A Plea for Eros

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