But Ransom has misunderstood the power of “vapours” and “dead phrases,” which play a transforming role in the novel, both in public and in private. Like a contagious fog over a city, these enunciations, no matter how hackneyed, are invested with the power to seduce and cast a spell over an audience — be it hundreds of people or just one. The dead phrases of both sides — the reactionary utterances of Mr. Ransom and the radical declarations of Boston’s feminists — are animated by the human voice, to which the story assigns an almost magical power. For the bulk of the narrative, the most compelling voice belongs to Verena. She is the enchantress whose speeches hold her listeners “under the charm,” as she delivers addresses that are more akin to musical performance than lecture. Like a sorceress in a fairy tale, Verena is “spinning vocal sounds to a silver thread.” She also entrances Ransom. When he seeks her out in Cambridge, he understands that he is falling in love with her, and his vision of her is marked by the heightened brilliance that illuminates a beloved. He compares her to a nymph, and she makes him think of “unworldly places.” Olive similarly imagines that her new friend’s wonderful qualities have “dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents.” Verena Tarrant shines, but the source of that luminosity, her bewitching hold over audiences, over Basil Ransom and over Olive Chancellor, is connected less to the presence of particular qualities in her personality than to their absence. The girl lacks self-consciousness and, like Miss Peabody, she has no grounded, no defined self. When she repeats to Ransom a phrase she has spoken twice before during the course of the novel, “Oh, it isn’t me, you know. It’s something outside!” she is both repeating what her prompters have told her and telling a truth about herself. James is getting at something I have always felt — that the public person inevitably slides into the third person, away from I and into he or she. The Bostonians explores an early incarnation of what will eventually become American celebrity culture. James saw it coming, and the novel anticipates the moment when human beings would be emptied of all inner human qualities and turned into images, commodities to be bought and sold on the open market for profit, a time when celebrities would fall into the curious but fitting habit of referring to themselves in the third person.
Before movies, radio, and television, publicity meant newspapers. In terms of the narrative, it is apt that Verena has sprung from a paternal seed that has no individual, no private character. Selah Tarrant isn’t only a humbug; he is a humbug obsessed with the idea of public recognition and the money to be made from it. Like a shuddering moth near a lamp, Terrant is irresistibly drawn to the glare of publicity. He haunts newspaper offices and printing rooms, hoping against hope that he will somehow be noticed. The most fervent wish of Setah Tarrant’s tawdry, corrupt little heart is to be interviewed by some newspaperman. There is an active journalist in The Bostonians, someone whose very name is an apology — Mathias Pardon. He hovers at the edges of the story throughout, showing up first at Miss Peabody’s and finally at the Music Hall, with appearances in between. An embodiment of the unconscious smarminess of the press, Pardon has scruples only in his patronymic. He is wholly unaware that his questions might be indelicate or intrusive, and he plows merrily ahead with his vapid articles. Although Pardon is a comic character, his vulgarity has sinister undertones; the man is morally vacant. “His faith, again, was the faith of Selah Tarrant — that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that it would be fastidious to question the terms of that privilege.” It is hard to read this sentence without feeling its prescience. It is a faith that would eventually lead to the grotesque national spectacle of contemporary American life in which countless people humiliate and debase themselves in public for the dubious glory of being “on TV.”
The paradox of publicity is that it enacts a reversal between the private and public. The press, especially the part of the press that reports on culture, continually converts what is meant for public consumption — art-into mere gossip about peoples private lives: “For this ingenuous son of the age [Pardon] all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for the newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business.” Pardon lurks on the sidelines of Verena’s rise to stardom, hungry to scoop the story. The afternoon before the event at the Music Hall, the journalist searches high and low for Olive and Verena without success and finally insinuates himself into the family house, where he hammers Olive’s sister with demands for “any little personal items” she might provide about either the speaker or her coach. The public, Pardon says, is almost as interested in Miss Chancellor as in Miss Tarrant. Under the banner of the public and publicity, the grand cause to emancipate women, a cause Olive champions as a force for “human progress,” is transformed into vulgar prattle about domestic arrangements.
Although both Basil and Olive regard Verena as an otherworldly presence, she is decidedly not. Verena has lived her entire young life on the public stage, a life that has robbed her of all inner fixity, all knowledge of her own desires, and it is precisely this floating, externalized quality that makes her exceedingly vulnerable. The girl who can sway the great public will be brutally manipulated in her private life. It is to James’s great credit that a malleable character like Verena, a person who is rather like an empty vessel filled over time with the “dead phrases” of others — first her father’s, then Olive’s, and finally Basil’s — is nevertheless a fully believable human being. Her friendship with and loyalty to Olive Chancellor, her attraction to Basil Ransom, and her sweet, confused desire to please them both has all the poignancy of a child trapped in a custody battle. Verenas dawning awareness that she has an inner life and personal desires turns on a secret she keeps from Olive. She does not tell her friend that she has seen Basil Ransom in Cambridge. This, the narrator writes, is “the only secret she had in the world — the only thing that was all her own.” Understandably, she is reluctant to give it up.
There is nothing more private than a secret, and a secret is of course silent. Silence belongs to solitude, the voice to the outside world. Unlike the voluble Verena, Olive is afflicted by silence. Nervous in the extreme, she sometimes finds herself dumbstruck and must struggle through her fits of muteness before she can find her voice. Despite a passionate desire to speak in public, she suffers from a nature so private it has become a debility. There is an aspect of the ventriloquist in James’s spinster. She speaks through Verena, finds her voice in another body. It is Olive, Verena tells Ransom, who writes the speeches: “She tells me what to say — the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!” This is intimate territory, the occupation of one person by another, and there is violence in it — the grasping, feverish desire not only to commingle with the beloved but to take total possession of her. Words assume the place of sexual penetration in The Bostonians. Words enter Verena, and words cause her destruction. The most powerful words, however, belong not to Olive Chancellor but to Basil Ransom.