The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

We've finally reached the end!

The book summary uses the phrase “love triangle.” Do you agree?

In the light of Basil’s views on women’s place, how do you explain his liking for Dr Prance?

Did you identify with any of the characters? Are there any of them you would have liked to know and befriend in real life?

James often refers to “the private” and “the public” and “the personal” and “the impersonal” when describing characters and their actions. Why are these concepts important to this story?

What about James’s description of the American press, overall, embodied mainly in Matthias Pardon?

Do you, overall, enjoy Henry James’s writing style, and do you want to read more of him?

What is the significance of the book’s final sentence?

FROM THE INTRODUCTION by Siri Hustvedt:

The introduction points to “war imagery” in Basil’s discourse with Verena (and his competition with Olive), and likens the love triangle to a personal reenactment of the Civil War, fought through words, with Basil representing the South and Olive the North, and Verena the battleground.

The introduction points out that Olive was a reformer and Basil a reactionary, but James is more interested in what happens when people espousing those views interact than he is in their views themselves.

The introduction compares Verena to Miss Peabody in that she has no defined self, and it describes Verena as "weak."

The book is “an early description of American celebrity culture.”

The ending of the book made me angry, but reading the introduction reconciled me to it and made me love James more. I love his subtlety, even if I’m sometimes too thick to get the meaning on the first reading.

Interesting questions, Lori!

—I do not agree that it is a love triangle; the relationship between Olive and Verena had nothing to do with sex or romance to my mind. Basil might have thought it did, but a walk through his mind would make me want to take a shower. Olive and Verena’s friendship seemed kind of like the sort of intense friendship that can develop in an office setting, when people are working long hours together on the same project. But if one person leaves the job, the friendship often dissolves. It was based on shared purpose, not commonalities of personality, values, or feeling.

—Speaking of Basil, I felt his interest in Dr. Prance was as a curiosity, and he liked how she had no interest in the feminism talk of Olive and Verena. If she had been at all attractive to him he would have liked her less.

—The final sentence certainly seemed to predict that Verena would regret her marriage—but I didn’t need James to tell me that! It made me feel a bit cheated—why should I have invested my time in these characters?

—Your highlighting of the public vs. private spheres seems central. The idea that women should restrict themselves to the private sphere has a long history, but by the late eighteenth century women had started to challenge it. Part of the scandal surrounding the eighteenth-century English political hostess Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was that she made public appearances on behalf of political candidates. By the time James is writing, the right to take one’s place in the public sphere—by voting, by advocating for issues, by practicing a profession—had become one of the key tenets of feminism. Basil at times seems almost a caricature in his insistence that Verena’s highest role is to please him at home, and in his horror at the notion of her public speaking.

—I really hated the melodramatic climax scene. James’s strength lies in the sly, sidelong revelation; people shouting and wailing and rushing in and out of rooms is something he should leave to other writers. That scene really soured me on the book. I would like to read more James if he would actually invest some heart in his characters.

—I enjoyed most the scenes with Miss Birdseye. I liked her personally, her unobtrusive social intelligence and acceptance of a wide range of people, and the scenes with her had a kind of tenderness. The rest of the time James seemed to be maintaining a cynical detachment that made the reading a bit of a chore for me.

—Mrs. Luna may have been the character I most disliked in the end. All that kittenish manipulation and resentment! Ewww. Her portrayal felt deeply misogynistic.

—I don’t know that Verena is weak so much as she is hard-wired to please other people and hasn’t really had the opportunity to develop a sense of self. She has a strong desire to feel good about herself and does whatever she thinks will earn her the goodwill of others. But she seemed to do the most growing and changing over the course of the story.

—One interesting thing that got perhaps overlooked: did anyone else think that when Olive went out to the stage at the end, she gave Verena’s speech in her place? I believe she did. She would surely have memorized it after all the weeks of rehearsal. If I’m right, Verena’s desertion would have had the fringe benefit of leading Olive to find her own voice, to “step into her power” as the saying goes.

This was definitely a triangle and, why the word love may not be accurate, the Olive-Verena was a lot more than an intense office friendship as Olive had strong feelings about possessing Verena. However, after feeling more positive about Basil, even with his onerous views, I came around to share Abigail’s feelings about Basil at the end of the novel - I too “loathed” Basil. He is just so extremely self-centered domineering and intractable. I cannot believe that Verena really wants to become his slave – a man who will totally subjugate all her desires to him. For much of the book, James portrayed Basil, even with his views, as fairly amenable and likeable, but all that faded at the end.

