Customer Reviews

The Bostonians

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Though James is certainly not known for his sense of humor, he displays a keen sense of satire in this novel. The two senses are not identical--many readers expect satire to make them laugh out loud, and those readers will be disappointed in this book. James' satire is more likely to make readers feel uncomfortable. He repeatedly mocks the two main characters and their struggle to control a young woman who hardly seems worth the effort that these two egoists put into her pursuit. James allows Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom (whose names evoke the satiricomic tradition in which he is writing) to take themselves seriously while allowing the readers to see them as stereotypes. While satire depends on such stereotypes, James' fiction typically delves into the psychological. At times, he is able to keep this balance, but often the tension is too great and the characters seem to fall flat. Verena Tarrant--the object of Olive and Basil's affection--is virtually absent psychologically (as others have noted), but her lack of character is built into the novel. She begins as her father's possession, and the novel hinges on whether Olive or Basil get to own her next. While the novel is certainly not without faults, it is interesting to watch a novelist as self-conscious as James attempt to write a novel of this type. While he wasn't destined to become a comic genius, this novel is a step toward the psychological, satirical and comic success he was to have in a novel such as "The Ambassadors."

This is the high point of the Henry James middle period. I don't think any book so perfectly captures the spirit of a city than The Bostonians does. It's obvious that James is critical of the people of Boston, and has great fun with a great era (spirituality, free love, communal living, feminism, and seances in the post-Civil War America), yet at the same time, I think this is a great description (and a truthful one) of the home of the eban and the cod. The battle between Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom for the soul of the very confused spiritualist speaker Verena Tarrant (Ah, those Jamesian names again!)is not only powerfully doen, but I think this book has much more humor in it than Portrait of a Lady does. (Although, this does not diminish either work in the least.) I could speak all day about this book, and given a chance I will. But I urge you to take a chance on it. I was Massachusetts born and raised..but out in the Western end of the state, and we tend to feel Bostonians sometimes think a bit too well of themselves. Apparently, over 100 years ago, things were the same. There is so much more to this book, read it, and realize that we, at the beginning of a new millenium, are hardly as progressive or as innovative as we like to think we are.

Of course, the greatest irony of this book comes not within its pages, but when you visit the grave of the James family. Henry James ashes were interred in the ground on the family plot, and now and forever, the family plot looks not upon the city of New York, or the expanses of Europe, but rather, Henry James, for all eternity, is facing th city of Boston. e

The astonishing thing about this book -- and a lot of Henry James's writing -- is his insight into the problems of women. This book deals with the problem of independence and freedom. Most of us, let's admit it, love the idea of being swept off our feet by some competent, assertive male. It's a real turn-on. If you don't believe it, check out how many successful professional women secretly read historical romances by the boxload. The problem comes the next morning when he starts to take control, bit by bit, of your entire life. In this book you have Olive, who is not, I think, a lesbian but someone who is very lonely and doesn't trust men and Verena, who likes men just fine, but is, for the moment anyway, under the spell of Olive and her feminist ideology. Are these our only options? Verena Makes her choice, but James notes that the tears she sheds may not, unhappily, be her last.

Pitting a battle for the affection of a young maiden (Verena Tarrant), a sententious middle aged woman of Boston (Olive Chancellor) seeks to outwit her stultifying southern lawyer temerarious cousin (Basil Ransom). Watching in the crowd are a wealthy sister to Olive (Mrs. Luna) and a worldly philanthropist (Miss Birdseye).

The fight is not personal - but is about everything. Suffrage rights for women are the constant theme espoused throughout this tightly written novel which deeply delves into the complicated characters of each of the above-referenced characters who account for the vast majority of the printed pages,

Olive is the movement's champion, Verena its voice, and Miss Birdseye, its benefactor - emotionally and financially. Fighting the joint forces admirably seeking to have "their cause" become realty, southern educated Mississippian Ransom says, "Do you really take the ground that your sex has been without influence? Influence? Why, you have led us all by the nose to where we are now. Wherever we are, its all you." His fight is not to the movement, but to opine when drawn into the parlor room for response.

The discourse of this book reads easily - an amazing feat as it was written 120+ years ago. And, the in depth philosophical thoughts marvelously outline many of the characters' values. "The world was full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it had been swept away, while it was still there to face, to give one a task and reward."

