The Bostonians (65 page)
Authors: Henry James
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Classics, #Literary, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary Fiction
—from
The American Novel
(1940)
Questions
1. Do you believe that a marriage between Basil Ransom and Verena Tarrant can work out? Could it offer the partners as much happiness as grief?
2. Do the characters of Olive and Basil tell us anything about how ideas and passions can—in a single person—work with
and
against each other?
3. Is the novel’s treatment of feminism fair? Is there a suggestion that Olive’s feminism is a by-product of her perhaps implied tendency toward lesbianism and not valid outside that context?
4. How do you explain Verena? Does she dissociate when she lectures? Does a public self, created by public speech, subdue her private self? Is she a kind of puppet put through her paces by Olive, her ventriloquist?
5. Would it be fair to say that this is not just a novel about something that could have happened at a certain place and time, but that it is a novel about something that happens perennially, wherever there are humans, even if the manners and issues differ? If so, the book still has something to say to us about ourselves. But what?
For Further Reading
Writings by Henry James That Relate to
The Bostonians
The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces.
New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
Literary Criticism.
2 vols. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. Groups James’s criticism as essays on literature, American writers, English writers (vol. 1) and French writers, other European writers, and prefaces to the New York Edition (vol. 2).
The Notebooks of Henry James.
Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
The Princess Casamassima.
London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1977. This edition includes the author’s preface.
Selected Letters.
Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Selected Literary Criticism.
Edited by Morris Shapira. London: Heinemann, 1963.
Biographies
Edel, Leon.
Henry James:
A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. A condensed and revised version of Edel’s original five-volume biography (see directly below).
——.
Henry James: 1882-1895
,
The Middle Years.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962. Especially relevant to The Bostonians, this is volume 3 of Edel’s five-volume
Henry James,
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953-1972.
Horne, Philip, ed.
Henry James: A Life in Letters.
London: Allen Lane, 1999.
James, Alice. The Diary
of Alice James.
Edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964.
Lewis, R. W. B.
The Jameses: A Family Narrative.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.
Matthiessen, F. O.
The James Family.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.
Strouse, Jean.
Alice James: A Biography.
Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Criticism
Allen, Elizabeth.
A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James.
London: Macmillan, 1984.
Bell, Ian F. A., ed.
Henry James: Fiction as History.
London: Vision Press, and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984.
Castle, Terry. “Haunted by Olive Chancellor.” In
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modem Culture.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Dupee, F. W., ed.
The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays.
London: Allan Wingate, 1947.
Edel, Leon, ed.
Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Fetterley, Judith.
“The Bostonians:
Henry James’s Eternal Triangle.” In
The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction.
Blooming-ton and London: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Geismar, Maxwell David.
Henry James and the Jacobites.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
Goode, John, ed.
The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James.
London: Methuen, 1972.
Griffin, Susan M., and William Veeder, eds.
The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Habegger, Alfred.
Henry James and the “Woman Business.”
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kaplan, Fred.
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Lucas, John, ed. “Conservatism and Revolution in the 1880s.” In
Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: Essays.
London: Methuen, 1971.
Lustig, T. J.
Henry James and the Ghostly.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
McMurray, William. “Pragmatic Realism in
The Bostonians.”
In
Henry James: Modern Judgements,
edited by Tony Tanner. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Pippin, Robert B.
Henry James and Modern Moral Life.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Powers, Lyall H.
Henry James and the Naturalist Movement.
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971.
Tanner, Tony.
Henry James: The Writer and His Work.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.
Trilling, Lionel.
“The Princess Casamassima.”
In
The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society.
New York: Viking Press, 1950.
Westbrook, Wayne W. “Selah Tarrant à la Daudet.”
Henry James Review
5:2 (1984).
Bibliographies
Bradbury, Nicola.
An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James.
Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1987.
Edel, Leon, and Dan H. Laurence.
A Bibliography of Henry James.
1957. Third edition, revised with the assistance of James Rambeau. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Highest peak in the Harz Mountains in central Germany and legendary setting for witches’ spring Walpurgis Night revelry; famously described as such in part 1 of Goethe’s
Faust
(1808).
An impudent, shameless woman of loose morals; the allusion is to the infamous wife of King Ahab of Israel as recounted in the Bible in books 1 and 2 of Kings.
Street in southern Manhattan in the financial Wall Street neighborhood.
The Charles River, the longest in Massachusetts; divides the cities of Cambridge and Boston.
To flirt with; to court.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of England’s most important poets of the Romantic period.
