The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Welcome to Boston! We have been introduced to several characters: Basil Ransom, Olive Chancellor, Mrs. Luna, Miss Birdseye, Mrs. Farrinder, and Dr. Prance. The Tarrants have made an appearance, but we don’t know much about them yet.

Miss Birdseye was possibly based on Elizabeth Peabody, an American Transcendentalist and reformer, and a sister-in-law to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This resemblance upset some readers, and James denied it. Dr Prance was probably based on Katharine Peabody Loring, a companion and caretaker of James’s sister.

What do you think of the characters so far? What kind of people are they?

What did you think of the James’s descriptions of the characters? How do their physical appearances reflect who they are? Were you struck by any particular description?

What is Dr. Prance’s opinion of Mr. Tarrant?

Would you have felt comfortable in this gathering? Why or why not?

This might be too early to tell, but from the descriptions given of the women and their dialog, what do you think James’s opinion was of women’s liberation movements of the time?

The physical description of Miss Birdseye is amazing. Like attempting to describe someone in an out of focus photo. At least that is how it struck me, and James does spend some time on her description.

I too was much struck by the description of Miss Birdseye—it seemed the most detailed and specific, so it doesn’t surprise me to hear people thought she was based on a real person. She seems like one of those people who has become pure Spirit while still in fleshly form. In a different cultural context she would be well down the path to canonization.

The gathering amused me: I have some experience of clubbish well-meaning reformers full of vague ideals and completely out of touch with the reality of other people’s lives. Olive at least has some level of awareness of her obliviousness, if I can use such a paradox, and she is honest with herself to a degree. I rather like her—she is struggling with her limiting shyness and trying to challenge herself to lead a worthwhile life without really knowing what that might be. Her encounter with Basil Ransom feels like something that could lead to disaster. For all his poverty, he reeks of male privilege and seems to see other people as placed on this earth to serve his wants, whatever they might be in the moment, even if they are just to be entertained for an evening.

I can’t yet say what James’s attitude was about the feminism of the day, though he seems to be tending a bit toward the patronizing and dismissive. As far as I recall the history of the movement, and I might be off-base here, American feminism was in what I would call its PETA phase, engaging in outrageous provocations to challenge the verities of the times—Susan B. Anthony getting arrested for voting, the publication of the Women’s Bible, and so on. If James is even “saying” anything at this early stage and not just setting the scene, it seems to be that leaders in the reformist circle (with the exception of Miss Birdseye) were mountebanks: Mr. Tarrant a poseur in the eyes of Dr. Prance, Mrs. Farrinder all about raising money and getting other people to do all the work. Basically the stereotypes of the spiritualist and the organizer, in short, for all the disguises of James’s verbiage.

This is interestingly set up, and I’m not yet sure what sort of judgment James is making. My overall impression is of an environment in which well-intentioned but out-of-touch abolitionists, having won the war, find themselves bereft of their cause and fumble about for some new direction in which to invest their energy. The most memorable passage for me so far has been the one in which Olive agonizes over the varying implications of the means by which she can choose to travel through the city, with and without a masculine companion. So overthought, so relatable, and so goofy.

Lori wrote: ".What do you think of the characters so far? What kind of people are they?
What did you think of the James’s descriptions of the characters? How do their physical appearances reflect who they are? Were you struck by any particular description?
Would you have felt comfortable in this gathering? Why or why not?."

My goodness there are a lot of characters introduced and they are all truly characters. He describes and depicts them quite well so far. I especially enjoyed the Dr. Prance dialogue and depiction.
I had expected the various degrees and forms of feminists but not some of the others types, like the mesmerist healer. It reminded me a bit of the themes and trends his friend/protégé Edith Wharton would comment on 40 years later in her Twilight Sleep. I don't think James will be quite as satirical as Wharton was about societal trends and I expect the book to focus on the feminist attitudes weaving in with traditional ones.
So far I prefer this story's Basil of the two Basil's. He seems pleasantly at ease at this party, much more so than I would be and as yet seems non-judgmental. However, we haven't heard that much from him, and his ease may just reflect extreme arrogance. I look forward to seeing how his attitudes interact with Olive's.