The three people of concern are Basil, Olive and Verena. Like so many books of this time, the young man simply becomes entranced by this mysterious woman - a devilishly coy but powerful beauty. A "Zuleika Dobson" of the 19th century. And, the young woman bearing so much weight on her shoulders must ask, "Did she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which, after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended to be fed and fortified?" Basil or Olive? Which friend can provide happiness? Could both? Would neither? Would Verena be too pusillanimous to fight these forces which strained her professional and personal life?

Ultimately, this book asks more questions than it answers. As to the monumentally honorable and valiant effort for Suffrage, we ask: Is it soiled by Olive's financial and covert payment (payoff?) to Verena's parents? As to the Suffrage's representaive of retort, we ask: Are Basil's honest intentions overcome by his impervious refusal to accept women as equals?

This book's modern dialogue of a very avant garde issue in the 1880's makes the issues and statements seem as poignant today as they were when written. That amazingly difficult success is what makes this an identifiable and undeniable classic piece of English literature.

The women's rights movement is a big part of American history, so it's interesting that Henry James used it as the subject of his 1886 novel "The Bostonians." While it's widely considered a satire, it doesn't really ridicule the movement, and the characters are too understated to risk judgment as caricatures. (To say James is a master of understatement is an understatement.) Rather, the novel appears to use the movement as a device to weave male-female relationships into a Balzacian comedy of society. Compared to most of his more popular novels, it is quite lighthearted.

The central heroine is the voluptuous Verena Tarrant, an inspirational public speaker with the voice of an angel and the charm of a Homeric siren. Her uniquely sheltered upbringing as the daughter of a fraudulent and avaricious "mesmeric healer" has freed her from a normal education and exposed her to anybody who wants to take advantage of her ingenuousness. One night at the home of an elderly progressive activist named Miss Birdseye, she delivers a mellifluous speech that grabs the attention of the scheming feminist Olive Chancellor and her cousin Basil Ransom, a Mississippi lawyer who has settled in New York to begin a practice and has just come to Boston to visit his relatives.

Olive quickly befriends Verena with the intention of putting her oratorical skills to work for the women's movement, acting as her mentor and coaching her in the rationale for gender equality. Men, including her own father, see Verena as a goldmine: A wealthy Harvard student named Henry Burrage offers to be her lecture agent, and a journalist named Matthias Pardon reports on her professional engagements, helping her to become a celebrity who commands large audiences. Basil, a conservative gentleman, naturally thinks Verena's speeches are radical nonsense; he resents the "feminization" of male society that he fears the emancipation of women would effect. Like Burrage, he would like to marry her, but he would first like to get the silly ideas out of her head placed there by Olive. Furthermore, his attraction to Verena is disheartening to Olive's widowed sister Adeline Luna, who is somewhat infatuated with him and sympathetic to his traditionalist views.

It almost goes without saying that the novel is not about the political aspect of women's rights; James is obviously not interested in that. The conflict he establishes is the selfish battle for control over Verena--whether her career in the hands of Olive and her handlers will submit to Basil's love for her. In general I find James's prose style to be too purposefully obstructive and uninviting, but here I was able to put aside my reservations and concentrate on the story at hand because I sensed the end would be rewarding, and indeed I liked the way the last sentence of the novel forgoes convention and leaves the principal question of Verena's happiness open and unresolved. For what it's worth, James also conjures great descriptions of street scenes of Boston and New York, giving genuine verbal snapshots of what these cities must have looked like at the time. He will never be one of my favorite writers, but I concede that he is one of my favorite disagreeable writers.

Memorable duel of wills between 2 stubborn forces in control of a pliable public speaker... One of James' stonger pieces; every word counts so read them carefully. His narration is stuffed with swirling ideas, pinpoint social commentary and sly asides; all floating inside his trademark beautiful prose. Olive versus Basil: there's a literary wrestling match for the ages. Great stuff

James after 1898 was too subtle, too often employing apposition to add layers like coats of paint to each observation. Works like The Ambassadors (1903) rely on the reader's powers of synthesis, which can be in turns exhilarating or frustrating. The Bostonians (1885) is an extremely straightforward, dramatic, cruel, hilarious, political, compassionate love story and one of the best novels by anyone. Olive Chancellor is tragic: with so much love behind her cold, horrified stares. Basil Ransom is magnetic, but an educated idiot savant whose passion and will are nothing other than natural talent. Verena Tarrant has nothing but natural talent--she is an organism that throbs with passion like a finely tuned Geiger counter. Whether the private turmoil of sex and marriage finally draw her from the political sisterhood, and what happens to queer women like Olive, are high-stakes, human questions that James presents with sheer drama and almost unbelievable insight.

