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The Bostonians

A tragic story of conservativism triumphing over the impotent cause of “progress” though the flexibility of heredity and upbringing.

Folks

• Olive Chancellor, ardent, jealous, man-hating feminist intent on having Verena Tarrant for herself and for the cause
• Verena Tarrant, beautiful young redhead who complies with anyone’s wishes
• Basil Ransom, cousin of Olive, conservative, Carlylian, conscience-lite, unsuccessful Southerner, an ex-Confederate who wants Verena for his own
• Mrs. Luna, elder sister of Olive, tries to seduce Ransom but gets furious when he doesn’t accept
• Mr. Tarrant, a “mesmeric healer” who just wants cash
• Mrs. Tarrant, a socially downward sliding daughter of a famous abolitionist
• Miss Birdseye, an old relic of the first (1840s) wave of Boston radicalism (a sweet force of union and peace, but who used to traverse the South giving Bibles to slaves)
• Doctor Prance, a fully emancipated, wry but caring woman who cares only for her work, not for the cause (she thinks women should just take the freedoms they already have) (seems to be James’ favorite character, the most rational one)
• Mr. Matthias Pardon, a journalist trying to publicize Miss Tarrant
• Mrs. Burrage, a rich, scheming, clever New York matron trying to get Miss Tarrant to elevate her own social standing
• Mr. Burrage, her charming son, in love with Verena

Themes

• Publicity
  • “the majesty of the ‘great dailies’” (155) (from Selah Tarrant’s thoughts)
  • Verena’s method of fame comes through newspapers, photographs purchasable in any photography office, posters plastered in the Boston streets, and sold-out lectures
  • “her name in the biggest kind of bills” (142) (and more repetition of the word BIG in relationship to publicity)
    • “big” also used to describe Central Park (paths are “too big,” “too numerous,” the lakes are “too big”) (319)
  • Compares publicity to war: “There has been enough arranging and interviewing, and discussing and telegraphing and advertising, enough wire-pushing and running about, to put an army in the field.” (407)
  • Selah Tarrant’s views on authorship and publicity: // “For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and every one was everyone’s business. All things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print meant simply infinite reporting.” (139)
• Particular versus General
  • Many of the characters hate the general idea of a group, but like one or two of them personally
  • Impersonality of a theory leads to poor interpersonal relations
• Description
  • This is James’ novel of painterly detail: on Daudet: “If only I could do something with that pictorial quality!”
  • Description of the Back Bay winter from Olive’s dining-room, description of the Elevated Railway and Basil’s neighborhood (the grocery store), description of the magnificent Boston Music Hall
• Modernity
  • James identified women’s struggle for emancipation as the “most salient and peculiar point in our social life” (“the great modern question,” 157, according to Pardon)
  • “A peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shopworn” (54)
  • “Modernness” of Olive’s house’s view of Back Bay row houses: “romantic” “stones roughly piled” lights reflecting on water (45)
  • “A peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shopworn” (54)
  • Mr. Pardon, the interviewer, is “a thoroughly modern young man:” “He regarded the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams: everything to him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest to exciting in his mind that sentiment of respect.” (140)
  • Olive: “The age seemed to be relaxed and demoralized,” “losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing superlatives, delighting to be fooled” (141)
  • Upheaval: to Miss Birdseye: “there were so many bright new motives and ideas in the world that there might even be reasons for looking at her” (220), ie, herself
  • “the masculine tone is passing out of the world,” says Basil (327) in what the narrator calls “narrow notions” (328)

Comps questions

• Marx
  • Catalog
    • James seems fascinated by the library card catalog at Harvard
    • His pictorial mania is one of his catalog-impulses
  • Verena becomes a commodity
    • through the photographs sold in Boston
    • though the book of her life and photos sold at the Music Hall
    • though Mrs. Burrage and her parents making money off her
    • “constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit from Verena” (156)
  • Commodity
    • “A peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—- like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shopworn” (54)
    • “owed it to themselves, owned it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the best material conditions…she elevated daintiness to a religion” (184)
    • “the short of thing she was able to say, was an article for whcih there was more and more demand” (314)
  • Labor
    • Verena’s lecture: “The meat and the wine, the gold and the silver, are simply the suppressed and wasted force, the sovereign remedy” of women’s labor (267)
    • Verena’s colorful appearance maker her look like: “she might have been a rope-dancer or a fortune-teller; and this had immense merit, for Olive, that it appeared to make her belong to the ‘people’, threw her into the social dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the fortunate classes knew so little about.” (101)
  • On Revolution
    • “turn everything over, and make the lowest highest” (212)
    • “to testify to the end against the stale superstition…that those gentry wwere as indispensable as they proclaimed to themselves on the house-tops—that, she passionately protested, was as inspiring a thought in the present poignant crisis as had ever been.” (372)
• Leisure: the period at Marmion, seaside resort
  • To get away from Boston and New York
    • “sick of the city air, and hungry for a holiday” Basil comes out (342)
    • “eternal peace” of Marmion compared to “so much nervous excitement” which occurs through a career (339)
    • Verena, on Basil’s saying that he wants to take her away: “You always want me to come out! We can’t go out here; we are out, as much as we can be!” (358)
  • Moving space is moving in time: it is seen as old, out-of-time, premodern
    • “You smelt the breath of hay…old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow…relic of the shipbuilding era” (350-1)
    • “old-world peace” (354)
    • “The days here must be very long—full of hours” (354)
  • It’s unreal
    • For Basil, “a country in a picture,” “more refined than the real world,” “a striking world of art” (352)
  • Anti-labor
    • Miss Birdseye dies there “at the end of her long day’s work” (352)
    • “A great contrast to my former exertions,” she says (354)
  • Bohemian
    • Homeopathic remedies, not doctors
    • “Miss Tarrant had said…that it was a place where people could lie on the ground and wear their old clothes. I delight to lie on the ground, and all my clothes are old” (357)

Quotes

• ”’Don’t you care for human progress?’ Miss Chancellor asked. ‘I don’t know – I never saw any,’” answers Basil. (49)