Like Brian I enjoyed Doctor Prance’s comments and observations and wondered, although it is such an early stage in the book, if she is the voice of the author. Dr. Prance believes that both men and women still have a lot to learn, something that, arguably, still rings true today. We don’t know what enabled Dr. Prance to become the independent women that she is but she did it by getting on with it, not by going to Mrs. Birdseye type meetings.
My first impressions of the Mrs. Birdseye group is that they are well meaning but without any real practical sense of direction. Dr. Prance has already got Mrs. Farrinder worked out when she tells Basil that she is after Olive’s money.
Olive, set in stark contrast to her sister at the beginning of the novel, seems destined to agonise at every decision she makes. No wonder Doctor Prance predicts that she will feel at lot of pain. Olive’s idolisation of Mrs. Farrinder contrasts with that of Basil, who, although he says he wants to hear what she has to say, seems to have already made up his mind to oppose her.
Basil himself is mainly disappointed to find that his cousin is not pretty like Miss Tarrant or intelligent like Dr. Prance. At Mrs. Birdseye’s he spends his time observing and won’t be drawn into anything at this stage. He seems to be quietly laughing at the spectacle before him as if he has been invited to some form of vaudeville performance.
If the Mrs. Birdseye assembly is a reflection of Henry James’ view of feminism then I detect a lack of seriousness on his part. However, it is early days and it is probably too soon to decide.

Thanks for your comments! I also enjoyed the descriptions in this chapter. I like how James adds depth to his characters.

Dr. Prance made me think of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, from the recent biography, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine. They dressed simply and were caricatured in the British magazine Punch.

An excellent book about the Peabody sisters is The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. One married Hawthorne, one married Horace Mann, and Elizabeth, who never married, ran a bookshop and helped start the first kindergartens. She wasn't at all "fuzzy" from what I have read of her. She took dictation and discussed ideas with several of the leading Unitarian ministers of the time. All the sisters learned several languages.

Mrs. Farrinder made me think a bit of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens, who neglected her own children in order to advocate and collect for foreign missions. But she also seems to enjoy and expect adulation for her every utterance.

Many of us have been in the place of Olive, justifying certain luxuries or conveniences while feeling a bit guilty about them. Or putting up with something we don't really like because we think it would be against our principles to enjoy something better. I think it is more common in young idealists than older people.

So far, James seems to me to be dismissive of the feminists. At this point, we have mainly seen their physical appearance and a bit of their speech.

I like that James told us about Basil's Southern accent so that I can hear him that way (without James trying to reproduce his dialect, which I think is a good decision.)

Funny, Robin, I also had to think of Mrs Jellyby and Dickens, especially when Africa came up in parentheses and a question mark.
Based on that I had the feeling that James was rather making fun of all of this, but as you have all said it is too early to tell.

I loved the descriptions of the different characters and it felt to me as such a contrast to Dumas’s Twenty Years Later, which I have been reading for the last months.

Besides the actual characters, we are also dealing with the “almighty” author/ narrator here who addresses the reader and also jumps with some statements into future. Does he want to give his view throughout the novel? Does he represent James or just a narrator of a story? Time will tell.

By the way, in which period is the story set? Due to the mentioning of the Civil War and that Basil might have been it, I assume we are talking of some time around 1870 / max. 1875 or what do you think?

Thanks for the references and context, Robin! The book was published in the mid-1880s, but given Basil’s relative youth your proposed date in the 1870s might well be right. I haven’t yet seen any real-world events mentioned that would allow us to fix the date more precisely.

Given the characters' ages, it must be set around 1875 or so. I don't think the beginning chapters could be set later than 1877.

There will be some reference in later chapters to landmarks that came into existence closer to 1880, but at least a couple of years will pass in the story before then.

I found this beginning sentence of a plot summary of The Bostonians on the Internet:

"In 1875 young Mississippian lawyer Basil Ransom is invited to visit his cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston."

I'll go with that date since, if its on the internet, it must be true.

Unless I have missed it, these first chapters don’t seem to mention how Basil became a lawyer in New York after his ‘involvement’ on a plantation in Mississippi and fighting on the ‘wrong’ side.
Having read a number of Edith Wharton but only one Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady) I came to the conclusion that New York society, towards the top of the pile, was a closed shop. I was thinking of Newland Archer, himself a New York lawyer in the 1870’s who basically had the job due to his family connections.

I wonder if at the time you could just move to another state and still be a lawyer. In modern times you have to pass the state board exam, and New York is notoriously difficult. It seems like Basil still has some money, but supposedly his family lost the wealth of their land (and the people they had enslaved, which was a big part of Southern wealth.) I don't think lawyers made a lot of money at the time, for example Abraham Lincoln was never rich.

I wonder how much Henry James knew about American society outside New York. He spent a lot of time in England and Europe.

James's family spent time in Boston, but I'm not sure if he ever visited the South.

James attended Harvard Law School but didn’t take a degree. I expect he had encountered young men like Basil. In the old days studying law was an appropriate pastime for upper class men even if they never intended to practise at the bar - useful in one’s business or political career, both for the knowledge and the contacts.

Good comments. I didn't know that there was female doctors in this era. I thought that they were not allowed to become doctors.

