by Henry James (1886)
The Bostonians is a satire of the early feminist movement. It is set in late 1870s Boston and involves a trio of main characters. Olive Chancellor is a young, joyless, humorless, man-hating, strident feminist. According to the endnotes in the copy I read, she is thought to be based on Susan B. Anthony. Verena Tarrant is likewise a young(er) feminist, but in contrast to Olive, she is a beautiful, charming, and sweet girl who is kind and aims to please. She grew up marinated in feminism and knows nothing else. She has become something of a sensation among the Boston feminists because of her precociousness as a speaker on the Boston lecture circuit advocating the emancipation of women. Olive forms a deep attachment to Verena and enters into a so-called Boston marriage with her, mentoring her, and determined to keep her to herself and prevent her from ever marrying.
Along comes Basil Ransom, Olive’s distant cousin, a southern aristocrat and unreformed and unapologetic reactionary. He visits Boston and is smitten by Verena. He gradually begins to win her over by the sheer force of his personality, much to Olive’s chagrin. As the novel progresses, Verena is caught in the middle between Basil and Olive, attracted to Ransom but struggling mightily against his advances and deeply conflicted about what to do, while Olive attempts more and more desperate measures to hold on to Verena.
Perhaps the best way to give a flavor of the book is to quote some passages from it.
Here is how Olive Chancellor is described early in the book:
There are women who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option; but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being. She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry.
And here is Olive’s sister remarking about how Olive wants to abolish all traditional social institutions:
She would reform the solar system if she could get hold of it… She hates [Europe]; she would like to abolish it.
The most memorable passages of the book usually involve Ransom. The following are a select few.
Ransom speaking to Verena on the current age:
The whole generation is womanised; … it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which… will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and to endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is… that is what I want to preserve or rather… to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt.
Ransom being described from Verena’s perspective:
Mr Ransom continued to joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena… had never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm leveled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the age… [H]e was ready to say worse things about some of those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she thought it right to say about almost any one…. [H]e was sick of all the modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an extension of it… Such declarations as this took Verena’s breath away; she didn’t suppose you could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century, even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic farce – people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of one person in a hundred.
Ransom’s thoughts on Verena:
The deepest feeling in Ransom’s bosom… was the conviction that she was made for love… She was profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex… would be relegated to the land of vapours, of dead phrases.
An exchange between Ransom and Verena:
[Ransom]: I have such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am perfectly ready to advocate a man’s having a half dozen wives.
[Verena]: The civilisation of the Turks, then, strikes you as the highest?
[Ransom]: The Turks have a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as ours – or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated. Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious effect on their manners, their person, their nature, of this fatuous agitation.
And a final quotation from Ransom on old maids:
I don’t object to the old old maids; they were delightful; they had always plenty to do, and didn’t wander about the world crying out for a vocation. It is the new old maid that you have invented from whom I pray to be delivered.
Finally, here is a description of one of the minor characters in the book, Miss Birdseye, who was thought to be a parody of Elizabeth Peabody:
[S]he belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her from 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…
[W]henever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race… It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage… She was in love… only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more appealing.
Evidently, the same stereotypes of feminists and liberals we have today were recognized by Henry James 150 years ago!
Another aspect about the book I enjoyed was reading about various places in Boston and Cambridge (and to a lesser extent, New York, as some of the book is set there as well) with which I am familiar, having lived there for several years, and what they were like in the late 19th century.
The dialogue is often quite witty, and the book is humorous throughout. All the main characters are flawed in some way, and even Olive is not completely without sympathy. The fact that the book remains widely regarded as an American classic despite its conspicuous contempt of the feminist movement (which one might expect should make it anathema to modern sensibilities) is a testament to the quality of the story itself and its rich characters, its avoidance of a crude didacticism or preachiness that perhaps characterize a story like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (I cannot say whether or not this is an accurate description, having not read it myself), and James’s skill as a writer.