A Plea for Eros

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.”
    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