But sympathizing with Basil and not Verena early in the book and then flip-flopping at the end seems to be what James intended. Wikipedia says this about it:
“As Ransom gets closer to winning Verena, he seems to lose at least some of his creator's sympathy. James was rather suspicious of the winners in life who scoop up all the goodies, especially the sexual goodies. He becomes more sympathetic to Olive in the later chapters as she begins to lose Verena.“

Thus, Verena ending up with Basil is a tragic ending. James intends this to be so by how he portrays everything in Chapter 42; especially the end where Verena is in tears and last ominous sentence, says “these were not the last she was destined to share” in “the union, so far from brilliant.” James indeed intends the reader to know this is a tragic ending.

I did find James to be an interesting narrator in this novel. I don’t remember another James story where the narrator refers himself as “I” and is as subjective. I looked into it and found that there is a lot written about both how unusual and curious this novel is in the James oeuvre and specifically the narration. The critics say James purposely used this narration style and fluctuating characters to make the reader more curious and read further in the book. I was more interested while reading this novel than with the later James novels, so James intent to make me curious was effective.

On the negative side, I did think the story was incohesive in its character portrayal and that the ending scene was overly melodramatic. I agree with another GR reviewer who commented this:
"The whole thing is very uneven. To begin with, we sympathize with the Southern gent. At the end, you want nothing so much as to kick him in the head. Did James change his mind? Is this change intentional? It's certainly infuriating."

Even if intentional, it was a bit infuriating. I also had trouble seeing that Verena could not get over her Basil fetish even after how he acted in the last chapter, when he totally sheds his “sheep’s clothing” and reveals his full wolfhood. It all seemed a bit unreal, as if it were a fable meant to teach a lesson, yes, like a Little Red Riding Hood story. I rate it as 3 stars.

Brian wrote: "seems to be what James intended"

In the last few chapters, I had to put the book down after every page or so and swear at Basil (seriously, my notes are full of profanity, and I'm not a person who swears a lot). I suspected that was the response James wanted, and if so, he did a great job!

I also found the theater scene overly dramatic and anxiety-inducing. I wondered if Olive actually gave the speech, like Abigail said, or just took the audience's wrath.

When I was trained as a literary student we were all obsessed with irony. The subtle literary critic was expected by something called “close reading” to discover that the author meant the opposite of what most readers always thought. Chaucer’s bawdy tales actually taught submission to the Church’s doctrines of chastity and Wordsworth’s poetry revealed the poet’s alienation from Nature. Now I’ll not claim that the final chapter of The Bostonians reveals that Olive Chancellor has been a hypocrite for the entire book, but there are some interesting details. After devoting herself totally to women’s freedom and independence from men, we find Olive has hired a very male, and racist, policeman to bar Basil from the hall. “It’s her that runs this lecture.” And we also have the vulgar and mercenary impresario Mr Filer (“every quarter of a second, at the present instance, is worth about five-hundred dollars”) bemoaning Verena’s failure to appear.

In the light of James’s later experience with theatre audiences - the disaster with Guy Domville - there’s perhaps something appropriate that Verena’s Boston debut should be a flop, with Verena herself pulling the plug. “I am going to be hissed, and hooted, and insulted” Olive screeches, which is of course what will happen to James. Still, compared to the courageous Miss Birdseye, it’s not as if Olive is running any real danger for the cause. And James adds that Boston audience are “not ungenerous.” That Olive’s project collapses in its first exposure to a wide and general public makes it appear hollow.

And Verena is hustled away cloaked as an incognita represented her disappearance literally from the public stage into the private sphere as Mrs Ransom. The last sentence may reveal that the marriage will be a mistake, but it may mean instead that like all marriages, there’s no such thing as a HEA.

I do have to say that if one wants to get to know James as an author then one should read this book as it is a bit different than his usual stuff in its narration style, character development and very theatrical ending scene. It evokes a more emotional response than the usual James novel. I am glad to have read it.

Upon reflection, I do agree with Bill that while James may be saying it will be an unhappy marriage, he is also saying that makes it a typical one. So James may not see it as that great of a tragedy as I said it was.

I was disappointed in this book. James is always a challenge to read but in other books like The Portrait of a Lady, the characters and relationships were more interesting. These seemed stereotyped. I also felt this was extremely insulting to the feminist cause which many women were sincerely working for at the time (including many lesser-known Black women.)

I think the thrill of Olive for Verena was more like a parent or mentor who is living vicariously through their child. I don't think that Olive would give the speech in Verena's place. She was too terrified of crowds or even smaller groups. And I think Olive would have sort of liked to be a martyr - "The world is so cruel to me, Basil is an example of all men who are out to get me."

