Henry James, the Menace of Feminism, and the Triumph of Love
By Janice Fiamengo
Few major novels of the latter twentieth century have made anti-feminism a central subject—a remarkable indication of feminism’s standing as a dominant social ideology.
There are a few (partial) exceptions, especially the stand-out American trilogy by novelist Philip Roth. It begins with American Pastoral (1997), which tells the story of the lethal political radicalization of the protagonist’s daughter; it progresses through I Married a Communist (1998), about the betrayals of the McCarthy era; and ends with The Human Stain (2000), in which the main character is a Classics professor whose career is destroyed by a false accusation of racism. The trilogy takes a skeptical, and ultimately mournful, perspective on the utopian visions that have gripped America following the Second World War.
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which begins with its main character dismissed from his college job because he refuses to apologize for an affair with a female student, similarly examines, with post-Apartheid South Africa as its setting, the vengeful underbelly of liberatory movements for racial and gender “justice.”
In addition, a number of late-twentieth century and early twenty-first century works have taken a cautiously sympathetic, or at least skeptical, perspective on male teachers erotically entangled with—and ultimately destroyed by—their female students. These include David Mamet’s play Oleanna (1992), Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel (2000), and Alan Cumyn’s novel Losing It (2001). All three works cast doubt on the familiar feminist story of the victimized young woman who is prey to the erotic machinations of a powerful older man; in each case, the works showcase middle-aged white men’s sexual and social vulnerability.
These works are bracingly at odds with feminist ideological certainties. However, large-scale analyses of feminism as a social movement are strikingly rare.
The dearth of anti-feminist story-telling is perhaps not surprising for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the majority of book buyers, editors, and—most significantly, perhaps—reviewers are women or feminist-compliant men educated to believe that feminism is good for both women and men. Most writers, whether well established or novice, hope for good press and a receptive audience. Damning the dominant orthodoxy requires a level of risk that many writers, surveying the landscape today, might well deem suicidal.
Moreover, the kind of novel that assesses its society through a detailed portrait of its practices and mores is not as prominent as it once was, having been largely replaced by other media such as film or investigative journalism better able to achieve documentary impact. The novel of social realism had its heyday in the nineteenth century, when authors saw themselves as social observers without parallel, choosing characters and situations for their broadly illustrative value, and aiming to provide insight into their time. Some of these writers, including George Eliot (1819-1880), Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), and Henry James (1843-1916), are still widely celebrated today, and offer intriguing examples of how narrative can take us inside characters’ minds to reveal the beating heart of their societies.
Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) is a remarkable novel about the ideology of women’s emancipation that swept through Boston and other progressive American cities in the 1870s. The novel is set in 1874. Portraying two women in the movement, Olive Chancellor and her beautiful young protégé Verena Tarrant, a speaker on the subject of women’s rights, the novel provides an in-depth analysis of how their shared ideology gave them, for a time, a seemingly holy purpose within a community “in love […] with causes” (25).
Into this peculiar environment comes Basil Ransom, a conservative southerner from Mississippi who fought on the losing side in the Civil War and has come north to set up a law practice in New York City. He is Olive’s cousin. Invited by her to attend a lecture on women’s rights, he falls in love with Verena and is revolted by the life-denying cant she has been taught to speak by her father, “all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the iron heel of man” (56). He finds it “fluent, pretty, third-rate palaver” (308).
Basil proposes in its place the more sober “old truths” that both men and women are destined to suffer in their different ways and must lighten each other’s burdens. “We are born to suffer,” he tells Verena, “and to bear it, like decent people” (222). No movement can change that, he insists, but fantastical beliefs can destroy what is good between men and women. He is alarmed that “the masculine tone is passing out of the world” (322). Most of all, he believes that Verena has been fooled, imposed upon, badgered into devoting her life to a sham that can bring her no lasting happiness. She is “made for love,” and “in the presence of a man she should really care for,” the false ideology she has embraced “would rattle to her feet” (319). Eventually he convinces her to abandon Olive and the world of feminist agitation.
Like all true works of art, The Bostonians is never merely a piece of anti-feminist propaganda (though it was criticized upon its publication, and afterward, for that flaw). In its plot development and thematic structure, it stages an engrossing debate between traditionalism and feminism, and although the conclusion is never really in doubt—Olive’s feminism is a bitter creed and Basil’s love too powerful and attractive to be denied—James’ sympathies are broad enough that the visceral attractions of both sides are vividly, if also sometimes ironically, represented.
Olive Chancellor, “a woman without laughter” (15), stiff and scrupulous, seems at first to offer Verena a worthy goal: the freeing of a community of women purified by suffering, women valiantly lifting themselves from the depths to which men have brought them. As Olive explains to Basil, the emancipation movement is “an earnest effort” for human progress toward “the new truths” (18). The movement seeks a new world order, “the greatest change the world had ever seen,” and “a new era for the human family” (33). Olive inspires Verena with exalted descriptions of how noble it is “when one makes a sacrifice for a great good” (130).
