The Bostonians Read Online Free PDF Page A

friend’s wonderful qualities have “dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents” (p. 76). 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!”’ (p. 73), she is both reiterating 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, Tarrant 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 Selah 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-Matthias 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 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 the privilege” (p. 116). 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 the 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 people’s private lives: “For this ingenuous son of his [Pardon‘s] age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business” (p. 115). 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’” (p. 390) she might provide about either the speaker or her coach. The public, Pardon says, is almost as interested in