February '13 / James Reading: The Bostonians

[Scheherazade]

This month we will be reading The Bostonians by Henry James.

Please share your comments and questions in this thread.

The book is available for free at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=the+bostonians

[Gladys]

A few chapters in and the reading seems easy - for Henry James. What Maisie knew was just as easy whereas The Ambassadors, for instance, was still hard going almost half-way through the book, while Washington Square was simply pedestrian until...

Olive Chancellor - the honest, seething, young spinster - is fascinating.

[Scheherazade]

I will probably start by Friday or so.

I am glad you are enjoying it so far, Gladys :)

[Gladys]

Olive Chancellor is beginning to remind me of young Emma with her naive protégé, Hariette, in Jane Austen's novel by that name. I disliked Emma and that novel, despite loving two previous Austen novels. But Olive is hardly Emma in other respects.

The urbane Basil Ransom, conservative and a little combative, remains problematic for me.

[Dark Muse]

The urbane Basil Ransom, conservative and a little combative, remains problematic for me.

Problematic in what why? I am just curious to know, do you mean it is problematic in your ability to like him? Or formulate an opinion of him, or do you find his character difficult to believe within the story?

I was not quite sure what to make of the scene with Varena, I was never quite clear if she was intended to just be a public speaker, or if in fact she was actually meant to be a some kind of channel/medium, as the moments leading up to the speech with her farther putting her into an almost hypnotic state, and her initial incoherent mumbling, as well as the others vague discretion of her speeches as being "inspired" it seemed almost as if she was intended to be invoking some other spiritual power to speak through her. She was also called "gifted" I did not know if this referred to her having some supernatural power, or if she was just meant to be a really talented speaker.

She was also I believe at one point referred to as a mountebank.

[Gladys]

Problematic in what why? I am just curious to know, do you mean it is problematic in your ability to like him? Or formulate an opinion of him...

Yes to both. I don't know what to make of Basil Ransom yet.



It was only after much experience he made the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so energetic as he.

I get the faint impression he's heartless.


I was not quite sure what to make of the scene with Varena, I was never quite clear if she was intended to just be a public speaker, or if in fact she was actually meant to be a some kind of channel/medium, as the moments leading up to the speech with her farther putting her into an almost hypnotic state, and her initial incoherent mumbling, as well as the others vague discretion of her speeches as being "inspired" it seemed almost as if she was intended to be invoking some other spiritual power to speak through her. She was also called "gifted" I did not know if this referred to her having some supernatural power, or if she was just meant to be a really talented speaker.

She was also I believe at one point referred to as a mountebank.

What to make of Verena? Does the following help?



The girl herself would have been the most interested person in the world if she had not been the most resigned; she took all that was given her and was grateful, and missed nothing that was withheld; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eagerness and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about temperaments and she loved her daughter; but she was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had at her side the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had ever bloomed on earth.

[Dark Muse]

Yes to both. I don't know what to make of Basil Ransom yet.

It was only after much experience he made the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so energetic as he.

I get the faint impression he's heartless

For me at least thus far Ransom is one of those characters of whom while I might not agree with (and maybe not get along with if I knew them personally) but cannot help but to amuse me in some way. I like his character, though I don't know if I would like him much as a person, there is something I find appealing about him. I like the sort of contradictory element he adds, if that makes much sense. But the way in which he is set against his cousin in their differing view points, and his nature being opposing to her own. He makes things interesting.


What to make of Verena? Does the following help?



The girl herself would have been the most interested person in the world if she had not been the most resigned; she took all that was given her and was grateful, and missed nothing that was withheld; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eagerness and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about temperaments and she loved her daughter; but she was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had at her side the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had ever bloomed on earth.


As I read further the book offered more of an explanation about the channeling business, and her role during the gathering. As it seems her further is in fact meant to be an actual spiritual medium while her mother's family are inclined toward being inspirational speakers, so it seems that Verena is a mix of the two. Her father likes to put on a show, and Verena inherited an ability for gifted speaking from her mother's side of the family.

[Gladys]

As I read further the book offered more of an explanation about the channeling business, and her role during the gathering.

Later on, there is a suggestion from Verena herself that she gains simple relaxation from her father's occult efforts rather than something akin to channelling.

[Scheherazade]

I have only read Book 1/Chapter 4 yet so haven't met Verena but so far I find Basil quite interesting. Like DM said, he may not be someone I might agree with on every single issue but there seems to be some kind of entertaining quality about him. He seems very laid back and able to look at things with humour.

[Dark Muse]

Does anyone else suspect that Olive may have feelings/intentions towards Verena that go beyond just friendship?

[Gladys]

Does anyone else suspect that Olive may have feelings/intentions towards Verena that go beyond just friendship?

Olive Chancellor admits to jealousy in that she would wish, against her better judgement, to keep Verena from young males - and suitors in particular. That is hardly surprising. We are told Olive considers Verena a perfect complement to herself: she has the intellect and passion, Verena the oratory and surpassing grace.

There is something stifling in Jane Austen's Emma, and even more so in Olive, the suffragette. But Olive is righteous! As I wrote on another thread, the opening paragraph of the novel has widowed sister Adeline saying of Olive Chancellor:


...she wouldn't for the world expose herself to telling a fib. She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude.

[Dark Muse]

In reading this book I cannot help but think of the "Boston Marriages" as they were called which were quite common around this time. In which it would be socially accepted that young women would live together (though with the expectation only until they found a man to marry) but in many cases the women in these arrangements had no interest in men and marriage and formed romantic partisanships with each other.

I also recall (if I remember correctly) that early on in the book Olive is described as someone whom was meant to be a spinster, she was seen as someone who would never marry. And there was also the comment about Ransom, when he questioned why Olive invited him if she was not going to like him and she said she asked him to come for Mrs. Luna.

I find Olive's attachment to Verena to be quite distributing at times, in fact there were moments in which Olive does seem almost stalker like it was particularly disinteresting when Olive expressed her desire to isolate Verena from her parents (as well as her friends) and control her Verana should associate with, and mold her into Olive's ideal of what/who Verena should be. These are things that today would be considered as red flags in a relationship.

Emma was over involved in her good natured desire to help her friend, but Olive comes off as kind of cookoo to me. It would be a bit annoying to have a friend like Emma, but it would be a little frightening to have a friend like Olive.

[Gladys]

And there was also the comment about Ransom, when he questioned why Olive invited him if she was not going to like him and she said she asked him to come for Mrs. Luna.

This puzzled me until, chapters later, I learned that Adeline Luna was widowed. Or have I missed an earlier reference to her marital status?

[Dark Muse]

This puzzled me until, chapters later, I learned that Adeline Luna was widowed. Or have I missed an earlier reference to her marital status?

I cannot recall just when it was mentioned, but I do recall earlier in the book being a bit confused by her and her status, I think it was around the same time that that remark was made that her widowhood was refered to.

[Scheherazade]

Do you think the names signify anything?

I remember from the only other James novella I read - Daisy Miller - that James did pick them carefully.

[Dark Muse]

I wondered about the names too. Particularly Basil Ransom, Mrs. Birdseye and Mrs. Luna struck out in my mind, as they all are both rather unusual sounding names, and of course they are also names that have other meanings.

[Gladys]

I wondered about the names too. Particularly Basil Ransom, Mrs. Birdseye and Mrs. Luna struck out in my mind, as they all are both rather unusual sounding names, and of course they are also names that have other meanings.

Out of curiosity, I checked the names of characters in the dozen, or so, Henry James' novels and novellas I've read. My impression is that names are chosen to accurately reflect the status - the social standing - of each character's family. By contrast, in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, names often code for much, much more.

Almost halfway through the novel, everything seems to have followed a more or less predictable course. But Verena is becoming increasingly interesting. I wonder how will ultimately Olive react.

[Scheherazade]

In Daisy Miller, if I remember correctly, the names reflected more than status. For example, Winterbourne had that cold, reserved attitude. However, Daisy's surname, Miller, did reflect her status (a common family who came into money through their trade).

I find the relationtionship between Olive and Verena interesting and somewhat suspicious - at least where Olive is concerned. I feel she is not honest and open even with herself. If Verena looked different (say, like Olive herself) would she have reacted in the same way?

Basil remains to be my favourite character in the book so far and Mrs Luna. I am only onto Ch. 15 yet but I am secretly hoping that those two end up together somehow.

I know, ever the romantic me!

Verena:

According to tradition, Saint Verena joined the Theban Legion in its mission to Rhaetia (part of modern day Switzerland) and was a relative of Saint Victor of the Theban Legion. The soldiers' relatives were allowed to accompany them in order to look after them and take care of their wounds.

When Saint Maurice, Saint Victor and the other members of the Theban Legion were martyred, Saint Verena led the life of a hermit. First, she settled in a place called Solothurn, but later moved into a cave near present-day Zurich. she comes from Garagous village, Qous, Qena, Egypt. As a hermit, Verena fasted and prayed continuously. According to tradition, she performed several miracles. Verena was particularly concerned over young girls and used to look after them spiritually and physically, due to her expertise as a nurse.

As a result of her fame, legend states that the local governor arrested her and sent her to jail, where Saint Maurice appeared to her to console and strengthen her. She was released from jail, and continued to perform miracles. Due to her, many converted to Christianity. Saint Verena was interested in serving the poor and used to offer them food. Moreover, she enjoyed serving the sick, especially those suffering from leprosy. She used to wash their wounds and put ointments on them, not fearing infection. She died at Switzerland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verena

[Gladys]

In Daisy Miller, if I remember correctly, the names reflected more than status. For example, Winterbourne had that cold, reserved attitude. However, Daisy's surname, Miller, did reflect her status (a common family who came into money through their trade).

Having read the novella long ago, I do not remember Winterbourne as especially cold. But I do appreciate the irony in his name after reading this Wiki quote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Miller):



The names of the characters are also symbolic. Daisy is a flower in full bloom, without inhibitions and in the springtime of her life. Daisy contrasts sharply with Winterbourne. Flowers die in winter and this is precisely what happens to Daisy, after catching the Roman Fever. As an objective analogue to this psychological reality, Daisy catches the very real Roman fever, the malaria that was endemic to many Roman neighborhoods in the 19th century. The issue on which the novella turns is the "innocence" of Daisy.


I find the relationship between Olive and Verena interesting and somewhat suspicious - at least where Olive is concerned. I feel she is not honest and open even with herself. If Verena looked different (say, like Olive herself) would she have reacted in the same way?

I believe Olive's interest in Verena is overtly driven by the expected impact of her beauty, personality and eloquence on the suffragette cause. For Olive, Verena's a means to a sacred end. Where's the dishonesty here?

