In a letter to his friend Grace Norton, who was going through a difficult time in her life, James gave this advice: “Only don’t I beseech you generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses — remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can.” On the other hand, when Hugh Walpole, novelist and friend of James, quoted “The Master” in his diary, the sentiment expressed appears to be quite different: “I’ve had one great passion in my life — the intellectual passion … Make it your rule to encourage the impersonal interest as against the personal — but remember also that they are interdependent.” The two passages dramatize what I would call the focused ambiguity of James’s language. He begged Grace not to “generalize” or “melt” but rather to encourage in herself the particular, the personal, the fixed, and he advised Hugh to encourage the opposite, “the impersonal interest,” with the important caveat that he remember the impersonal and the personal are always connected.
The apparent contradiction reveals Jamesian semantics. In each case, he is speaking to a particular friend, and his imparted wisdom reflects his understanding of each person’s psychological needs. James must have felt that Grace’s abstract effusions needed taming. On the other hand, he was giving Hugh paternal literary advice. In the world of James, there are no absolutes, no final truths, no static realities. The solidity he urges on Grace Norton is only a relative one. Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect. In The Bostonians, Henry James turns the public and private inside out, and the engines behind that reversal are external and internal — a particular cultural atmosphere and sexual passion.
In terms of setting, the novel moves away from the “organized privacy” of Olive’s rooms at the beginning of the novel to a public building at its very end: Boston’s Music Hall, where Verena is scheduled to speak and where the story reaches its piercing crescendo. In between are scenes that take place in private, semi-private, and semi-public places. The second environment is Miss Peabody’s dim, drab, and “featureless” apartment, where Mrs. Farrinder is supposed to address a gathering of the sympathetic. The reader’s introduction to Miss Birdseye (a character all of New England took as a swipe at Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne’s sister and sister-in-law of the novelist) has a comic pathos that well illustrates the novel’s worried strain between the general and the particular: “The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details.” Even poor Miss Birdseye’s face has become impersonal and unfocused, as empty and unfurnished as the rooms she occupies, an interior that causes the bourgeois Olive a pang and makes “her wonder whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm for humanity.” As the novel’s most extreme altruist, Miss Peabody suffers from a loss of self.
The far more complex Olive Chancellor wishes with her whole being to emulate the selflessness of the aging abolitionist, lo escape the pains, rigors, and tormented confinement of her own body. For Olive, however, the Emancipation of Women is far more than another good cause to support; it is a deeply personal echo of her own psychological and sexual imprisonment. Even before she lays eyes on Verena, the reader knows that Miss Chancellor has dreamed that she might “know intimately some very poor girl.” The shopgirls she approaches, however, are wary and confused by her attentions, and inevitably mixed up with some young “Charlie,” an impediment Olive comes to “dislike … extremely.” Olive Chancellor is clearly in love, and her love for Verena conveys the hunger of sexual longing, but it would be a serious misreading of the novel to suppose either that Olive and Verena are “doing it” behind the scenes or that Olive has fully admitted to herself that the desperation she feels about Verena is connected to her desire for physical love.
Despite the fact that nineteenth-century mores, particularly in the United States, were far more repressive of homosexuality than those of our own time, there was nevertheless a greater tolerance and far less suspicion of intimate friendships between women that included physical signs of affection. The word crush was often used to describe the feelings of girls in school who fell for other girls, for example, and the term was used without the “taint” of homosexuality. Although relatively more open to same-sex unions, contemporary American culture nevertheless bristles with a need to categorize human eroticism, a force that by its very nature resists definition and plays a role in most relations between people of either and both sexes, whether it is acted upon or not. In other words, when The Bostonians was published, James’s lesbian portraits were subject to greater ambiguity than they are now, and in certain passages James plays on the vagaries of sexual identity, the shifting, indefinable motion between the masculine and the feminine: “It was true that if she had been a boy she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever.” In hot pursuit of Verena Tarrant, Basil Ransom fantasizes an end to her involvement with the cause: “… but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex (what sex was it, great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to the land of vapours, of dead phrases.”