The Bostonians Read Online Free PDF Page B

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” (p. 16). 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 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” (p. 227). Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack” (p. 337), that he is engaged in a “siege” (p. 357). By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” (p. 409) and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away” from Olive and the waiting public (p. 414). 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 Ransom’s 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 antifeminist ideas justify his very personal advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression that 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 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’” (p. 313). 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” (p. 354). 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” (p. 313), 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