Like Olive, Basil longs to find a public forum where his ideas might be heard. His effort is stymied, not by pathological shyness but by the simple fact that his ideas are too unpopular, at least in the North, to find much of an audience. Although he has written several essays and submitted them to publishers, they have been turned down. The narrator informs us that in one of these rejection letters an editor suggested to Ransom that three hundred years earlier he might easily have found a journal willing to print his thoughts. He has simply come too late. As an unpublished author, Ransom is rendered voiceless in the public sphere where he longs to speak. His frustration mirrors Olive’s, and his motives for chasing Verena are equally intricate, despite the fact that his end desire is the opposite of Olive’s. He wants to render Verena mute in public. To borrow the words of Mrs. Burrage, he intends to “shut her up altogether.” We know Ransom has elaborate arguments for this position and that, like his feminist opponent, he is sincere. Neither Mr. Ransom nor Miss Chancellor is guilty of cant, but the Mississippian is also the indigent but proud survivor of a ruined South, where his mother and sisters still live in the penurious circumstances of defeat, Olive, too, lost her only two brothers in the war (an echo of James’s soldier siblings), but despite their deaths, as a Northerner, she didn’t lose a way of life. Ransom’s family lost everything but its gentility, and early in the novel, as he sits in Olive Chancellor’s parlor and waits for her to make her first appearance, the reader is introduced to the tinge of resentment that colors his experience: “He ground his teeth a little as he thought of the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him feel unhoused and underfed.” Ransom is a man whose every move and word is affected by the memory of suffering, and like Olive he has clutched at ideas that reflect his feelings of personal injury and an unrecognized, but nevertheless evident, hunger for vengeance.
Once Ransom’s attraction to Verena has become conscious love, his pursuit of her is increasingly described in terms of force. “In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality — of being pushed by an impulse to test her good nature, which seemed to have no limit.” Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack ….,” that he is engaged in a “siege.” By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away,…” from Olive and the waiting public. The war imagery is obvious, James is pointing to a second, far more personal version of the North/South conflict, but Mr. Ransom’s victory over Miss Chancellor, his conquest of Verena and her future in domestic bondage, isn’t achieved by “muscular force” but by talk.
It is interesting to note that Ransom’s decision to chase Verena in earnest, despite his poverty and dim prospects, is fueled by the rather flimsy justification that one of his essays has at last found a publisher. A single publication does not change Ransoms financial future, but he seizes upon it as a sign of a new public voice, which invigorates him in his quest to silence Verena’s. The newly acquired stature as public speaker gives credence to Ransom’s private utterance, a marriage proposal, just as his anti-feminist ideas justify his very personal advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression, which Olive feeds to Verena, can’t contend with Basil’s verbal seduction. His most potent phrase turns out to be his accusation that Miss Tarrant isn’t real. He tells her that in her desire to please others she has come to resemble “a preposterous little puppet” commandeered from behind the scenes, and the suitor turns his love object’s own phrase against her: “It isn’t you; the least in the world.” What she originally believed was selfless devotion to a cause, a belief that allowed her to proclaim with pride, “It isn’t me,” is transformed through Ransom’s steady rhetorical assault into an accusation of fraud: “, … 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.” Sentence by sentence, Ransom enters the inner sanctum of her doubts. Although he has touched on a truth and offers Verena the hope of “standing forth in … freedom,” his is finally a promise of continued captivity under another name. Verena’s fate is sad, but she is too wobbly and empty a character to be tragic, and Basil Ransom’s hunger for Verena Tarrant is augmented by the stature of his adversary, Olive Chancellor, who, unlike Verena, is truly his equal. In terms of the book’s politics, this irony creates a final and terrible resonance. It also redeems James from the charge that The Bostonians is somehow against women. It is a book uncomfortable with causes but deeply, intimately comfortable with women.
In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half-blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes in her profound sorrow and humiliation heroic.
…. as soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him forever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was.
“In the arts,” James wrote, “feeling is always meaning.” For me, these words illuminate not only the novelist’s ars po-etica but also James’s great strength as a writer. His experience of the world and his empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs — religious, political, or philosophical — must inevitably become a form of lying.
Late in his life, he tried to explain his wariness of systems to two politically engaged writers: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. As a member of the committee that had rejected a play by James, Shaw told its author in a letter, “People don’t want works of art from you. They want help, they want above all encouragement.” In his response, James argued: “… all direct ‘encouragement’—the thing you enjoin me on— encouragement of the short cut and say ‘artless’ order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading …” Wells had hurt James by publishing a cruel attack on the older writer in a satirical book called Boon, The Mind of the Race, in which he had, among other things, criticized his “view of life and literature.” To Wells, James wrote, “I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner.” And later in the letter, he elaborated further, “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is “for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift.”