As for St Verena, we shall see! :aureola:

[mona amon]

Hi everyone! I've started reading this and I'm in chapter nine, I think. It's OK so far. Still waiting for it to really draw me in.

[Gladys]

Hi Mona, and welcome. I'm up to Chapter 31 and enjoying the book, but these comments relate to Chapter 24 and earlier.



...but Verena never changed colour; it was either not new or not disagreeable to her that the authors of her being should be bought off, silenced by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower orders are treated when they are not locked up; so that her friend had a perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way ever to offend her. She was too rancourless, too detached from conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too much to say of her that she forgave injuries, since she was not conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps that life sets for our consistency.
Verena is remarkable indeed. So remarkable that she will present an unexpected threat to both Olive and Basil, who so wish to manipulate her?



Adeline guessed Olive had perfect control of her now, unless indeed she used the expeditions to Cambridge as a cover for meeting gentlemen. She was an artful little minx, and cared as much for the rights of women as she did for the Panama Canal; the only right of a woman she wanted was to climb up on top of something, where the men could look at her. She would stay with Olive as long as it served her purpose, because Olive, with her great respectability, could push her, and counteract the effect of her low relations, to say nothing of paying all her expenses and taking her the tour of Europe. "But, mark my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she will give Olive the greatest cut she has ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will marry a circus-man!" And Mrs. Luna added that it would serve Olive Chancellor right. But she would take it hard; look out for tantrums then!
In her critique of Verena Tarrant, Adeline Luna, as always exaggerates; but the forecast of high-order tantrums from Olive is surely prophetic. Yet how will these tantrums be reconciled with: She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude?

Also prophetic are venerable Miss Birdseye's parting words to Basil Ransom. A marvellous understatement I suspect.



And while, lifting and pushing, he was helping again to insert her into the oblong receptacle, she turned a little and repeated, "She will affect you! If that's to be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin.

[Scheherazade]

I believe Olive's interest in Verena is overtly driven by the expected impact of her beauty, personality and eloquence on the suffragette cause. For Olive, Verena's a means to a sacred end. Where's the dishonesty here?

As for St Verena, we shall see! :aureola:I think it was DM who mentioned earlier the possibility of some romantic infatuation on Olive's behalf and I agree with that as well; that is what I meant when I said Olive was not being entirely honest with herself. She does seem to want Verena for their "cause" but I still think (started Ch 25) there is an attachment that goes beyond camaraderie.

Despite having past the half-way spot in the book, I feel we still don't know much about Verena. She seems to be saying and doing the "right things" all the time and Mrs Luna is probably right in her assessment of her (as quoted by Olive). She is bound to cause some kind of disappointment sooner or later.

Enjoying the book though it is a more challenging book than I expected.

[Gladys]

Despite having past the half-way spot in the book, I feel we still don't know much about Verena. She seems to be saying and doing the "right things" all the time and Mrs Luna is probably right in her assessment of her (as quoted by Olive).

As quoted by Olive? Do you mean: as narrated?

By chapter 32, we have learnt rather more about Verena without taint to her sublimity. I sense she is much deeper than she seems. But I have no good reason to accuse Olive of carnal attraction to Verena.

As for The Bostonians being challenging book, I am finding it easy reading compared to most Henry James novels. Try The Ambassadors if you seek a real challenge. The novellas tend to be easier.

As for Mrs Luna tying the knot with Basil Ransom, forget it!

[mona amon]

As for Mrs Luna tying the knot with Basil Ransom, forget it!

Aww! I was hoping that they would.

I haven't come much further than when I last posted, but I feel the same way as Scher and DM about Olive's feelings for Verena. It seems like a romantic infatuation, though probably asexual.

[Gladys]

...I feel the same way as Scher and DM about Olive's feelings for Verena. It seems like a romantic infatuation, though probably asexual.

Certainly Olive's infatuation is romantic.

But why assume that Olive's romance pertains to a sensual feelings for Verena? More likely, Olive is swooning with a romantic notion that she will blossom as the beneficent patron of the suffragette movement's young Joan of Arc. Hence her recurring jealousy when she fears Verena might escape her patronage. Olive Chancellor is at times a little embarrassed by this self-indulgent romantic infatuation but, repressing her selfish leanings, she strives to act righteously. The movement is her life.

[Scheherazade]

As quoted by Olive? Do you mean: as narrated?Meant to say ".... as quoted by Gladys" actually... But seems like I have Olive in mind (no, not an infatuation).


By chapter 32, we have learnt rather more about Verena without taint to her sublimity. I sense she is much deeper than she seems. But I have no good reason to accuse Olive of carnal attraction to Verena.No, not carnal but utterly romantic... I am not sure Olive would be capable of "carnal" feelings or, rather, admitting and accepting those. She's one of the most interesting characters I have read in a long while. What a brilliant job, James does while depicting her with quick, succinct descriptions.


As for The Bostonians being challenging book, I am finding it easy reading compared to most Henry James novels. Try The Ambassadors if you seek a real challenge. The novellas tend to be easier. I did not say it was a challenging book but that it turned out to be more challenging than I had expected. I thought it would be a story similar to Age of Innocence but I am pleasantly surprised.

[Gladys]

She's [Olive] one of the most interesting characters I have read in a long while.

By Chapter 36, Verena has become just as interesting, as indeed has the novel as a whole. The Henry James' novel Washington Square (named after an affluent locality in New York, where Olive Chancellor walks to calm her nerves concerning Verena's future) also becomes suddenly interesting, well past the novel's half-way mark.

And I do love the dry and direct Dr. Mary J. Prance.

I'm thrilled you're still reading, Scheherazade. The last forum book club I joined - reading Walter Scott's Rob Roy, full of Scottish dialect - left me the lone reader. :smilewinkgrin:

[Gladys]

I'm approaching the end of the book and to say I'm engrossed is an understatement. This is some novel, and I'm zealously struggling to imagine the ending. For those seeking a love story, the courting of Verena by Basil Ransom, and her delightful acquiescence, should satisfy the most demanding of tastes.

Without spoiling the plot, here are a few observations.


She would make any sacrifice for affection.

Verena speaking of her mother. Like mother, like daughter?


"Miss Birdseye said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head to say. "You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!"

Verena the prophet?


...as they walked it came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible.

Verena seems incapable of taking offence - strange though it seems.


It was plain Doctor Prance didn't go into that kind of analysis. If Ransom had complained to her of a sore throat she would have inquired with precision about his symptoms; but she was incapable of asking him any question with a social bearing.

The seriously unflappable Dr Prance.


her mortal remains were to be committed to their rest in the little cemetery at Marmion, in sight of the pretty sea-view she loved to gaze at, among old mossy headstones of mariners and fisher-folk. She had seen the place when she first came down, when she was able to drive out a little, and she had said she thought it must be pleasant to lie there. It was not an injunction, a definite request; it had not occurred to Miss Birdseye, at the end of her days, to take an exacting line or to make, for the first time in eighty years, a personal claim.

A superb encapsulation of the life of Miss Birdseye.

[Gladys]

I found the book riveting reading, especially the last hundred pages. The ending is fascinating. Mrs Luna's early foreshadowing seems, on first sight, to get the basic facts of the ending more or less right:


[Verena] was an artful little minx, and cared as much for the rights of women as she did for the Panama Canal... She would stay with Olive as long as it served her purpose, because Olive, with her great respectability, could push her, and counteract the effect of her low relations, to say nothing of paying all her expenses and taking her the tour of Europe. "But, mark my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she will give Olive the greatest cut she has ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will marry a circus-man!" And Mrs. Luna added that it would serve Olive Chancellor right. But she would take it hard; look out for tantrums then!

But a longer reflection on the ending suggests something rather different. Verena's main concern, even once committed to Basil Ransom, definitely appears to be the lapsing of her feminist address to the Boston audience. She gives this up, for the same reason she does most things: [she] would make any sacrifice for affection, and Ransom offers this in abundance. The dying Miss Birdseye appeals to Verena in a similar way to Ransom and, I suspect, to similar effect!

The novel ends with the hooded Verena walking with Ransom into the street, in tears. I think she's crying over a newly found passion for the suffragette cause, ignited by the dying Miss Birdseye. That Verena is destined to shed many more tears is surely a vindication of Miss Birdseye's prophesies:


Of course he [Ransom] took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn't like being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. "Miss Birdseye said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head to say. "You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!" This speech, on Verena's part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, "Do you mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?"

And the charismatic octogenarian dying sentiment says it all:


You mustn't think there's no progress because you don't see it all right off; that's what I wanted to say. It isn't till you have gone a long way that you can feel what's been done.

Ransom (the primary subject of the novel) will succumb, in time. A sublime ending.

[mona amon]

This post may contain **SPOILERS**

Finished reading a while back and thought I'd already posted this and then discovered I'd only saved it somewhere. :blush: I liked it very much, though I'm not sure I should have given it five stars, a rating I reserve only for the very best books. I was so carried away by the complete rout of Olive at the end, LOL. It was the ending I was really hoping for, and I was so scared that Verena would turn out to be a perverse wretch like Isabel Archer and go back to Olive, but what a resounding victory for Basil! :hurray:

On second thoughts, I wonder if it is really fair for a male writer to vent his feelings about suffragettes in this way - he's such a good writer he makes everything so convincing! :D

Gladys, your comments were very interesting. I'm not so sure that Ransom will succumb in the end. Henry James hardly gives us any hints about what will happen after the novel has ended. It was the same with Portrait of a Lady. I really couldn't imagine Isabel Archer's future course, after I closed the book.

The tears I took to be the tears any woman would shed even in a normal marriage, though it is probably just the author perversely denying his female protagonists any happiness in life. There's a disagreeable streak in James, and despite his genius he will never be among my favourites.

I did enjoy this book very much though - 7/10

[Gladys]

Gladys, your comments were very interesting. I'm not so sure that Ransom will succumb in the end. Henry James hardly gives us any hints about what will happen after the novel has ended. It was the same with Portrait of a Lady. I really couldn't imagine Isabel Archer's future course, after I closed the book.