James tells us that Verena won't be happy, but I don't think she would be happy forever with Olive either. At some point she would grow up and get tired of pleasing other people. I suppose that with Basil, by then she would have children and have no alternative.

I think that the first thing to say is that Basil’s views and attitudes probably reflected the view of about 90% of the world’s population at the time, men and women included. Today such opinions would shock the great majority (probably not 90% though unfortunately.)
It might be obvious to say, but the reasons for the outcomes in this novel are firmly set in the nineteenth century, not the twenty first.

Basil’s ‘crime’ was to question Verena’s commitment to a minority opinion, a cause which Olive saw as representing Verena’s life’s work. Olive’s mistake was to choose the wrong women. She did this impulsively at first sight after hearing Verena speak. Olive held all the aces, so she thought. Wealth, society connections, an ability to control Verena’s greedy parents and a cause that, for a time, fascinated Verena. Unfortunately for Olive, speaking about a cause wasn’t enough for Verena.

‘The reality was simply that Verena had been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because, for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. ‘

Verena’s subconscious revenge was her duplicity after Basil had asked her to marry him. By asking her for help, Verena threw out a lifeline to Olive that was designed to break. By then Verena only stayed with Olive because she felt obliged to.

From the moment she took that walk with Basil in the park in New York there was no turning back. There he sowed seeds of doubt about what she was doing with Olive and.....

‘the words he had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her—these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation.’

On top of that she slowly came to realise that she loved Basil despite his opinions and attitudes. It took almost two years but was much more meaningful than Olive’s immediate possession of her. Basil’s power over Verena was not because he was a thoughtless brute but because she loved him with a passion. Olive couldn’t compete with that. There has to be more than love to make a good marriage and James hints at possible problems ahead. Maybe Verena can impose herself on Basil and follow in Mrs Birdseye’s footsteps. Verena was always much more interested in doing things, being ‘useful’ and gradually she realised that her words, although eloquent, were just words.
After finishing the novel I watched the 2015 film ‘Suffragette’......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrag...
https://www.maturetimes.co.uk/wp-cont...

.....the motto of Emmiline Pankhurst’s movement was ‘Deeds not Words’
http://warble.com/blog/wp-content/upl...
I thought of Verena being much more fascinated with that group than Olive’s cause. It was Mrs. Birdseye’s death that almost derailed Basil’s plans to marry Verena. The best thing to happen for both of them would be for Basil to continue writing but return to the South so that Verena could continue with Mrs. Birdseye’s social work. I think Verena has enough spirit to persuade him.....eventually.

I agree that the Music Hall ending (an apt location) was over melodramatic. However, Bill is right in pointing out the hypocrisies which came into the limelight, like a huge bag of dirty washing being emptied onto the floor. If Mrs. Birdseye had not died, Verena would have quietly left with Basil at the end of that month by the seaside. That ending would have felt less than satisfactory for the author but I would have preferred it.

Overall I preferred The Portrait of a Lady but this gave me an insight into Boston/New York society of the 1870s and something to compare with Edith Wharton.

This article about Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue erected in 2018 might be of interest. It has been placed in St Peter’s Square Manchester, not far from the location of the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) when cavalry cut down men, women and children who were peacefully demonstrating for the right to vote. The statue is only the second one of a woman ( the other is Queen Victoria) to be erected in Manchester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_...

I don't remember much about Portrait of a Lady since I read it a long time ago. But I do remember a feeling of being dropped off a cliff at the end of the book, as though the whole ending were missing. As though James had run out of time, and simply not bothered to finish the story! I've seen this ending described as "ambiguous," but what I remember is more severe than that, and I wonder whether James might not have been criticized for this, with the result that at the end of his next novel (this one) he reacted with a pendulum swing in the opposite direction and produced a melodramatic climax which, unfortunately, didn't quite work out for him either.

I did enjoy the novel, although I agree that it feels different from his other work. I particularly enjoyed the ambience of the rural setting in which Basil woos Verena and Miss Birdseye dies; the landscape description came as welcome relief to my mind's eye.

Verena's marriage to Basil is an unfortunate outcome, but I'm not sure I'd describe it as tragic so much as ordinary. And also--its negativity is tempered by a feeling of things falling back into more natural grooves: Olive taking the stage, for example. It is her stage to take, her passion, her cause, and her argument. She is clearly capable of making the speech . . . if not emotionally ready. And Verena's abdication of the puppet role at last forces her to do the thing she should have done long ago. I like to think she actually does it.

Olive has grown, particularly through the "dark night of the soul" moment of reckoning which she experiences while Verena is away on the boat with Basil:

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled calculations burned within her like a fire . . .

