The Bostonians Critical Essays

The Bostonians is the longest of Henry James’s novels in an American setting, and in spite of his later dissatisfaction with its middle section or the high promise given to the unfinished The Ivory Tower (1917), it is his most important fictive statement on America. The name and setting of the novel are significant; two other American novels, Washington Square (1880) and The Europeans (1878), are set in New York City and Boston respectively, and though The Bostonians begins in Charles Street and ends in the Music Hall in Boston, its second half begins in New York, which James always claimed as his native city. James had difficulty selecting a title for the work, but when he had settled on The Bostonians, he knew it precisely suited the contents and his meaning.

The best commentary on the work is found in James’s preface to the New York edition. James had several times tried to clarify a passage he had written in his life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, on what he believed that America offered and lacked with respect to writers. The Bostonians was James’s attempt to write on a subject that was at once local and typical, a local manifestation of a national trait. James chose that distinguishing feature of American life, the American woman, whom he had earlier encapsulated in Isabel Archer and other heroines. The settings he chose were the Boston of the early 1870’s and postabolitionist New York, with its atmosphere of exhausted triumph and its hectic pursuit of new reform movements, especially that of women’s rights. James’s general distaste for the reformers if not for their proposals may be sensed in his portraits in the novel.

The “Bostonians” may be variously identified as one, two, or more characters, but James uses the term only once to refer to Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant. Although James referred to Verena as the heroine, the true Bostonian is Olive, the embodiment of the clash between discrimination and undiscriminating action in Boston of the 1870’s. Destined by nature and appearance to be what was called a New England Nun, she becomes a Boston battler in the very last paragraph of the novel, haranguing a capacity crowd in Boston’s largest auditorium. She does so in place of Verena, who has been carried away by Basil Ransom. These three characters play out an ironic and psychologically penetrating form of the eternal triangle.

James seems to approve Verena’s fate, largely because she is unawakened throughout almost the whole novel; she remains a pretty young girl with no mind, and James shows little interest in her. Ransom is a Mississippian trying to revive the family plantation by practicing law in New York; he does not have ideas (until he begins to write reactionary articles) but lives by a code: Everyone must do his or her work well in one’s appointed station in life. When he tries to express this idea to Verena as they sit in Central Park, she is horrified and...