A Plea for Eros

evident, hunger for vengeance.
    Once Ransom’s attraction to Verena has become conscious love, his pursuit of her is increasingly described in terms of force. “In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality—of being pushed by an impulse to test her good nature, which seemed to have no limit.” Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack … . ,” that he is engaged in a “siege.” By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away ,…” from Olive and the waiting public. The war imagery is obvious, James is pointing to a second, far more personal version of the North/South conflict, but Mr. Ransom’s victory over Miss Chancellor, his conquest of Verena and her future in domestic bondage, isn’t achieved by “muscular force” but by talk.
    It is interesting to note that Ransom’s decision to chase Verena in earnest, despite his poverty and dim prospects, is fueled by the rather flimsy justification that one of his essays has at last found a publisher. A single publication does not change Ransoms financial future, but he seizes upon it as a sign of a new public voice, which invigorates him in his quest to silence Verena’s. The newly acquired stature as public speaker gives credence to Ransom’s private utterance, a marriage proposal, just as his anti-feminist ideas justify his very
personal
advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression, which Olive feeds to Verena, can’t contend with Basil’s verbal seduction. His most potent phrase turns out to be his accusation that Miss Tarrant isn’t real. He tells her that in her desire to please others she has come to resemble “a preposterous little puppet” commandeered from behind the scenes, and the suitor turns his love object’s own phrase against her: “It isn’t
you;
the least in the world.” What she originally believed was selfless devotion to a cause, a belief that allowed her to proclaim with pride, “It isn’t me,” is transformed through Ransom’s steady rhetorical assault into an accusation of fraud: “, … these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them and that was the alteration, the transformation.” Sentence by sentence, Ransom enters the inner sanctum of her doubts. Although he has touched on a truth and offers Verena the hope of “standing forth in … freedom,” his is finally a promise of continued captivity under another name. Verena’s fate is sad, but she is too wobbly and empty a character to be tragic, and Basil Ransom’s hunger for Verena Tarrant is augmented by the stature of his adversary, Olive Chancellor, who, unlike Verena, is truly his equal. In terms of the book’s politics, this irony creates a final and terrible resonance. It also redeems James from the charge that
The Bostonians
is somehow against women. It is a book uncomfortable with causes but deeply, intimately comfortable with women.
    In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half-blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes in her profound sorrow and humiliation heroic.
    …. as soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him forever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with