Has this clear vision of everything wrong in her relationship with Verena led to an equally clear vision of her own, independent potential? Maybe it hasn't yet . . . but, as she mounts the stage, will it?

I don't feel like anyone changed, that is part of my dislike of the book. Verena did become a bit more independent but only to go into another person's sphere. Olive didn't seem to learn anything. Did I miss something (out of boredom) where Olive actually goes onstage for more than just stalling the audience? Basil doesn't change except to become more confident about his writing ability based one person's view. At the very beginning, Basil decides he is in love with Verena, Olive decides she dislikes and distrusts him, Olive decides to possess Verena. Verena drifts from her parents to Olive to Basil. We didn't need 400+ pages for that.

James doesn’t specify that Olive delivers the speech onstage, but I felt he implied it. I like your analysis of Olive, Alice!

Trev, if you liked Suffragette you might also like Iron-Jawed Angels, which is about Alice Paul and the later suffragists in the United States.

Abigail wrote: "James doesn’t specify that Olive delivers the speech onstage, but I felt he implied it. I like your analysis of Olive, Alice!

Trev, if you liked Suffragette you might also like Iron-Jawed Angels, ..."

Thanks, I will look that one up and try and watch it.

In ‘Suffragette’ the book ‘Dreams’ by Olive Schreiner was passed around the group as something to inspire them all. I am not sure how much of that was fact but there was list of signatures in the front of the book beginning with Emmeline Pankhurst and the last one was Emily Davison. Of course the name Olive made me think of the Bostonians but I have since found out that the book was written in 1890 so the names must be purely coincidental.

Lori wrote: "James often refers to “the private” and “the public” and “the personal” and “the impersonal” when describing characters and their actions. Why are these concepts important to this story?

What about James’s description of the American press, overall, embodied mainly in Matthias Pardon?"

Last night I took a look at James' notes on Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians (in the collection edited by Edel & Powers) searching for evidence to support my hypothesis about the endings of the two novels. I didn't find any . . . it seems that he planned for Portrait to be unfinished right from the start! And the pendulum swing idea doesn't take Princess Casamassima into account, which he apparently wrote concurrently with The Bostonians, and which I haven't read and know nothing about. But Lori your questions about the private and public, personal and impersonal, as well as about the press made so much sense after reading what James had to say (to himself) about The Bostonians:

"The whole thing as local, as American, as possible, and as full of Boston: an attempt to show that I can write an American story. There must, indispensably, be a type of newspaper man--the man whose ideal is the energetic reporter. I should like to bafouer the vulgarity and hideousness of this--the impudent invasion of privacy--the extinction of all concept of privacy, etc. . . . "

I had to look up bafouer and it seems to mean ridiculing or making fun of something. So, he sets out to prove that he can write an American novel, but at the same time the goal is to make fun of American culture, or at least this publicizing aspect of it which he views as "vulgar" and "hideous." With satire in mind as his purpose, the very different feel this book has from others makes perfect sense, and the ending--an explosion of temper involving the newspaper man himself, the police officer, the greedy agent Mr. Filer (who suggests the public might enjoy the spectacle of Basil and Verena hashing out ideological differences on stage, in a prescient glimpse of reality television)--falls right in line.

Alice wrote: "With satire in mind as his purpose, the very different feel this book has from others makes perfect sense, and the ending--an explosion of temper involving the newspaper man himself, the police officer, the greedy agent Mr. Filer (who suggests the public might enjoy the spectacle of Basil and Verena hashing out ideological differences on stage, in a prescient glimpse of reality television)--falls right in line."

That's a very good point!

Thanks for all of your comments!

I was also comparing the book to Portrait of a Lady, and to some of Hardy's novels, in their depictions of women who are clearly choosing the wrong man. It's like a slow train wreck that readers are forced to witness. But those depictions are also kind of realistic since we all know people who have chosen partners who are clearly bad for them.

Well it’s not quite so slow, since it’s a longish short story, but Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters” (written in 1892) springs to mind as another spectacular example of a bad marriage train wreck . . . Oh, my.

I agree with Robin that the real tragedy in this book is the inability of any of the characters to change. Olive could have done much more for Verena than just guarding her like an extremely jealous husband, and thwarting her development. Verena had no chance, she was still very young and inexperienced. She fell in love with Basil, but I don’t think she really had the ability to see ahead what this marriage might look like. Basil‘s views reflect his Southern upbringing. He is unable to widen his horizon. The time he spent in New York did not produce any adjustments of his views. This might be typical for the time, but it appears to be a bit extreme. I think Basil would be much happier back in the South. Everyone here is destined to be very unhappy. Depressing.