Henry James invariably produces novels for which minority interpretations of the ending are more than defensible. The Portrait of a Lady is a case in point, as you may see from my entirely sympathetic reading of Isabel Archer: An infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?60270-An-infinite-hope-that-she-should-never-do-anything-wrong&highlight=ARCHER). :smile5:

There is many a hint given by Henry James as to the aftermath of the ending. For instance, while the urbane Basil Ransom seems the winner, James (with his usual understatement) has painted Ransom as a decidedly unpleasant character, perhaps as unpleasant as any in a James' novel. Ransom preys on the obvious vulnerability of the highly suggestible Verena (consider her father's sorcery) and he treats everyone else as means to an end. I doubt that the charismatic Verena Tarrant ever had much love for Ransom, or for Olive Chancellor, but for better or for worse she will faithfully carry out Miss Birdseye (inspired, deathbed) prophesy to the letter, in the course of time. And that will be Basil Ransom's terrible punishment!

Henry James, in my opinion, is all about irony, and especially so in his endings. I wonder whether James, born to a wealthy New York family, and a homosexual, does have the bias against women you suggest. I would certainly struggle to accept that the London-based author has the least sympathy for our energetic young man from the deep South with a world-view appropriate to the dark ages and a moral compass to match.

I much liked the novel.

[Scheherazade]

I did not find Ransom an unpleasant character at all. He is, quite probably, someone I would not agree with on my issues but I do not think that he expresses his views any less agreeably than the others in the book, inclusing Olive and Verena.

I am not a romantic but I give their love more credit. I don't think Basil will succumb because he truly believes in his views and, I feel, James also thinks he is a necessary opposition in the mechanism. However, theirs will not be a peaceful home because their political views; there will be heated debates and exchanges.

[mona amon]

I have to say I actually liked Basil and was rooting for him all the time, and can easily imagine why Verena fell in love with him. Like Scher I feel they were both genuinely in love with each other. He might be a bit overbearing, but his views were not overly reactionary for his time and only seem so in contrast to the radical feminism of the female characters. Also, he's no hypocrite - He's very open about his opinions, his opinion of Verena's opinions, and his lack of money.

His male chauvinism does not bother me so much because Olive comes across as a man-hater rather than a feminist, or rather, a woman who is interested in feminism not because of passionate conviction but because she hates men. I was also not convinced that Verena had any true longlasting passion for the cause, beyond a youthful enthusiam stoked in her by others, and a way to showcase her gift for public speaking. It is this gift that Basil will have to deal with in the future. Will it cause her suffering to give it up, or will she be accepting of the supression and turn to other things?

Neither of the women is like Miss Birdseye, the stalwart soldier labouring for the cause, and Basil ultimately respects her and feels perfect friendliness for her and for Mary Prance, a doctor and a genuinely 'liberated' woman.

-------------------

EDIT: I found this movie on youtube and will be watching it sometime - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4L-qel7AQs

[Gladys]

I did not find Ransom an unpleasant character at all...I do not think that he expresses his views any less agreeably than the others in the book, including Olive and Verena.

So Ransom seems throughout: eminently likeable. Indeed, the most distasteful characters in many a James novel only seem so after considerable reflection on the ending. The best example is beautiful and stunningly sublime Kate Croy in On the wings of the Dove. Kate seems peerlessly wonderful until one chooses to reflects, with no help from James, on her relation to others. Henry James is good at decoying the reader to the very end.

Olive, by contrast, seems grimly miserable but, as Mrs Luna says, honest Olive is full of rectitude.


I am not a romantic but I give their love more credit. I don't think Basil will succumb because he truly believes in his views...

If you are right, why are there so many passages like these below?


...so that her friend [Olive] had a perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way ever to offend her [Verena]. She was too rancourless, too detached from conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too much to say of her that she forgave injuries [Ramson's is the deepest], since she was not conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps that life sets for our consistency.
------
And while, lifting and pushing, he was helping again to insert her [Verena] into the oblong receptacle, she turned a little and repeated, "She will affect you! If that's to be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin.
------
She [Mrs Tarrant] would make any sacrifice for affection." The fancy suddenly struck Ransom of asking, in response to this, "And you? would you make any?" Verena gave him a bright natural stare. "Any sacrifice for affection?" She thought a moment, and then she said: "I don't think I have a right to say, because I have never been asked. I don't remember ever to have had to make a sacrifice—not an important one."
------
...and as they walked it came over her [Olive] that some of the things he [Ransom] had said to her were far beyond what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible.
------
What was a part of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the satisfaction of a person who made demands of her.
------
What will become of your charm?—is that what you want to know? It will be about five thousand times greater than it is now; that's what will become of it. We shall find plenty of room for your facility; it will lubricate our whole existence. Believe me, Miss Tarrant, these things will take care of themselves.
------
The emotion she [Verena] had expressed as he stood there before poor Miss Birdseye was only one of her instinctive contortions; he had taken due note of that—said to himself that a good many more would probably occur before she would be quiet.
------
"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked...

Nevertheless, Verena will eventually vindicate both Olive and Miss Birdseye. In view of these quotes and ones previously supplied, the affect of the ever-so-subtle demands made on the infinitely suggestible Verena by the dying Miss Birdseye is critical to appreciating the ending.


I was also not convinced that Verena had any true long-lasting passion for the cause, beyond a youthful enthusiasm stoked in her by others, and a way to showcase her gift for public speaking. It is this gift that Basil will have to deal with in the future. Will it cause her suffering to give it up, or will she be accepting of the suppression and turn to other things?

Verena indeed has little passion for the cause per se, as Mrs Luna rightly forecasts. She will be accepting of the suppression and will turn to her genuine vocation, as imputed by Miss Birdseye, on her deathbed. And the married Basil Ransom will prove just as impotent in derailing the passionate and charismatic Verena as Olive Chancellor! That's some ending, I think - a much better one than a simple love story with a more or less happy ending. The energetic Ransom gets more, much more, than he bargained for.


...the words he [Ransom] had spoken to her [Verena] there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her—these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps.

[Gladys]

I have just understood the blatant foreshadowing by Mrs Luna, early in the novel. Ransom is the lion tamer, who energetically tames both Olive and Verena by the end of the novel. But as Olive has well learned, the taming of gifted Verena is problematic in the extreme.


"But, mark my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she [Verena] will give Olive the greatest cut she has ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will marry a circus-man!"

In The Bostonians, the wedded Verena will ultimately give the central character, the circus-man Basil Ransom, the greatest cut of all!


Basil Ransom's emotions were peculiar while his hostess delivered herself, in a manner at once casual and emphatic, of these rather insidious remarks.

[mona amon]

I think James is a realistic writer rather than a romantic one, but in this case the ending with Verena and Basil succumbing to each other seems to be the realistic ending. However, he does show us Verena in tears and tells us they will not be her last, in order to remind us that his ending is not a romantic one with Basil carrying off Verena into the glorious sunset. The young couple will have quite a lot of settling down to do. Imagine what a contrast Basil's shabby rooms will be for Verena compared to Olive's beautiful house, for instance, and Basil will have to pull up his socks and start becoming more successful, now that he's a married man. A lot of hardship lies ahead, but I'm sure they'll settle down in the end and have a reasonably happy life.

As for the quotes, my interpretation is quite different -

"...so that her friend [Olive] had a perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way ever to offend her [Verena]. She was too rancourless, too detached from conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too much to say of her that she forgave injuries [Ramson's is the deepest], since she was not conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps that life sets for our consistency.

Doesn't Verena's 'bright mildness' show that she is the one who will be submissive, and Basil dominant?

"Any sacrifice for affection?" She thought a moment, and then she said: "I don't think I have a right to say, because I have never been asked. I don't remember ever to have had to make a sacrifice—not an important one."

At that point in her life she had not been called to make any sacrifice, but by the end she'll have to sacrifice her career out of love for Basil, and of course this is complicated by the fact that anything she does out of love for Basil will go directly against Olive, for whom she also has affection.


"She will affect you! If that's to be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin

Ms Birdseye was right in a way, as even Basil acknowledges. She affected him so much that he fell in love with her almost from the first time he saw her. But she doesn't seem to realise that you can be 'affected' by someone's character and personality without being in the least affected by their opinions. She also underestimated Basil's own effect on Verena, and failed to even imagine that Verena might actually be the convert rather than the converter.

"...and as they walked it came over her that some of the things he [Ransom] had said to her were far beyond what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible."

"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked...

Well yes...poor Olive is to completely lose this battle of wills.

What was a part of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the satisfaction of a person who made demands of her.

Everyone makes demands of Verena - her parents, Olive, and Basil, and in the end she gives in to Basil's demands because they are most in accordance with her own wishes.

The emotion she [Verena] had expressed as he stood there before poor Miss Birdseye was only one of her instinctive contortions; he had taken due note of that—said to himself that a good many more would probably occur before she would be quiet.

Here Basil understands something of Verena's conflict, although he is not in sympathy with it. But he's very confident of his ultimate triumph.

What will become of your charm?—is that what you want to know? It will be about five thousand times greater than it is now; that's what will become of it. We shall find plenty of room for your facility; it will lubricate our whole existence. Believe me, Miss Tarrant, these things will take care of themselves.

Basil does not want to trample upon her or stifle her, which is a relief, since he very much has the upper hand in their relationship.

...the words he [Ransom] had spoken to her [Verena] there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her—these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps.

But what do you feel is her genuine vocation? On reading that chapter again I think it's pretty clear that Basil means that her genuine vocation is to take care of home and family and be very beloved by him.

[Gladys]

…the ending with Verena and Basil succumbing to each other seems to be the realistic ending. However, he does show us Verena in tears and tells us they will not be her last, in order to remind us that his ending is not a romantic one with Basil carrying off Verena into the glorious sunset.

The massively understated sentence that ends the novel is typical of many a James’ book. If you want the ironic ending Henry James really intends, consider as entirely accurate the foreshadowing presented here:


"All what, Miss Tarrant?" Ransom asked.

"Well, what I told her [Miss Birdseye]. She is sure you are going to become one of our leaders, that you are very gifted for treating great questions and acting on masses of people, that you will become quite enthusiastic about our uprising, and that when you go up to the top as one of our champions it will all have been through me."

Ransom stood there, smiling at her…


As for the quotes, my interpretation is quite different.

Your interpretation is entirely accurate insofar as it reflects the viewpoint of Basil Ransom and Olive Chancellor who, from the first, are like open windows for the reader. Yes, Basil and Olive interpret the situation exactly as you describe.

In reality, Verena will convert Basil through her bright mildness. She'll have to sacrifice her career out of love for Basil, but not Miss Birdseye's final vision for her. What little insight the dying Miss Birdseye actually has matters little alongside the huge impact on Verena. Olive does lose this battle of wills, as will Basil later on. Everyone makes demands of Verena, not least Miss Birdseye, and Verena willingly complies. Basil is as confident of his ultimate triumph as cousin Olive was, before him. He looks forward to marital bliss and, while this may happen, the Southerner will also fulfil Miss Birdseye's feminist vision.

