A Plea for Eros

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