An amusing triangle story, in which a conservative lawyer (and former Confederate officer) from Mississippi and his progressive feminist cousin from Boston compete for the affection of an attractive young woman from the quackery world.

The target of interest is a gifted speaker on women's emancipation issues. Verena is introduced as a humbug: her inspiration comes from her father's mesmeric skills. Proper feminists are put off by her show. Her father, the mesmeric healer, is a miracle monger with a long history in humanitarian bohemia, including times as a spiritist. The girl herself is an early star in the so American industry of inspirational speaking. Her mother is from a family of abolitionists, but she lost her standing when she married a con man.

Olive, the wealthy young Bostonian, is consumed by the passion of sympathy, and some esthetic qualms about the world of protestations. Her consolation is suffering, the prospect of which is, `spiritually speaking', so much cash in her pocket.

She wants to help her weaker sisters, but hardly knows how. The shop girls, whose lot she has tried to improve by sympathy, are in the end more interested in `Charlie' than in her sympathy. As it turns out, she will have the same experience again with Verena. Olive's essence is exaggeration, and when she meets Verena, it is love at first sight. She picks her as her engine for contribution to the movement and takes her under her wings. She wants to free her from the world of her parents as much as from the danger of marrying any of the young men whom she smiles at.

Basil, the man in the triangle, is amused and attracted. Verena sees him as a handsome joker. He can't quite take his Northern cousin serious, and he certainly does not understand her, but he recognizes a pretty girl when he sees one, and he wins the fight for Verena. However he certainly is not shown as a shining light of intellect, rather he can be quite a simpleton in his backwoods stance. He wins because of his 'charliedom'.

James had the habit of sympathizing with the loser. His attitude towards the two competitors shifts according to the fortunes of war. James also had the habit of leaving much unsaid, which makes his stories frequently more sexless than plausible. One wonders if this is entirely due to voluntary self-censorship or if he had a different mindset from most people. He leaves Olive's lesbianism deliberately vague, but nevertheless quite apparent. Wiki mentions the term `Boston marriage' for the kind of ménage that Olive and Verena have until Basil disturbs things.

The Bostonians was first published in serial arrangement in 1885-86. It seems that readers of the time enjoyed it less than we do now. One might also assume that not all modern day feminists can forgive James for poking fun at their ancestors in spirit. Looking back from more than a century later, I see HJ at his witty best, at the top of his craft.

Henry James's, "The Bostonians," is a simple, but increasingly entertaining love story set in the years soon after the end of the Civil War. Basil Ransom, a true Southern gentleman from Mississippi, has moved North (specifically, to New York City) to try and start a career away from the impoverished South of the Reconstruction days. Shortly after moving North, he pays a visit, at her behest, to the Boston house of his distant cousin, Olive Chancellor. Olive, a stalwart in the women's rights movement of the time, invites Basil to her home in order to offer help and assistance to her Southern cousin, but she also wishes to save him from the flawed ways he certainly must have taken on growing up in the South. Her self-seeking, ulterior motives fail miserably, of course.

It is through Olive that Basil Ransom meets Verena Tarrant, the young woman who has left her lower middle-class family to move in with and be molded by Olive. Verena has a tremendous speaking ability which caught Olive's (and the other women's (womyn's?) movement leaders') attention. But ultimately, Verena also catches Basil's attention... not for her feminist diatribes, but for her beauty and the passion of her speeches. Basil is instantly struck by Verena, and from this point onward the plot focuses as Basil attempts to seek out his love interest who is highly guarded by Olive, Verena's parents, and several others.

The dialogue between Olive and her friends with Basil Ransom, is a constant back and forth that is civil on the surface, but boiling with hostility underneath the social niceties. While Basil is always cool and focused as he tracks the object of his love, Olive Chancellor only becomes more paranoid as she sees that she is gradually losing her young charge... to a Southern Neanderthal. "The Bostonians" meanders through the first couple hundred pages with witty dialogue between the alien Basil and his new peers, but as his focus intensifies, so does the plot. James draws all this circling and stalking into a final, climactic scene that many will be cheering, but one that many modern-day feminists and their sympathizers will be cursing.

Henry James was a bit of both, the mordant mocker of the society he loved to flee. Henry James was both more and less than a Man of his times; he was a demi-god of observation, aloofly scrutinizing the foibles of everyone around him, a perpetual onlooker perhaps because he never found a means to participate. I suspect he made many people uncomfortable, particularly later in his career when one might well have dreaded becoming a character in his next novel.

