A Plea for Eros

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.
    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.