Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

ANTHONY SCOTT Basil, Olive, and Verena: The Bostonians and the Problem of Politics To note that henry james is, among male American novelists, signally and persistently concerned with representing the consciousness and experience of women can scarcely count as much of an insight. To observe further that The Bostonians, uniquely within James' corpus, articulates this concern in explicitly political terms would simply be to invoke a set of critical commonplaces about the anomaly of that novel: that it, aside from The Princess Casamassima, is the only novel by James to develop a political theme; that it lacks a central perceiving consciousness; that its author did not revise it for the New York Edition; and that it ends not with a characteristically Jamesian act of renunication but with the prospect (happy or not) of a marriage.1 This essay will examine how The Bostonians represents the social and personal identities of women as a political issue, in order to better understand James' relation to feminism, and also to suggest continuities between some of the issues raised by The Bostonians' treatment of feminism and concerns taken up in James' later work. It will be helpful to define what I mean by politics. In the current critical idiom, politics stops nowhere. That is, aesthetic practices such as the writing of novels and interpersonal relationships such as friendship and marriage are now seen always to have involved power, enfranchisement , and contestation in ways that significantly blur the boundaries between them and the institutions and movements which had previously delimited what was called politics. To the extent that this Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number 1, Spring 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 50Anthony Scott essay is informed by the insights of recent feminist thought—that is to the extent that it understands The Bostonians' staging of a debate about what constitutes a proper and useful social role for women as symptomatically frustrating any easy distinction between the personal and the political—it is part of this tendency. But if, in the abstract, everything can be said to be political, it is nonetheless also the case that certain areas of social practice, knowledge, and identification become political, and that the process by which they do so can only be understood historically . Feminism in The Bostonians is a politics because it is public and contestatory, because it seeks institutional reform. It is a radical (and perhaps, for James, a dangerous) politics, though, because it commands a public discourse about matters apparently outside the purview ofpolitical contest altogether—matters of family, of marriage, and of gender identity. What I will come to call the incoherence of the novel's depiction offeminism arises from the fact that for James (or, at least, for Basil Ransom, whose relation to James—a vexed issue for critics of The Bostonians —will be examined soon), the possibility that women's interests might be claimed and represented as political threatens the conceptual stability not only of gender identity but of politics itself. Feminism is not, of course, the only political matter taken up in The Bostonians. Indeed, critics have seen the sexual politics of the novel as métonymie of America's deep social unease in the post-Civil War era. The battle between men and women—a battle over the constitution of gender identities that is played out in The Bostonians in the arena of personal relationships as well as in that of public discourse—thus for many readers converges with and comes to represent the residual tension between North and South, as well as the confusion of a society witnessing the expansion and entrenchment of the consumer economy —hypostatized by James as "publicity"—which threatens to overwhelm an older world of privacy and aesthetic sensibility.2 Still, the primary political locus in the novel, what its author called "the most salient and peculiar point in our social life," is feminism. Further, the manner in which feminism—even if limited to James' depiction of it—understands the connections between gender and power is radically at odds with James' own characteristic sense of such connections . This is not, however, simply to assert that James was hostile to the feminism...