"The Bostonians" is an early product of James's observatory. At first glance, it's an elaborately funny satire of Brahmin Boston and its elite intellectual reformers. Note that "funny" contains "fun". The Bostonians is a FUN book! If more readers approached James expecting to have fun, there would be less misperception of his books as 'difficult.' For biting satire, the Henry James of "The Bostonians" could go round for round with his contemporary Mark Twain. But "The Bostonians" is also a pioneering 'psychological' novel. The narrative is certainly "third person omniscient" but James artfully fits that narrative into the mentalities of the two principal characters - Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom - as penetratingly as fingers in a glove.

Olive is a Bostonian of 'sufficient means', with access to the upper reaches of a class she despises. Bluntly -- though James is never blunt -- she's a man-hating closeted Lesbian. (Anachronistic qualifiers! But in a novel of 1884, the intimate portrayal of such a character's mind was beyond the skill of any other writer.) Olive is neurotically shy, perhaps agoraphobic, and acutely sensitive to any antipathy. She's also a mistress of manipulation, a clever, bitter, lonely woman, quite easy for the reader to dislike, and her interest in the young beauty, Verena Tarrant, is ultimately more selfish than idealistic. Olive is of course an ardent feminist, a 'suffragette', and her small circle of associates are recognizable as archetypes of the feminists of the Gilded Age in America. Curiously, Olive is also the character whose psychology most closely matches that of Henry James, the acute observer forever on the fringe of others' lives.

Basil Ransom is a Southerner, a veteran of the Civil War consumed with frustration at the loss of his plantation wealth, bitterly nostalgic for the chivalric ante-bellum way of life, though the ugly facts of the "peculiar institution" of slavery never seem to color his nostalgia. Basil is stately, tall, handsome, genteel ... and blatantly narcissistic, an impractical fool who fails utterly as a lawyer in New York City, a place he loathes. Nevertheless, he considers himself something of a reformer also, a reactionary prophet who imagines that his essays in fringe publications will somehow someday bring society to its senses and restore the gallant manliness of the Old South. He is, of course, scornful of feminism, a blatant male chauvinist (Anachronistic terms again!) who seriously argues that Verena's destiny is to be his ornament. Sly Henry James, nevertheless, presents Basil quite sympathetically; incautious readers might take the ardent male as the 'hero' of the narrative, might take his side in the competition he wages against Olive for possession of Verena Tarrant. Believe me, that would be a sadly superficial interpretation.

The apex of the romantic triangle in this novel is the immature beauty, Verena Tarrant, the prize for which Olive and Basil will wage their psychological battles. To be anachronistic once more, she is an 'abused' child, a victim of manipulative parents and painfully susceptible to manipulation from both would-be possessive lovers.

A hundred and some years have passed since James invented Basil Ransom, and it's difficult to imagine how readers might have perceived that prickly character in the late 1800s. Today, he seems odiously familiar, the stiff-necked die-hard reactionary, the Lost Cause mythologizer. His 'gentle persuasions' addressed to Verena are pure rant and cant; his little essays in reactionary ideology might have earned him a bright career on the Talk Radio of 2010. When I read "The Bostonians" first, in the 1960s, I'm afraid I was too green and optimistic to recognize the pertinence of James's insights into American character. I thought the book was a depiction of a quaint by-gone era. It's not. It's now!

[Beware! If you don't wish to know how the contest ends, don't read this paragraph!]

The celebrated last sentence of The Bostonians, which projects a future of 'tears' for Verena, is not ambiguous in the least, whatever any critic has written about it. Only a reader ludicrously ignorant of marriage and of abusive relationships could fail to comprehend that Verena will indeed have tears to shed. Her ardent deliverer, Ransom, will soon enough wallow in his own futility. Poverty and frustration will overwhelm him, and he WILL blame her. Ransom will become, in remarkably few unwritten pages, the brutal domestic tyrant and wife-abuser that we modern readers recognize implicitly in his character. In short, this is a tragic ending craftily disguised in the uproarious humor of Verena's elopement with the gallant Basil.

It's interesting to compare The Bostonians with another 'feminist' novel of the same decade, George Gissing's "The Odd Women", which also depicts involves a romantic conflict between a man and a woman of opposing wills. Gissing's novel is quite good, a well-crafted narrative with vivid and plausible portraitures, but it remains external. Next to The Bostonians, Gissing's work seems quite old-fashioned. When I first read The Bostonians for a college literature class, the professor declared rhapsodically that it was" the greatest novel of the 19th C." I silently scoffed then, but now I suspect he had a point.