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.” 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.” 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.