There were other ideas wafting about the James household — imported ones. A disciple of both Emanuel Swe-denborg, the Swedish natural scientist turned mystic, and Francois-Marie Charles Fourier, the French social philosopher, Henry Senior embraced a miasmic coupling of spiritual enlightenment (Swedenborg believed he had found a key to an angelic reading of the Scriptures) and a Utopian vision of a new society in which human beings freed from repression and inhibition could release their true passionate selves and lead orderly, harmonious lives in communities known as phalanxes.
As in every age, rigorous intellectual ideas mingled with more dubious notions. In both Europe and the United States, a rage for Mesmerism and the occult shook fashionable society and intellectual circles. Seances abounded. The novelist’s brother William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, maintained a belief in spiritualism throughout his life and hoped to continue his researches beyond the grave. He asked his wife to try to contact him after he was dead, and she did try, but in vain. On another occasion, however, without his widow present, William was reported to have spoken from the other side. When Henry received news of the phantom voice, he called it “the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish.” Then, as now, vegetarianism was in vogue among the forward thinking, but the enlightened fell for other health fads as well. A number of the Transcendentalists became enamored of Fletcherism, an eating practice that encouraged chewing food into a liquid mush before swallowing. Henry Junior took up the cause for a while and masticated with such vigor that William, a nonbe-liever, blamed Fletcherism for Henry’s myriad bowel troubles.
If contemporary readers find these beliefs and ideas remote, I ask them to pause and reconsider. We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country from California to New York, an age of channeling, colonics, crystals, and raw food crazes. In the United States, Utopian quests for purity, perfection, and self-improvement, no matter how wacky, have always found fertile ground in which to flourish. The question remains, however: Why did Henry James describe the lively intellectual climate (with its admittedly nutty fringes) of Boston and its environs as “arid” and “vacuous”? James felt that American culture was simply too young and too thin to sustain him as an artist. He was continually pulled by the lure of Europe, by its old and visible history — its architecture, painting, ruins, and, of course, its literature.
For James, the single most important American writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He read and loved Hawthorne’s books as a youth, and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved. Hawthorne, a sublime storyteller who criticized both American Puritanism and utopianism in his fiction, became the American literary precedent for James. When he woke up on May 19, 1864, to the news that the great American novelist was dead, the young Henry James sat on his bed and wept. Like most literary sons, however, he was critical of the father, and when writing about Hawthorne lie articulates his ambivalence about American fiction:
But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has widely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of transatlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognizes, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance.
However shallow James may have found American literary soil, he acknowledged that Hawthorne sprouted from it, and The Bostonians owes a debt to the older writer’s work, The Blithedale Romance in particular, which was inspired by Hawthorne’s brief discontented stay at Brook Farm: Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist-Fourierist experiment in communal living. In his essay “Brook Farm and Concord,” James quotes the words of the skeptic, Coverdale, from Hawthorne’s Utopian romance: “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from the old standpoint.” It is a sentence that speaks directly to The Bostonians, not to any particular character but to the effect of the narrative as a whole, which unearths its truths through the continual push and pull of people and ideas that find themselves in rigid opposition.
In the novel, two ideologies and two people are pitted against one another. In its simplest terms, the book presents us with a conflict between a reformer and a reactionary, between a triumphant North and a defeated South, between a woman and a man. The Bostonians is a novel of ideas, but the ideas articulated by James’s two battling characters, who are also distant cousins, Olive Chancellor, a Boston spinster and champion of women’s rights, and Basil Ransom, a bitter arch-conservative from Mississippi, are not the ideas the book probes. Indeed, both characters are guilty of mouthing sentimental or cliched tripe, and I don’t think their creator was terribly interested in their beliefs per se. He was drawn by something infinitely more complex than a conflict between two hardened ideological positions. Like all of James’s novels, The Bostonians is an investigation of what happens between and among people, and how that arena of interaction can take on a life of its own and determine the fates of those involved.
Miss Chancellor and Mr. Ransom are ferocious rivals in what becomes a love triangle. Both want possession of Verena Tarrant, the pretty, weak, and very charming product of a Cambridge quack healer and the daughter of an abolitionist. The innocent Verena, who has a “gift” for inspirational speaking, is nothing if not a child of the new ideas. “She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and had been passed from hand to hand by trance speakers; she was familiar with every kind of ‘cure’ and had grown up among lady editors advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the marriage-tie.” Through this tug-of-war over a person, Verena, who is also the creature of a particular New England subculture, James explores the psychological implications of belief — how a climate of ideas can invade, affect, mingle with, and be used, both consciously and unconsciously, by a person in the throes of passion.
The book’s intellectual vigor, then, is not located in what the characters say they believe, in their dogmatic positions, but rather in a dialectical tension between the “personal” and the “impersonal,” the “private” and the “public,” the “particular” and the “general.” These words in their various forms occur so often in the novel that they become a conspicuous and pointed refrain. What they mean, however, is another, far more complicated problem. Because The Bostonians skips from one person’s point of view to another’s, the narrator gives us access to the thoughts of all his major characters and to each one’s idiosyncratic uses of these words, a fact that further complicates their meaning. When Basil first meets his cousin Olive, he notes the bourgeois opulence of her house and feels that he has never found himself “in the presence of so much organized privacy.” This is exactly the realm in which he hopes to place Verena. He emphatically believes that she is “meant for privacy, for him, for love.” On the other hand, the narrator tells us that Mrs. Farrinder, formidable spokeswoman for the Emancipation of Women, has “something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet…” The foggy, attenuated Miss Birdseye, relic of an earlier abolitionist age, is also a being of generalities, a person who, though rumored to have had a Hungarian lover in her youth, could never, the narrator tells us, “have entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with causes.” Dr. Prance, on the other hand, devoted physician and living proof of female competence in a profession usually reserved for men. has no use for causes: “She looked about her with a kind of near-sighted deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to generalize in any way….” The society matron Mrs. Burrage, only marginally involved in causes, is also a woman whose “favours” are “general not particular.” Selah Tarrant stresses that his daughters success as a speaker is “thoroughly impersonal,” and Verena herself insists that when she addresses an audience “it is not me ….” In sharp contrast, Ransom, as he watches Verenas performance, thinks to himself that what he is witnessing is “an intensely personal exhibition.” And while Olive Chancellor hopes and believes that she will never be like her frivolous sister, Mrs. Luna, who is “so personal, so narrow,” Basil Ransom finds Olive to be “intensely, fearfully, a person.” Verena, too, discovers “how peculiarly her friend” Olive is “constituted, how nervous and serious, how personal, how exclusive ….” The words slip according to each character’s perceptions, blind spots, and feelings, and only through their interplay can we begin to make sense of James’s meaning.