What you seem to miss is that never, never, does Henry James allow us direct access to the viewpoint of Verena. We, like Olive and Basil, are left to infer the viewpoint of this exquisitely passionate and sincere...quivering, spotless, consecrated maiden. Appreciating the differing perspectives of the main characters is always the challenge in reading Henry James.


"Miss Birdseye said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head to say.

"You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!" This speech, on Verena's part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, "Do you mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?"

"Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I obtained over her."

"Well, what good will it do, if I'm going to tell Olive about your visit?"

"Well, you see, I think she hopes you won't. She believes you are going to convert me privately—so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective and dramatic." [here is massive foreshadowing of the ending from the mouth of the saintly octogenarian]

Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments when her candour seemed to him preternatural. "If I thought that would be the effect, I might make an exception," she remarked, speaking as if such a result were, after all, possible.


But what do you feel is her genuine vocation? On reading that chapter again I think it's pretty clear that Basil means that her genuine vocation is to take care of home and family and be very beloved by him.

Verena's genuine vocation initially related to married life with Ransom. Nevertheless, the evangelical aspect of her vocation flowers in full glory following the death-bed prophesy of Miss Birdseye. Verena Tarrant will do father Selah, that one-time miracle monger, proud. Her Southerner husband, the man who liked to understand, will one day stand in the vanguard of the women's movement! If only Olive Chancellor could see that miraculous day!

As Verena says to Olive:


"Do you leave it all to me? You don't give me much help," Olive said.

"Help to what?"

"Help to help you."

"I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!" Verena cried gaily. The next moment she inquired, in an appeal half comical, half touching, "My dear colleague, why do you make me say such conceited things?"

The married Ransom will face the same awesome artillery that, in the end, muzzled Olive, his cousin:


Olive had contributed with all her zeal to the development of Verena's gift; but I scarcely venture to think now, what she may have said to herself, in the secrecy of deep meditation, about the consequences of cultivating an abundant eloquence. Did she say that Verena was attempting to smother her now in her own phrases? Did she view with dismay the fatal effect of trying to have an answer for everything?

[Gladys]

The Bostonians is a racy novel with all the appeal of a who-dun-it to be solved by the reader well after finishing. I loved it. The big question is: What are we to make of Verena Tarrant? Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom seriously underestimate her. Even the canny Mrs Luna gets her wrong. Paradoxically, the two who get closest are the seemingly senile Miss Birdseye and the mesmerist father, whom Olive has bought off.


[Selah Tarrant] looked at his child only from the point of view of the service she might render to humanity. To keep her ideal pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral life—this was a duty more imperative for a parent so closely identified with revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed profitable worldly connexions.

Henry James withholds explicit information on the perspective of Verena: that rancourless young woman, detached from conventional standards, free from private self-reference, the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had ever bloomed on earth. One indication of Verena's viewpoint arises from her compliance with the wishes of others. The magnetic Selah Tarrant ensures her cooperation through expansive spiritual conjuring, the ardent Olive Chancellor through positing Verena at the pinnacle of the women's movement, and the debonair Basil Ransom through extolling the genuine vocation that is sacred matrimony.

It’s perhaps easy to miss that the short, aged, unassuming Miss Birdseye also makes a comparable claim on Verena, a claim which happens to mesh perfectly with Ransom’s genuine vocation, and her feminist upbringing. The angelic octogenarian's dying behest sees Verena converting Ransom, the energetic arch-conservative from the South, to serve as a splendid standard bearer for the women’s movement. That’s some vision for Verena’s future: a glorious vision presented with sublime fervour by a dying saint.

If you doubt this interpretation, consider those whose wishes have no impact on the extraordinary generosity of Verena. At the Music Hall, Verena is deaf to harangue of her own loving mother and her business manager, Mr. Filer. Earlier, she is utterly dismissive of that enlightened and cultivated gentleman, Henry Burrage, who tastefully declines to impose on her the least vision, and she is dismissive of Henry’s elegant, rich and well-meaning mother. Verena herself consistently maintains: I have renounced.


"I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!" Verena cried gaily. The next moment she inquired, in an appeal half comical, half touching, "My dear colleague [Olive], why do you make me say such conceited things?"

In New York, Verena reveals that her performance doesn't really depend on Olive, any more than she really needed her father to start her up. It's a small jump to say that the wedded Verena, a child of the women's movement, will perform without anyone's help, and certainly without Basil Ransom's.


Moreover, I don't believe that at bottom they are Miss Tarrant's opinions," Ransom added.

"You mustn't think she hasn't a strong hold of them," his companion [Miss Birdseye] exclaimed, more briskly. "If you think she is not sincere, you are very much mistaken. Those views are just her life."

"Well, she may bring me round to them," said Ransom, smiling.

Preparing for the Music Hall, Olive arms Verena to the hilt, just as Verena has begged of her. But Olive fails to grasp the peculiar nature of Verena's life-long dedication to the women’s cause. Olive sells short the girl who pulls hard. And so does Basil as he whisks his alluring Trojan Horse away from the Music Hall!


...the dreadful, ominous, fatal part of the situation was simply that now, for the first time in all the history of their sacred friendship, Verena was not sincere. She was not sincere when she told her [Olive] that she wanted to be helped against Mr. Ransom—when she exhorted her, that way, to keep everything that was salutary and fortifying before her eyes.

Poor Olive is so wrong: gifted Verena's great calling is not on the grand stage but in the home of that implacable enemy of the women's movement.


If Basil considered women superficial, it was a pity he couldn't see what Olive's standard of preparation was, or be present at their rehearsals, in the evening, in their little parlour.

Verena's tears, as she flees the Music Hall for married life, flow from the important sacrifice she makes for affection. It’s not so much her affection for Basil as her affection for Miss Birdseye and her transcendent vision. She presents to Verena a genuine vocation in the fight for the cause to which she has dedicated her life. The unflappable Selah Tarrant will be proud of his red-haired daughter.


[Basil] presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she [Verena] was in tears.

[mona amon]

I absolutely agree with you that this book just gets better every time you go back to it to look up something. I've been re-reading whole chapters just for the discussion, which I'm enjoying very much, even though my replies are not so frequent.

I feel Verena is central to the novel because her choice is what matters in the end, not Basil's, not Olive's, not her parents', and not (I am convinced) even Miss Birdseye's. All the others exploit her in one way or the other, thrusting a role on her which, with Basil's help, she comes to realize is one that she does not want to play. They exploit her and demand sacrifices out of her which for a while she willingly gives, until she's rescued by Basil. It's all very ironic because the one who preaches to her about freedom of women tries to tie her down and control her as much as she possibly can, while the reactionary Basil is the one who sets her free to pursue her true vocation.

Miss Birdseye is not portrayed as senile, but she too does not entirely escape the anti-feminist narrative bias. She is a noble-hearted, kind, good natured dupe, whom anyone can take advantage of.

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, but that you could see, without this, that she was gentle and easy to beguile...[cut]... She belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements. (Chapter 4)
which is why I have trouble accepting that her over-optimistic expectations of Basil are in any way visionary. It is her good natured simplemindedness that casts a spell on everyone from the reactionary Basil to the practical Mary Prance, but they show their affection by pretending to agree with her so as not to cause her distress, rather than changing themselves to fit her vision of them.

Verena is different. Young, impressionable and tender-hearted as she is, Miss Birdseye's death affects her deeply and sparks in her a crisis of conscience and achieves what Olive with all her fighting spirit is unable to. Verena gives Basil the slip. His victory is not to be so easily won after all, but he does triumph in the end.

[Gladys]

Miss Birdseye is not portrayed as senile, but she too does not entirely escape the anti-feminist narrative bias. She is a noble-hearted, kind, good natured dupe, who anyone can take advantage of...which is why I have trouble accepting that her over-optimistic expectations of Basil are in any way visionary.

I too appreciate your input, and entirely agree with your assessment of Miss Birdseye. She is only visionary in the sense that her unlikely but sublime idea rejuvenates the independent-minded Verena, and serves to foreshadows the eventual direction of the Basil and Verena's marriage. Incidentally, one reason Olive allowed Verena to see young men was the possibility of conversion to the cause (visits from handsome and unscrupulous young men for the sake of the opportunities it gave one to convert them): and that's exactly what will happen to the energetic Southerner.

But I would not agree that anyone succeeds in exploiting Verena, least of all the cousins, Olive and Basil. Verena perceives attempts at exploitation as an inconsequential component of her mere experiments in how to live morally better.


Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of diffidence nor a particle of vanity.
-------
"She doesn't want a piano—she doesn't want anything," Selah remarked

How could anyone exploit a girl with such a character?


It's all very ironic because the one who preaches to her about freedom of women tries to tie her down and control her as much as she possibly can, while the reactionary Basil is the one who sets her free to pursue her true vocation.

I suspect you seriously underestimate Verena’s independence and powerful internal drive. Verena, the brilliant young womapulls hard, is neither a muddle-head nor a dupe. There is a wealth of evidence that freedom of women is uppermost in her mind throughout the novel, despite the many who assert otherwise. They simply don't appreciate this singular and unassuming girl, who was raised by her father (“He is very good”) with a keen sense for what service she might render to humanity. Her true vocation owes far more to her egalitarian upbringing (reinforced by Miss Birdseye's naive dream) than to Olive's grandiose scheme or Basil's self-interested bulldozing. Olive does serve to provide Verena a fine (though unwitting) service in arming her to perform a feminist miracle on her husband to be.

With the Boston crowd growing restless in the Music Hall, her father Selah, with a boundless confidence in his daughter, gropingly prefigures the ultimate ending. His curious final utterance is perhaps the last direct foreshadowing of the ending Henry James really intends. Selah's Tarrant's declaration is fine instance of why I read Henry James. The irony of the narrator is exquisite:


Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seemed as if the better day was going to be put off for quite a while.

Typically, Henry James plants the key to understanding his stories well before the final chapter. This is spectacularly so in the delightful What Maisie Knew, where the ending is even more subtle. Selah Tarrant's off-the-cuff declaration happens to corresponds perfectly with Verena's words to Ramsom early in the novel:


"You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!"


Verena is different. Young, impressionable and tender-hearted as she is, Miss Birdseye's death affects her deeply and sparks in her a crisis of conscience and achieves what Olive with all her fighting spirit is unable to. Verena gives Basil the slip. His victory is not to be so easily won after all, but he does triumph in the end.

