A Plea for Eros

into vulgar prattle about domestic arrangements.
    Although both Basil and Olive regard Verena as an otherworldly presence, she is decidedly not. Verena has lived her entire young life on the public stage, a life that has robbed her of all inner fixity, all knowledge of her own desires, and it is precisely this floating, externalized quality that makes her exceedingly vulnerable. The girl who can sway the great public will be brutally manipulated in her private life. It is to James’s great credit that a malleable character like Verena, a person who is rather like an empty vessel filled over time with the “dead phrases” of others—first her father’s, then Olive’s, and finally Basil’s—is nevertheless a fully believable human being. Her friendship with and loyalty to Olive Chancellor, her attraction to Basil Ransom, and her sweet, confused desire to please them both has all the poignancy of a child trapped in a custody battle. Verenas dawning awareness that she has an inner life and personal desires turns on a secret she keeps from Olive. She does not tell her friend that she has seen Basil Ransom in Cambridge. This, the narrator writes, is “the only secret she had in the world—the only thing that was all her own.” Understandably, she is reluctant to give it up.
    There is nothing more private than a secret, and a secret is of course silent. Silence belongs to solitude, the voice to the outside world. Unlike the voluble Verena, Olive is afflicted by silence. Nervous in the extreme, she sometimes finds herself dumbstruck and must struggle through her fits of muteness before she can find her voice. Despite a passionate desire to speak in public, she suffers from a nature so private it has become a debility. There is an aspect of the ventriloquist in James’s spinster. She speaks through Verena, finds her voice in another body. It is Olive, Verena tells Ransom, who writes the speeches: “She tells me what to say—the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!” This is intimate territory, the occupation of one person by another, and there is violence in it—the grasping, feverish desire not only to commingle with the beloved but to take total possession of her. Words assume the place of sexual penetration in
The Bostonians.
Words enter Verena, and words cause her destruction. The most powerful words, however, belong not to Olive Chancellor but to Basil Ransom.
    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