Robin mentioned the dialect and James not reproducing it and I agree. It's odd when authors do this. If you know that accent you can "hear" it when reading, and if you don't, no matter how good it is (it never is), it will make no sense, so leave it out.

Rafael wrote:

Robin mentioned the dialect and James not reproducing it and I agre..."

In that sense he differs from authors such as Gaskell, Elliot and Dickens who would attempt to reproduce the accent/dialect where appropriate. I have only heard the southern accent in a few films (and maybe the Beverly Hillbillies if that is a southern accent) so to gauge the impact of the difference in speech between Basil and his cousin’s set would be difficult. Having said that, the New York accent seems to me very distinct from other areas of the country.
Would a lawyer with a southern accent come up against some opposition or reluctance to be engaged in New York in the aftermath of the Civil War?

Oh good question! Hard to imagine this not being problematic.

I recommend the Merchant-Ivory film with Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave, and Linda Hunt doing Dr. Prance. It follows the book very closely, as Merchant-Ivory pics always do.

I was brought up in the Bronx, one of the outer boroughs, and I've been told I have a New York accent, but I don't know what distinguishes it. A California friend on another forum said she loves my posts because they're so New York-y. Southern accents are more clearly defined, the leisurely stretching of vowels.

Linda2 wrote: "I recommend the Merchant-Ivory film with Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave, and Linda Hunt doing Dr. Prance. It follows the book very closely, as Merchant-Ivory pics always do.

I was brought..."

Thanks, I will look for it!

An upper class New York accent of the latter 19th century sounded very different from what we think of as how New Yorkers talk. Listen on YouTube to Theodore Roosevelt speaking to get an idea of what it was like.

The upper-class New York accent (similar to those of Boston and Main Line Philadelphia) was known as Locust Valley Lockjaw. These days people often mistake it for a British accent.

Yes, they’re all what is called ‘non-rhotic’ in linguistics, as would be Basil’s Mississippi pronunciation.

That's really good to know. I always wonder about historical dramas where George Washington has a standard American accent and Thomas Jefferson a Southern one. I would think that so early on, everyone sounded British, Scots, Irish, etc. depending where they or their family came from only a generation or so ago. In some parts of Canada, some speakers still sound "British" to me.

Since James draws attention to the Mississippi accent at the very beginning of the book, it clearly stands out in Boston. I just assumed that it would also stand out in New York, but maybe not . . . Maybe speech patterns in Boston and New York were divergent (as now) with the New York sound closer to that of Mississippi.

Most noticeable would be Basil’s slower cadence and lengthened vowel. To the Bostonians he would sound uneducated and backward.

Bill wrote: "Most noticeable would be Basil’s slower cadence and lengthened vowel. To the Bostonians he would sound uneducated and backward."

Interesting then that Basil has made such an impression on Olive and her set. Olive seems frightened of him. The others are probably taken by his handsomeness and self confidence.

In respect of linguistics I have been reading the autobiography of Sir Harold Evans, My Paper Chase, the journalist and former editor of The Times and Sunday Times. He was brought up a stone’s throw away from the slums of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ in Manchester. Even though he went on to live and work in the USA, his childhood days had a strong influence on his future career.

He says this after writing about the time, as an eleven year old, he listened to the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announcing on the radio the declaration of war with Germany.
‘ The echo of Chamberlain’s plaintive voice has stayed with me all these years. At the time I could not get out of my head the posh way he talked about our ‘embessador’ in Berlin and the ‘plens’ we would all have to make. The plummy announcers on the BBC had made me acutely conscious of accents as an indicator of class, of ineluctable superiority. Just turning on the radio made me ashamed. Nobody in my universe spoke like that; therefore we must be outcasts, belonging to some inarticulate barbarian tribe. These were the years when the announcers and news readers all spoke so-called Standard English, meaning the soft tones of the alien South; harmonious Oxbridge voices of long vowels, distinct p’s and t’s, and effortless aspirates. The BBC tolerated J. B. Priestley’s Yorkshire accent for a few months from June to October 1940 in his ‘Postscripts’ series of morale-boosting talks, but not his political opinions: seen by the Tories as too socialist, the programme was axed. In 1941 it was front-page news when Wilfred Pickles brought a Yorkshire accent to BBC news-reading - one would have thought a cathedral or two had been sacked - but he too was soon removed from the national airwaves and Standard English prevailed for the next thirty years.’

I am now wondering what Verena’s accent must have been like. Certainly not ‘posh’ but decent enough for her public speaking to hold an upper class audience with prejudices.

Fascinating quote, Trev! I am old enough to remember accents as class markers even in the USA and the anguish they caused. About the southern accents, just like in the North there were aristocratic variants and plebeian ones, and probably the Northerners could tell that Basil was of the former class, even though a southern accent of any stripe would sound a little “rube” to them.