Actress connected with music-hall or theatrical entertainments.
Auguste Comte (1798—1857), French mathematician and philosopher; he founded Positivism, a system of philosophy that recognizes only positive facts and observable phenomena.
Then-unfashionable area located between Boston and Roxbury, south of the Back Bay.
Hired four-wheeled coach drawn by two horses.
Horse-drawn trolley car.
The
Boston Evening Transcript,
a popular local paper published from 1830 to 1941.
Set form of words or conventionalized statement in which something is defined or declared.
A look of haughtiness; the reference is to the Roman goddess Juno, female counterpart of Jupiter.
The tragic gypsy dancer heroine of Victor Hugo’s 1831 French novel about fifteenth-century Paris,
Notre-Dame de Paris
(The
Hunchback of Notre Dame).
In touch, in connection with; a state in which mesmeric action can be exercised by one person on another
(Oxford English Dictionary).
Dressed up with vulgar finery.
Those who deal in quack remedies.
Character based on the nineteenth-century spiritualist Cora L. V. Hatch, one of whose lectures James attended in 1863.
Possibly a reference to Brook Farm, a Fourieresque community in Roxbury (see chapter IV, note 3, and chapter V, note 1).
Reference to literary or political salons.
American travel writer and translator, famous for his English rendition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Faust
in the early 1870s.
Heavy curtains used as doors (French).
Reduction to the absurd (Latin): disproof of a hypothesis by revealing the absurdity or incongruity of its logical conclusion.
Greek biographer of the first century A.D.
Shade or tone (French); figuratively, a subtle or slight variation or difference in meaning, expression, feeling, etc.
Range, span (French); figuratively, import or consequence.
Social midst (French).
Of the Chinese (French); here, in Chinese style.
Outbreaks.
Dabbler (French); here, a lover of the arts, or someone who has a superficial interest in them.
Island in Acadia National Park, off the coast of Maine.
Child of theater or circus parents (French); one who follows in parents’ professional footsteps.
Women’s apartments in a household; any building set apart for women.
On the whole (Latin); totally, completely.
Private life (French).
Reference to the composers Franz Schubert (Austrian, 1797-1828) and Felix Mendelssohn (German, 1809-1847).
Sixteenth-century (Italian); art in Italy in the 1500s was marked by a reversion to classical forms.
Small curios (French).
Prophetess, fortune-teller, witch.
Outcome or conclusion (French); in literary terms, the unraveling of a plot.
Literally, protected (French); a favorite; here, one whose career is sponsored by someone of influence.
Newspaper founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley (1811-1872), an American editor and politician who advocated social reform; a member of his editorial staff was the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller (see Introduction).
A consolidation of the city’s principal social welfare agencies.
Conservative German newspaper founded in 1874.
Recurring element in a work of art (French).
Common table for guests at a hotel or restaurant (French).
Glass of beer or wine (German).
At full length (Latin).
Ethan Allen Andrews (1787-1858) and Solomon Stoddard (1800-1847), authors of a popular book of Latin grammar.
One-on-one, private conversation (French).
Female improviser (French).
North-south thoroughfare that runs through the center of Manhattan; at the time of the novel, very upscale and lined with expensive homes.
Towns in Middlesex County, in eastern Massachusetts.
Arcadia, a mountain area in southern Greece; in this context, represents pastoral paradise.
Roman goddess of handicrafts, the arts, wisdom, and war.
Three of the most renowned universities in the world; as mentioned here they are, respectively, in England (founded in the twelfth century), Germany (1737), and Italy (1222).
Reference to Gore Hall, where Harvard’s library was first housed; the building was a simplified imitation of an edifice at King’s College of Cambridge University in England (see chapter XXV, note 1).
Authoritative body of Jewish civil and ceremonial traditional law.
Small, two-person sofa (French).
Keeping secret.
Chore, thankless task (French).
An affront to her slighted beauty (Latin); a hanging look. The reference is to an episode in the epic
Aeneid
by the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) in which Juno, wife of the god Jupiter, is angry when Paris, who has been charged with choosing the most beautiful goddess among three (the other contenders are Venus and Minerva), awards the prize to Venus. This contest was a prelude to the Trojan War (see chapter XII, note 2).
Evening party (French).
Foremost and largest restaurant in the United States in the nineteenth century, named for and operated by Swiss immigrant Lorenzo Delmonico.
Explanation (French).
I have resigned myself (French).
A top venue for theater and opera from 1854 to 1926, located in New York City at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place.
Menu.