I don't think Verena, with her extraordinary powers of reflexion is impressionable in the least! She is a brilliant and thoroughly independent thinker, immune to intellectual bullying from anyone:


She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige, not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of herself.


I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!

Later, after the holiday at Marmion, we see that inspirational Verena has become more than a match for Olive. Will Basil fare better?

Miss Birdseye's dying vision, in fact, propels Verena (with unwitting Olive's help) into frantic preparation for her improbably ambitious mission to convert Basil. Verena hesitates no longer; she commits herself whatever the cost. After the death, Verena gives Basil the slip because she needs more time to prepare for this formidable mission she will face in wedlock. The risk and consequences of failure are extreme.

Basil's appearance at the Music Hall is not unexpected because Verena has been preparing for him. His "triumph at the Music Hall" will prove short-lived, for the delightful maiden he drags into his castle is a Trojan Horse. The narrator and Verena are agreed that the social views of the Mississippian are abhorrent, and there nothing to suggest Verena has a change of heart. The narrator is hardly suggesting a love story when he ends with: the union, so far from brilliant, into which she [Verena] was about to enter.


I [Verena] am faint and weak at all the horrible things you [Ransom] have said; I have lunched on abominations.

In the end it will be Verena, and the Women's Movement, that triumph gloriously.


"Oh yes—I want to give my life!" she [Verena] exclaimed, with a vibrating voice; and then she added gravely, "I want to do something great!"

[Gladys]

For those who see the ending as a triumph for Basil Ransom, think again. Verena’s perspective is extraordinary: too rancourless, too detached from conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. Therefore the interpretation by "ordinary" others of her actions, motives and motivation simply cannot be trusted. Only the narrator, Verena herself and, perhaps, Selah Tarrant are trustworthy interpreters. The triumphant ending cannot be sustained once these three reliable witnesses are examined. I challenge someone to find a quote which implies otherwise. :smile5:

Miss Birdseye’s assertion to Ransom that Verena is committed (in her peculiar way) to the Women’s Movement is vindicated by countless passages, believe it or not. She is a child of the movement through and through, despite all the doubters. And towards the end, Verena has reason not to disillusion them.


[Verena] struck her [Olive] as the only person she had yet encountered who had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she herself had.
-------
...that I [Verena] have dedicated my life; that there is something unspeakably dear to me.

Verena will marry Ransom but her view of marriage, a subject long discussed in her presence, is unconventional for the times. She is marrying for mixed motives and, of these, love, honour and obey are not front and centre. Her marital commitment is not necessarily lifelong, unlike her peculiar commitment to the cause of women.


"Well, I must say," said Miss Tarrant, "I prefer free unions." Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to her.
------
It implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other had her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that might arise from encounters with young men in search of sensations.

[mona amon]

Call me a cynical old biddy :D but I don't see even a whispered hint of a feminist miracle anywhere in the book, and do not believe for a moment that James intended one. The course the book is going to take is summed up early on -


There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose acquaintance she had sought; but they had seemed afraid of her, and the attempt had come to nothing. She took them more tragically than they took themselves; they couldn't make out what she wanted them to do, and they always ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the last analysis, that they cared much the most. They cared far more about Charlie than about the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs. Farrinder would treat that branch of the question. In her researches among her young townswomen she had always found this obtrusive swain planted in her path, and she grew at last to dislike him extremely. It filled her with exasperation to think that he should be necessary to the happiness of his victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk about with her, it was of him and him only that they discoursed among themselves), and one of the main recommendations of the evening club for her fatigued, underpaid sisters, which it had long been her dream to establish, was that it would in some degree undermine his position--distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in waiting at the door. ~ Chapter 5

Olive sees 'Charlie' as an obstacle in the way of the cause, instead of accepting him as a normal part of life, and one that will have to be incorporated into any social movement, feminist or otherwise. All her problems stem from there. The book seems more concerned with Olive's defeat and Charlie's triumph, rather than about the feminist movement as such. No sooner has Olive taken Verena under her wing, than Charlie appears in the form of Basil Ransom. In a desperate bid to circumvent Basil, she gives her reluctant consent to the idea of a union with Henry Burrage, whom she regards as a less dangerous sort of 'Charlie' than Basil, but of course that doesn't work.


I suspect you seriously underestimate Verena’s independence and powerful internal drive. Verena, the brilliant young womapulls hard, is neither a muddle-head nor a dupe. There is a wealth of evidence that freedom of women is uppermost in her mind throughout the novel, despite the many who assert otherwise. They simply don't appreciate this singular and unassuming girl, who was raised by her father (“He is very good”) with a keen sense for what service she might render to humanity. Her true vocation owes far more to her egalitarian upbringing (reinforced by Miss Birdseye's naive dream) than to Olive's grandiose scheme or Basil's self-interested bulldozing. Olive does serve to provide Verena a fine (though unwitting) service in arming her to perform a feminist miracle on her husband to be.

With the Boston crowd growing restless in the Music Hall, her father Selah, with a boundless confidence in his daughter, gropingly prefigures the ultimate ending. His curious final utterance is perhaps the last direct foreshadowing of the ending Henry James really intends. Selah's Tarrant's declaration is fine instance of why I read Henry James. The irony of the narrator is exquisite:


Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seemed as if the better day was going to be put off for quite a while.

In a way Verena is all that you say, and it would be a very hollow victory for Basil if she were not. But she is very young, and very much susceptible to outside influences. Her father seems to have tutored her about all the women's movement stuff. Her gift was for public speaking, and he had to give her something to speak about. Under Olive she goes much further, because she gets a really good education on the subject, and I have no doubt at all that she is completely sincere at the time, and really believes in what she says to the public. The ideas may have been put into her head by others but she seizes on them with enthusiasm, and it's her youthful ardour and enthusiasm which clashes with Basil's obstinate cynicism. But it is this very clash that brings about the realization that this world is too large for any one philosophy, that there are different points of view that can be just as true as one's own, that the majority of woman are not as suffering and down-trodden, nor the majority of men as vile, as Olive would have her believe -


Olive thought she knew the worst, as we have perceived; but the worst was really something she could not know, inasmuch as up to this time Verena chose as little to confide to her on that one point as she was careful to expatiate with her on every other. The change that had taken place in the object of Basil Ransom's merciless devotion since the episode in New York was, briefly, just this change--that the words he had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her--these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that it implied and portended. She was to burn everything she had adored; she was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremendously serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which she--yes, decidedly, by this time she must admit it to herself--she meditated. It was simply that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love--she felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by nature for entertaining that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree (which had been the implication (385) of her whole crusade, the warrant for her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person, and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months (counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this spell was more than she could say--poor Verena, who up to so lately had flattered herself that she had a wizard's wand in her own pocket. ~ Chapter 38



The irony of the narrator is exquisite:

That's so true, but you seem to be ignoring the irony and taking a very literal reading of it if you take that fraudster and charlatan's words as a foreshadowing of what's to come in Verena's married life, rather than the amusing overstatement of the situation that they actually are. Actually the last chapter is a wonderful mixture of high drama constantly being undercut by the hilariously comic. The mood simply doesn't work for portending the miraculous, inspirational or sublime!

[Gladys]

Call me a cynical old biddy :D but I don't see even a whispered hint of a "feminist miracle" anywhere in the book, and do not believe for a moment that James intended one.

Maybe I can offer you even more than a whispered hint :). During the long, sober weeks between the holiday at Marmion and the Music Hall fiasco, a subdued Basil Ransom takes time to reflect on the prospect of married life with Verena. His misgivings concerning Verena are not dissimilar to Olive's, early in the novel. {EDIT: In the above sentences, I have misconstrued the context in more ways than one.} And at the Music Hall, Basil will take no comfort that Verena thrice pleads to speak from the stage or, on leaving, from the tears of a girl making an important sacrifice to do something great!


Doubtless, too, he had perceived how vain it was to hope to make Verena abjure a faith so solidly founded; and though he admired her enough to wish to possess her on his own terms, he shrank from the mortification which the future would have in keeping for him—that of finding that, after six months of courting and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day.

Have you examined the possibility that Verena ("the sweetest flower of character...that had ever bloomed on earth") speaks nothing but the truth, and that her moral values and convictions are set in concrete from the first? Nothing I've read suggests that Olive or Basil make the least impact on Verena's integrity (I am quite strong enough!) If so, she is morally stronger than either cousin. Moreover, Verena has a power to charm that the finest mesmerist would envy and, perchance, fear.

We differ most on the credibility of Verena's utterances. For much of the novel, everyone but Mrs Luna (note the name) paints Verena with angelic integrity. Nevertheless, Basil believes that he is slowly but surely altering her convictions, Olive too believes she can manipulate Verena but, at Marmion, Olive despairs and even deems Verena insincere. But are they right about Verena? What if they underestimate her strength: what if no one can fathom the monumental moral depth of Verena Tarrant. Henry James, brother of the great American philosopher and psychologist William James, delights in psychological extremes:


[Verena] began to pray silently that Olive might not push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself by a lie.

Unlike you, I believe that gifted Verena is unerringly true to her well established moral principles and convictions. Remember that from the outset Verena maintains a healthy scepticism of Olive's vision and her antipathy for men, and Verena's big change, prompted by Basil's genuine vocation remark, is simply her absolute rejection of that vision. Why assume - though Henry James tempts us - that Verena's change goes further? If the feminist convictions of this inscrutable girl never waver, many present at the Boston Music Hall fiasco will hopelessly misjudge her.


There were two or three pale shop-maidens...

Once again, I entirely agree with you about the passage. The narrator presents Olive's perspective and foreshadows majority opinion at the end. Verena Tarrant will be seen to give up everything for the Basil: the "Charlie" in waiting at the door. In the opinion of everyone but Selah Tarrant and Miss Birdseye, Verena in love no longer wishes to give her life to the cause of women. Are we told here what Verena thinks?


But it is this very clash that brings about the realization that this world is too large for any one philosophy, that there are different points of view that can be just as true as one's own, that the majority of woman are not as suffering and down-trodden, nor the majority of men as vile, as Olive would have her believe.

How well you express Basil Ransom's view of Verena's evolving psyche! Are we given reason here to think that Verena shares this view, that she will come to enjoy lunching on what she calls abominations?


the words he had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her...had sunk into her soul...She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation...she liked herself better than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps...She was to burn everything she had adored; she was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was that she was not ashamed of the treachery which she...meditated. It was simply that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love..., she was framed, apparently, to allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person, and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months (counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such a cataclysm.

Summarising your quote, Verena's genuine vocation will have nothing in common with the grandiose schemes of Olive Chancellor. Verena is not in the least ashamed to discard a lecture-lamp future and lovingly embrace this man, despite Olive's fierce disapproval.

The ambiguous text, I've highlighted above, is probably the best evidence you'll find to support an assertion that the fire in her [Verena's] spirit...for the sufferings of women has diminished. Such a sentiment, if implicit in the highlighted text, is doubly qualified (via deliberate and inimitable circumlocution so characteristic of Henry James). Firstly, what crumbles is her conception of a kind of a double flame: her spirit will burn with a single (more focused) flame in future. Secondly, what crumbles is her commitment to the sufferings of women in general: her feminist energies will be focused to convert an energetic man with political ambitions. The narrator qualifies and equivocates. The evidence I've cited elsewhere suggests that Verena's feminist fire, as strong as ever, is redirected to a single object: the energetic and charming chauvinist from Mississippi, a man as magnetic as her own father.

Henry James is ever cryptic and no sentence is more ambiguous than: It was always passion, in fact; but now the object was other. There is no good reason to assume that Verena's passion is limited to romance. I suggest she will now redirect her reforming feminist passion from the stage to the marital home.


That's so true, but you seem to be ignoring the irony and taking a very literal reading of it if you take that fraudster and charlatan's words as a foreshadowing of what's to come in Verena's married life, rather than the amusing overstatement of the situation that they actually are.

What you're calling irony, I call humour. Anyone hearing Selah Tarrant's words (the better day was going to be put off for quite a while) would knowingly smile at his quirky and slightly silly remark. That for me is the literal meaning. Beyond the literal, the authorial irony is twofold. Firstly, Selah understands the constancy of his idealistic daughter like no one else: his curious words simply reflect sound judgement. Secondly, Henry James is foreshadowing the feminist triumph that will flow from the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter.

As you say, Selah is amusing and, in Verena's words, wonderfully magnetic. While Selah is a mesmerist, and Miss Birdseye lacks the smallest sense of the real, beware of underrating their function in the novel. They are, after all, the only characters labelled as good: "He is very good," Verena said simply. Selah brought up his daughter to keep her ideal pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral life. Miss Birdseye was sublime, the whole moral history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles. Which other character attracts such moral kudos? Only Verena herself!

Selah Tarrant and Miss Birdseye alone retain faith in integrity of Verena. Is it coincidence that they are the only significant characters in the novel beneath middle-class? Mrs Tarrant, for instance, comes from the best family.

I find recognising irony in Henry James (and perhaps elsewhere) easier if I pay extra attention to any passage containing a dissonance, no matter how faint. Where a fine author chooses to insert a dissonance - something mildly superfluous or odd - irony may be lurking. A full understanding of that irony usually comes later. Here's a simple but enchanting example.

Verena said simply. "And he's wonderfully magnetic."

By magnetic, Verena means something like captivating, a characteristic she has inherited in greater measure. The adjective here does seem a tiny bit forced or dissonant, and so it is because Henry James intends a double meaning. In her coming marriage, Verena will serve as a powerful magnet, drawing poor Basil to her feminist opinions.


Actually the last chapter is a wonderful mixture of high drama constantly being undercut by the hilariously comic. The mood simply doesn't work for portending the miraculous, inspirational or sublime!

Quite so. Here lies the genius of Henry James, and not just here but in all his novels. That's why I read and love him, but only expect to appreciate his endings days or weeks after finishing each book. In The Bostonians, if you fail to discern that Verena Tarrant is truly extraordinary, the closing chapter will not disillusion you. Verena is much wiser than she seems. In an early conversation with Olive, Verena (the girl free from private self-reference) encapsulates the ending.


"Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear."

The more you look, the more you find. There's further authorial irony when Basil Ransom concedes that his radical opinions will never lead to public eminence, prompting the reader to wonder whether, his high political ambitions might fare better were he to adopt Verena's feminist opinions.


It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder whether he might not make a living by his opinions. 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...It came over him with some force that his opinions would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should just have parted with his last rag of canvas.

When understood in this context, authorial irony is in full bloom as the dying Miss Birdseye just happens to forecast the course of Verena's marriage:


I did want to see justice done—to us. I haven't seen it, but you will. And Olive will. Where is she—why isn't she near me, to bid me farewell? And Mr. Ransom will—and he will be proud to have helped."

Rereading much of the The Bostonians to defend my interpretation has been rewarding. I am at little surprised, given your straightforward interpretation of the novel, that you'd rate it anything like five stars. :wink5:

[mona amon]

I think you are basically wondering how I, a present day woman, can possibly sympathize with an interpretation of the book which implies that a progressive, strong minded young woman gives up all her cherished opinions and becomes the doormat of a male chauvinist pig :) but that is not at all my interpretation of it!


Unlike you, I believe that gifted Verena is unerringly true to her well established moral principles and convictions. Remember that from the outset Verena maintains a healthy scepticism of Olive's vision and her antipathy for men, and Verena's big change, prompted by Basil's genuine vocation remark, is simply her absolute rejection of that vision. Why assume - though Henry James tempts us - that Verena's change goes further?

I don't disagree with you fundamentally about Verena, except perhaps in seeing her as a young girl whose mind is not yet fully formed, but is still flexible, learning, growing and evolving to something even better and higher, while you seem to feel she's already reached the perfect state. I'm not saying marriage to Basil was her greatest move in this direction, but well, we all do foolish things when we're in love, and it's really not as bad as it seems, for here I think is the point where we most disagree - the character and opinions of Basil Ransom.

First of all, I do not see Basil as Verena's diametric opposite. Olive sees him that way, because he's male, and a very masculine sort of male at that, handsome to boot, and opposed to her cause. But although he opposes their views, he is no reactionary. He does not consider any age a dream age that he wants to push humanity back to. He is cynically critical of all ages and all humanity, not just women. He doesn’t feel that women don’t deserve an education. He feels that hardly anybody deserves an education. He doesn’t say that woman should be denied power. He doesn’t for a moment believe that they do not have any power, and so on. We see him as anti-feminist only because he’s anti-Olive.

If we leave Olive out of it, we have young, idealistic Verena who is still in a state of flux, and cynical, more obdurate Basil, who is also an idealist in his own way (about what I’ve forgotten - whatever he wrote in his newspaper article).My interpretation of their union is one of realism and compromise. No doubt after marriage they’ll both influence each other, or corrupt each other or tone each other down or elevate each other, or any of the numerous possibilities of marriage between two persons, but I’m highly skeptical about Basil’s miraculous conversion to a cause that Verena herself seems to have all but given up, although I do not see that as a defeat of Feminism. Verena rejects Olive’s brand of feminism and elopes with Basil, and the whole bent of the book seems to suggest that this is the happier choice for Verena. Basil woos her and wins her honourably, through a process of persuasion, debate and dialogue. Olive on the other hand tries to get the girl by bribing her parents, emotional blackmail and control.

The only feminist miracle that could have happened in this context is for Verena to reject both Basil and Olive and go off on her own to find herself (or whatever!) the way Ibsen’s Nora Helmer does, but how many of us actually approve of Nora’s action, anyway?

I have not addressed most of your points, and will be back with more later. :)

[Gladys]

I offer a few quick thoughts to avoid misunderstanding.


I think you are basically wondering how I, a present day woman, can possibly sympathize with an interpretation of the book which implies that a progressive, strong minded young woman gives up all her cherished opinions and becomes the doormat of a male chauvinist pig

Not at all. I was actually wondering why you'd rate so highly a novel you see as simply a love story.

As an Ibsen zealot, Verena seems to me at least as radical as Nora Helmer from the A Doll's House. As I've said, Verena marries primarily to proselytize or, rather, with the conviction that she will!


I'm not saying marriage to Basil was her greatest move in this direction, but well, we all do foolish things when we're in love, and it's really not as bad as it seems, for here I think is the point where we most disagree - the character and opinions of Basil Ransom.

And I'm saying that in marrying Verena, Basil is doing the foolish thing when in love. Not so the deep Verena who marries with eyes wide open: "Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear." Verena's feminist convictions are very well established before she meets Basil: only the nature of her calling is in question.

I am surprised you think we disagree on Basil because I've agreed with all you had written about him. Can you cite evidence for feminist tolerance in Basil? I'd be astonished if you can.


First of all, I do not see Basil as Verena's diametric opposite ... He is cynically critical of all ages and all humanity, not just women ... He doesn’t say that woman should be denied power ... We see him as anti-feminist only because he’s anti-Olive.

Certainly, Verena saw much to like in the free-thinking Basil while she despised his opinions. I think all those outside the stage door at the Music Hall in Boston would label Basil anti-feminist. And I'm much inclined to accept Verena's view of Basil's "monstrous opinions":

"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really mediæval universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or Göttingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their spirit."
---------
She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more comfortable— one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more crudely profane.


...I’m highly skeptical about Basil’s miraculous conversion to a cause that Verena herself seems to have all but given up, although I do not see that as a defeat of Feminism. Verena rejects Olive’s brand of feminism and elopes with Basil, and the whole bent of the book seems to suggest that this is the happier choice for Verena.

This, of course, is the prime subject of my previous, long post.

[mona amon]

I was actually wondering why you'd rate so highly a novel you see as simply a love story.

But I don't see at as a love story at all, leave aside simple. It is too unsatisfyingly unromantic to be a love story. James tells us outright that the union was far from brilliant, and there's really not a single character in the novel who seems to disagree with this.


And I'm saying that in marrying Verena, Basil is doing the foolish thing when in love. Not so the deep Verena who marries with eyes wide open: "Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear." Verena's feminist convictions are very well established before she meets Basil: only the nature of her calling is in question.

I am surprised you think we disagree on Basil because I've agreed with all you had written about him. Can you cite evidence for feminist tolerance in Basil? I'd be astonished if you can.
No feminist tolerance as such. He feels that the place of women is at home practicing the domestic virtues and being charming to the men who own them, LOL. But I feel he’s like most men of his time, who accept patriarchy as the natural order. To oppose feminism is not his ideology. He doesn’t take it seriously enough for that. He doesn’t do anything to actively put down women.

I completely agree with you that Verena went into marriage with her eyes wide open. She’s not the type of young woman who is so blinded by love that she has any illusions about changing the man she wants to marry. She has absolutely no romantic illusions about what marriage with Basil will be like. And yet she’s so overcome by love for him that she succumbs.


Maybe I can offer you even more than a whispered hint :). During the long, sober weeks between the holiday at Marmion and the Music Hall fiasco, a subdued Basil Ransom takes time to reflect on the prospect of married life with Verena. His misgivings concerning Verena are not dissimilar to Olive's, early in the novel. And at the Music Hall, Basil will take no comfort that Verena thrice pleads to speak from the stage or, on leaving, from the tears of a girl making an important sacrifice to do something great!


Doubtless, too, he had perceived how vain it was to hope to make Verena abjure a faith so solidly founded; and though he admired her enough to wish to possess her on his own terms, he shrank from the mortification which the future would have in keeping for him—that of finding that, after six months of courting and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day.

But this quote is the narrator giving us Olive's thoughts. They are not Basil's thoughts at all, but Olive trying to find reasons for Basil giving up his pursuit of Verena in New York. It goes on to say she was living in a fool's paradise. I don’t see how it proves your point.


Olive Chancellor was able to a certain extent to believe what she wished to believe, and that was one reason why she had twisted Verena's flight from New York, just after she let her friend see how much she should like to drink deeper of the cup, into a warrant for living in a fool's paradise.

Have you examined the possibility that Verena ("the sweetest flower of character...that had ever bloomed on earth") speaks nothing but the truth, and that her moral values and convictions are set in concrete from the first? Nothing I've read suggests that Olive or Basil make the least impact on Verena's integrity (I am quite strong enough!) If so, she is morally stronger than either cousin. Moreover, Verena has a power to charm that the finest mesmerist would envy and, perchance, fear.

We differ most on the credibility of Verena's utterances. For much of the novel, everyone but Mrs Luna (note the name) paints Verena with angelic integrity. Nevertheless, Basil believes that he is slowly but surely altering her convictions, Olive too believes she can manipulate Verena but, at Marmion, Olive despairs and even deems Verena insincere. But are they right about Verena? What if they underestimate her strength: what if no one can fathom the monumental moral depth of Verena Tarrant. Henry James, brother of the great American philosopher and psychologist William James, delights in psychological extremes:


[Verena] began to pray silently that Olive might not push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself by a lie.

Unlike you, I believe that gifted Verena is unerringly true to her well established moral principles and convictions. Remember that from the outset Verena maintains a healthy scepticism of Olive's vision and her antipathy for men, and Verena's big change, prompted by Basil's genuine vocation remark, is simply her absolute rejection of that vision. Why assume - though Henry James tempts us - that Verena's change goes further?

First of all, Verena is not all that truthful. It is Olive who is the truthful one. Verena lies by omission – “ It was not, after all, so easy to keep back only a little; it appeared rather as if one must either tell everything or hide everything. The former course had already presented itself to her as unduly harsh; it was because it seemed so that she had ended by keeping the incident of Basil Ransom's visit to Monadnoc Place buried in unspoken, in unspeakable, considerations, the only secret she had in the world — the only thing that was all her own. She was so glad to say what she could without betraying herself that it was only after she had spoken that she perceived there was a danger of Olive's pushing the inquiry to the point where, to defend herself as it were, she should be obliged to practise a positive deception; and she was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened it became dearer to her.” But to be fair, she is untruthful only because she’s so scared of Olive’s immense power for suffering. I don’t think it’s important, but you claimed she was unerringly truthful, so just pointing it out.

Also, who, with the sole exception of Mrs Birdseye (who is indiscriminately commendatory of everyone) , paints Verena with angelic integrity? Not her parents, not Mrs Farrinder, nor Mary Prance, nor even Olive and Basil, or any other character I can think of.


How well you express Basil Ransom's view of Verena's evolving psyche! Are we given reason here to think that Verena shares this view, that she will come to enjoy lunching on what she calls abominations? – Gladys

Those were my own views of Verena’s evolving psyche, based on what we’re given in the text. It’s Olive who has the intensity, the fixedness of purpose, the passionate dedication that you ascribe to Verena. No, I do not see Verena as insincere. She does earnestly believe in their cause, but it is a youthful enthusiasm dinned into her since childhood by others, and doesn’t go as deep as Olive’s.

The encounter with Basil in Central Park is the turning point. First she’s appalled by him. Previously, she’s always met his opposing views with joking equanimity, but now suddenly she’s scared, not of Basil’s views, but of her own faith being shaken.

Besides, you ought to know,' the young man proceeded, in the same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a mathematical solution, 'you ought to know that your connection with all these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all. They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate associations, and you accepted them as you would have accepted any other burden, on account of the sweetness of your nature. You always want to please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn't YOU, the least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in its way too), whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it's a question of pleasing, [sic] how much you might please some one else by tipping your preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as in your loveliness!'

While Basil Ransom spoke--and he had not spoken just that way yet--Verena sat there deeply attentive, with her eyes on the ground; but as soon as he ceased she sprang to her feet--something made her feel that their association had already lasted quite too long. She turned away from him as if she wished to leave him, and indeed were about to attempt to do so. She didn't desire to look at him now, or even to have much more conversation with him. 'Something,' I say, made her feel so, but it was partly his curious manner--so serene and explicit, as if he knew the whole thing to [sic] an absolute certainty--which partly scared her and partly made her feel angry. She began to move along the path to one of the gates, as if it were settled that they should immediately leave the place. He laid it all out so clearly; if he had had a revelation he couldn't speak otherwise. That description of herself as something different from what she was trying to be, the charge of want of reality, made her heart beat with pain; she was sure, at any rate, it was her real self that was there with him now, where she oughtn't to be. In a moment he was at her side again, going with her; and as they walked it came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible. What would be her state now, poor forsaken friend, if some of them had been borne to her in the voices of the air? Verena had been affected by her companion's speech (his manner had changed so; it seemed to express something quite different), in a way that pushed her to throw up the discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park she would go off by herself;…
This is the beginning. Verena starts doubting herself. She does not want to marry Basil and she puts up a good fight, but in the end she has to give in. What Bernard Shaw calls 'the life force' has her in its grip.

Now you say that Verena does not reject Feminism, but only Olive's brand of feminism. Where are we shown her retaining any sort of feministic views? What type of feminism is she supposed to convert Basil to?

[Gladys]

She’s not the type of young woman who is so blinded by love that she has any illusions about changing the man she wants to marry.

This is a huge topic and I'll respond in a later post.


But this quote is the narrator giving us Olive's thoughts. They are not Basil's thoughts at all, but Olive trying to find reasons for Basil giving up his pursuit of Verena in New York. It goes on to say she was living in a fool's paradise. I don’t see how it proves your point.

Guilty as charged! You're right, I have misconstrued the context in more ways than one. And I should have been more cautious because Henry James, in my experience, at best gives whispered hints about his endings.

What I can say is that Henry James here foreshadows the ending through sentiments that Olive expresses but scarcely believes:


...after six months of courting and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day.

And mortification for Basil will come, but much later.


First of all, Verena is not all that truthful. It is Olive who is the truthful one. Verena lies by omission – “ It was not, after all, so easy to keep back only a little...” But to be fair, she is untruthful only because she’s so scared of Olive’s immense power for suffering. I don’t think it’s important, but you claimed she was unerringly truthful, so just pointing it out.

It is important. The whitest of white lies, the only secret she had in the world, is a typical Henry James decoy (he does exactly the same with Catherine in Washington Square). The point is that Verena never "lies" again, to anyone, in the entire novel! As to who paints Verena with angelic integrity, I would say that the first impression she creates on everyone is that of an angel. That's one reason audiences adore her, the Burrages fete her, Olive adopts her, and Basil befriends her. It's true, that in time, such impressions become less favourable. Less favourable because Verena is much deeper than anyone appreciates (the evidence here is clear), with the possible exception of father, Selah.

On first meeting Verena, Basil’s glowing assessment exemplifies the admiration she almost universally attracts. And Basil's judgement here is truer than he realises. So true that it explains much in the curious ending: Verena is inscrutable.


You stand apart, you are unique, extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising influences.

You say: Olive who is the truthful one?


I [the narrator] have said that it was Miss Chancellor's plan of life not to lie, but such a plan was compatible with a kind of consideration for the truth which led her to shrink from producing it on poor occasions.


It’s Olive who has the intensity, the fixedness of purpose, the passionate dedication that you ascribe to Verena. No, I do not see Verena as insincere. She does earnestly believe in their cause, but it is a youthful enthusiasm dinned into her since childhood by others, and doesn’t go as deep as Olive’s.

You should not allow the ignorant speculation of others characters to influence your assessment of Verena. All textual evidence shows you are wrong about the depth of the passionate dedication of this the sweetest flower of character, and wrong in suggesting that her dedication is a little more than an artefact of her upbringing. Where in the novel is the hard evidence to support these propositions, which seems to me feeble rationalisations used to make sense of the ending for want of something better? Here is hard evidence:


[Verena] struck her [Olive] as the only person she had yet encountered who had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she herself had.
-------
...that I [Verena] have dedicated my life; that there is something unspeakably dear to me.
-------
"No, I want to hate my liking. I want you to keep before me all the reasons why I should—many of them so fearfully important. Don't let me lose sight of anything! Don't be afraid I shall not be grateful when you remind me." That was one of the singular speeches that Verena made in the course of their constant discussion of the terrible question...

As she leaves the Boston Music Hall with Basil - we may surmise that - Verena is indeed grateful to Olive Chancellor.


Previously, she’s always met his opposing views with joking equanimity, but now suddenly she’s scared, not of Basil’s views, but of her own faith being shaken.

Verena appreciates Basil's impressive persuasive powers, and the obvious danger he presents to her. He is far more magnetic than the mesmeric Selah Tarrant. These are the very powers Miss Birdseye urges her to harness to the cause of women; and this task will become Verena's genuine vocation.


If she had been less afraid, she [Olive] would have read things more clearly; she would have seen that we don't run away from people unless we fear them and that we don't fear them unless we know that we are unarmed. Verena feared Basil Ransom now (though this time she declined to run); but now she had taken up her weapons, she had told Olive she was exposed, she had asked her to be her defence.

Leaving the Boston Music Hall, we can be certain that Verena is well trained for battle and armed, by Olive, to the hilt.


Now you say that Verena does not reject Feminism, but only Olive's brand of feminism. Where are we shown her retaining any sort of feministic views? What type of feminism is she supposed to convert Basil to?

This is a truly wonderful question and goes to the heart of the ending. It made me think long and hard. If Verena rejects Olive’s feminist vision, which isn’t really so bad, what is the greater good to which Verena aspires?

My gut reaction was: the feminism of Miss Birdseye, with Basil Ransom leading the charge. So yesterday I started looking for evidence. As brother of the fine philosopher and psychologist William James, I never underestimate the breadth of vision of Henry James. The following sentence is surely key to Verena's outlook:


[Selah Tarrant] looked at his child only from the point of view of the service she might render to humanity.

Olive wants the charismatic Verena to preach feminism to the converted and the wavering in the enlightened North, where slavery in America was first abandoned: a female preaching mainly to sympathetic, middle class females. Miss Birdseye inadvertently happens upon a radically different vision: the charismatic Basil preaching feminism to his reactionary brothers - black and white - in the deep South, that perennial den of prejudice and exploitation.

An eloquent Basil will bring enlightenment to Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana - where Miss Birdseye had long toiled) and not just to women. In future, it will be a man will delivering the liberating feminist gospel to men. Moreover, a white male Southerner will preach to the Southern blacks. Surely this is a big idea - way bigger than marrying for love and the vocation of "wife"!

How will Verena convert Basil to the women's cause? My guess is that she will achieve his conversion less through preaching to Basil than through acting out, like Miss Birdseye before her, a compassion for the oppressed, now legendary from that heroic age of New England life. The following are three wonderful passages (and I’m sure there are more) that I stumbled upon yesterday evening. These are the only references to tears, associated with Verena, apart from the closing sentence of the novel.


Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked up at her patient old friend [the dying Miss Birdseye]; she had spoken to him, often, during the last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she had told him that this was what she would have liked to do—to wander, alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply "Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself. This did not, however, as he was perfectly aware, prevent her feeling that she had come too late for the heroic age of New England life, and regarding Miss Birdseye as a battered, immemorial monument of it. Ransom could share such an admiration as that, especially at this moment; he had said to Verena, more than once, that he wished he might have met the old lady in Carolina or Georgia before the war—shown her round among the negroes and talked over New England ideas with her; there were a good many he didn't care much about now, but at that time they would have been tremendously refreshing. Miss Birdseye had given herself away so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left of her for the supreme surrender.

And a little earlier:


allowed her, certainly, no illusion on the subject of the fate she should meet as his wife; he flung over it no rosiness of promised ease; he let her know that she should be poor, withdrawn from view, a partner of his struggle, of his severe, hard, unique stoicism. When he spoke of such things as these, and bent his eyes on her, she could not keep [B]the tears from her own; she felt that to throw herself into his life (bare and arid as for the time it was) was the condition of happiness for her, and yet that the obstacles were terrible, cruel.

And in the beginning is a passage that shows Olive will be more right than she realises in thinking of Verena as the only person she had yet encountered who had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she herself had.


it seemed to her [Olive] at times that she had been born to lead a crusade—the image of the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes. Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only sacred cause...

[mona amon]

I think we have very different ways of interpreting things. Shall we just agree to disagree? :)

Anyway, I have enjoyed discussing this with you, in the process of which I re-read so many chapters and became much more familiar with the book, and much more appreciative of it, than I normally would have.

[Gladys]

The Bostonians ends with:


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.

Mona Amon has suggested Verena's tears, and tears to come, relate to a less than ideal marriage with Basil Ransom. Whereas I speculated that she was sorry to be leaving the feminist sisterhood to marry and live with the reactionary Southerner. It is neither!

Verena's tears are tears of mingled joy and compassion! She cries purely and simply in zealous anticipation of the opportunity she will now have to serve, like Miss Birdseye before her, among the poor and needy blacks in the racist and sexist South. Her tears are tears of love and compassion for the oppressed in Basil's home state of Mississippi.


Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked up at her patient old friend [the dying Miss Birdseye]; she had spoken to him, often, during the last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she had told him that this was what she would have liked to do—to wander, alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted vantage of the New England platform.

Incidentally, I no longer believe that Verena marries to convert Basil. She marries for love and for the opportunity to work and struggle with the needy and oppressed - predominately the blacks. Nevertheless, through Verena's peculiar influence and her selfless service to the oppressed, Basil will eventually be born again to play a leading role in the human rights movement, just as muddleheaded Miss Birdseye foresaw.


I think we have very different ways of interpreting things. Shall we just agree to disagree?

It's been fun corresponding and, overnight, even more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place as you can see. I may still post, but please don't feel obliged to respond. :) And eventually, I will post on why we have such different takes on the novel.

[Gladys]

Saint Verena was interested in serving the poor and used to offer them food. Moreover, she enjoyed serving the sick, especially those suffering from leprosy. She used to wash their wounds and put ointments on them, not fearing infection.

The names of characters in The Bostonians are making more sense at last.

Verena Tarrant heads South with Ransom to continue the great work of [Miss Birdseye's] life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the Southern blacks.

Basil Ransom's life - once Verena's influence has made its indelible mark on him - will be given as redemption for the imprisoned, enslaved, suffering or oppressed of Mississippi. He will make a living by his opinions, and his enlightened ideas will be embodied in national conduct.

Olive Chancellor sees the world, in a rather drab and jaundiced way, and from the narrow perspective of a feminist.

Mrs Adeline Luna is more upbeat than Olive but zany to the point of blindness. She is the first to utterly misrepresent Verena's motivation.

Miss Birdseye's perspective narrowed in her final years, but she could see Verena and Basil's future with the perspicacity of a hawk!

A great novel.

[hellsapoppin]

Does anyone else suspect that Olive may have feelings/intentions towards Verena that go beyond just friendship?



It is clear that Olive's interests in Verena are more than just Platonic. She claims to have recruited her as a spokeswoman for her feminist cause. But the reality is that she is romantically fond of her. She begs her thus: "“Will you be my friend, my friend of friends, beyond every one, everything, forever and ever?”" She then begs her not to marry.

How interesting that while Olive views men as enslavers of women, she has Verena in a slave like stranglehold by refusing to let her out of her sight. She evens pays the Tarrants to stay away from their daughter as she controls her every move. Verena cares for her but is not attracted to her sexually or romantically. She thought about leaving her but muses,


She had a vision of those dreadful years; she knew that Olive would never get over the disappointment. It would touch her in the point where she felt everything most keenly; she would be incurably lonely and eternally humiliated. It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship; it had elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed. Of course it had been more on Olive’s side than on hers, she had always known that; but that, again, didn’t make any difference.

This novel is from the Gilded Age and a writer could not be very explicit in writing about illicit sexual matters. This is why Olive's sensitivities cannot be asserted more forcefully. By contrast, Basil Ransome can do so and succeeds in winning her over.

The gender politics in the book are very interesting. Olive says men enslave women - but she enslaves Verena. Olive says women are deprived of equal opportunity. But Dr Mary Prance is a successful physician who does not squawk about life's unfairness ever what it might be - she is a doer, not a whiner. Olive says the world is unfair to women but she is wealthy as is her sister Mrs. Adeline Luna [in fact, the book is filled with many female characters who all have one thing in common: they are ALL wealthy!]. Basil is a man who lost his entire fortune, was forced to fight and kill in an unjust war, and lives in poverty in NY. Olive's speeches are heard in public. Basil has terrible trouble getting his writings published. Olive has been given everything she has ever had in life for free and feels that it takes someone like Verena to do her speaking for her. Basil stands up and does his own work.


I felt the book had a great many merits. It would have been very interesting to see what the book looked like if it had been written in the 20th century where same sex arrangements could be discussed more explicitly. Bottom line is that Olive's interest in Verena was more than just a business or ideological arrangement and one that was definitely not Platonic.

[hellsapoppin]

I have just understood the blatant foreshadowing by Mrs Luna, early in the novel. Ransom is the lion tamer, who energetically tames both Olive and Verena by the end of the novel. But as Olive has well learned, the taming of gifted Verena is problematic in the extreme.


"But, mark my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she [Verena] will give Olive the greatest cut she has ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will marry a circus-man!"

In The Bostonians, the wedded Verena will ultimately give the central character, the circus-man Basil Ransom, the greatest cut of all!




Some of the large amount of money Olive gave to the Tarrants will likely go to the Ransoms as a dowry. Thus, Olive loses out in more ways than one in the end.

[hellsapoppin]

The wealthy and privileged Mrs Luna said "She will run off with some lion-tamer". She sizes him up thusly,

"Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave a little smiling sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing a small red stone. In spite of this decoration the young man looked poor--as poor as a young man could look who had such a fine head and such magnificent eyes. Those of Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing; his head had a character of elevation which fairly added to his stature; it was a head to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some judicial bench or political platform, or even on a bronze medal. His forehead was high and broad, and his thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and without any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner.''


While she and all the other women were rich and privileged he was poor but "leonine" or lion like ~ dignified& regal in manner and appearance.

[hellsapoppin]

Miss Birdseye had given herself away so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left of her for the supreme surrender.


Miss Birdseye was modeled after Elizabeth Peabody:


9935


https://www.historynet.com/elizabeth-peabody-an-old-soul/



Miss Peabody never married and was described as, "“desultory, dreamy, but insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it.” Her gravestone at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, notes: Every humane cause had her sympathy, and many her direct aid.'' We have her to thank for developing the idea of kindergardens!

[hellsapoppin]

Dr Mary Edwards Walker - source for Dr Mary Prance:


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Dr._Mary_Walker_%28cropped%29.jpg/220px-Dr._Mary_Walker_%28cropped%29.jpg



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Edwards_Walker



Mary Edwards Walker, M.D. (November 26, 1832 – February 21, 1919), commonly referred to as Dr. Mary Walker, was an American abolitionist, prohibitionist, prisoner of war and surgeon.[1] She is the only woman to ever receive the Medal of Honor.[2]

In 1855, she earned her medical degree at Syracuse Medical College in New York,[3] married and started a medical practice. She attempted to join the Union Army at the outbreak of the American Civil War and was denied. She served as a surgeon at a temporary hospital in Washington, D.C. before being hired by Union Forces and assigned to Army of the Cumberland and later the 52nd Ohio Infantry, becoming the first female surgeon in the US Army.[4][5] She was captured by Confederate forces[3] after crossing enemy lines to treat wounded civilians and arrested as a spy. She was sent as a prisoner of war to Richmond, Virginia until released in a prisoner exchange.

After the war, she was approved for the Medal of Honor, for her efforts to treat the wounded in battle and across enemy lines during the Civil War. Notably, the award was not expressly given for gallantry in action at that time, and in fact was the only military decoration during the Civil War. Walker is the only woman to receive the medal and one of only eight civilians to receive it. Her name was deleted from the Army Medal of Honor Roll in 1917 (along with over 900 other, male MOH recipients); however, it was restored in 1977.[3] After the war, she was a writer and lecturer supporting the women's suffrage movement until her death in 1919.




A truly fascinating person!