Olive’s nature is fervent, severe, romantic, full of a longing for martyrdom and heroic sacrifice; she is a powerful figure of ruthless devotion. We are told that “the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and die for something” (10). James reports ironically of this hope that “It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner such a sacrifice […] would be required of her, but she saw the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger as rosy as success” (34). As a wealthy and thoroughly sheltered woman of leisure, Olive is irritated when Basil points out the material difference in their circumstances, and her conviction that only women have ever suffered throughout history ignores the undermining fact that she had two brothers killed in the Civil War.
Much of Olive’s passion seems an unconscious lesbianism. Before meeting Verena, she had entered into various fervent friendships with poor young women, hoping to aid and awaken them in some unspecified manner, and always disappointed to find them more interested in “Charlie” (“a young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar”) than in the salvation of society (31). With Verena she is jealous, moody, possessive—at one point imploring her to “Promise me not to marry!” (128), then later refusing the promise, in passive-aggressive renunciation, when Verena is ready to make it. She cannot conceive of any man truly loving. Of Basil she protests to Verena hysterically that “He didn’t love her, he hated her, he only wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her” (364).
The great problem with Olive’s worldview, as James reveals it, is that, not unlike the hard Puritan religion of her Massachusetts forbears—decisively abandoned but not really overcome—her convictions have a strong element of fanaticism and hatred, in which the presumed suffering of women in the past justifies—indeed demands—the atonement through suffering of men in the present. So thoroughly possessed is Olive by the pain of “millions” of female innocents who “had lived only to be crucified” (33), that their cries are always in her ears, their tears seeming to pour out through her own eyes, and the “dreadful image” of their agony always before her.
Her vision of radical renewal must “exact from the other, the brutal, bloodstained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation” (33). She has become convinced of the justice of collective vengeance against men and feminine exemption: “She was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad […] But their errors were as nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity, if need be, of misconduct” (175). Though a refined and highly intelligent and even courageous woman, Olive’s merciless radicalism thoroughly justifies her sister’s designation of her as a “female Jacobin” (3). She works “perpetually and zealously” to imbibe in Verena her same hatred, wishing to convince her that “after so many ages of wrong […] men must take their turn, men must pay!” (176-76).
Verena is younger than Olive, impressionable and eager to please, and raised in a progressive family devoted to fads, causes, and hearty self-advancement. Her father is a mesmeric healer, and her mother had been involved in the Abolition movement. She adopts Olive’s passion for social reform with at first only a dim awareness of how thoroughly it possesses Olive and how much it will demand of her. She does not hate men, as Olive does, but she has made a life of conceding to others, accommodating their desires. She is attracted to Olive’s description of the purity of their shared self-sacrifice. Eventually Olive takes her over and impresses her own need on her so thoroughly that it seems impossible to escape even when she has admitted to herself that she loves Basil: “She felt Olive’s grasp too clinching, too terrible” (372).
Basil Ransom, with his unprosperous career in the law and retrograde views, offers her little but his assertion of right and his undeniable masculine allure. It is an allure that, though little particularized after his introduction (where he is described as having a “fine head” and “magnificent eyes,” which are “dark, deep and glowing” with a “smouldering fire” [2]) is foregrounded throughout the novel, opposing Olive’s “dry” intensity and intolerable rectitude. In contrast to Olive, who quivers with “a vibration of anguish” (76) or a silent “rapturous stillness” (254), he is often presented as laughing when he speaks—at times bursting into “an irrepressible laugh” (21), or “a genial laugh” (58), or “irresistible laughter” (207). The laughter symbolizes his vigor, his humanity, and his promise of sexual joy.
He is also, unlike Olive, a forbearing man. In one powerful scene, Verena and Basil visit Harvard University’s Memorial Hall, its tribute to the Harvard students who had given their lives in the Civil War, where Verena observes with the patness of the platform lecturer (or a modern feminist academic) that it is wrong to erect a beautiful monument “to glorify a lot of bloodshed” (232). Basil, who risked his young life in the war and experienced the full bitterness of defeat, stands as a living rebuke to her thoughtlessness, a vivid type of the “duty and honour […] sacrifice and example” that the hall symbolizes (232).
Yet he responds to Verena lightly: “If, when women have the conduct of affairs, they fight as well as they reason, surely for them too we shall have to set up memorials” (233). By what willing sacrifice have women earned the right to direct their country’s affairs? Verena’s facile answer is that women “would reason so well they would have no need to fight—they would usher in the reign of peace” (233). He loves her enough to forgive her shallowness.
James makes a point of frequently deprecating Basil’s views, apologizing for their “provincial” (8) nature, their crudeness. Early on in the novel, when Basil is waiting to hear Verena speak for the first time, we are told of his irritated reflection, regarding the temperance movement, “that civilization itself would be in danger if it should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women,” with the narrator hastily informing us that “I am but the reporter of his angry formulae” (45). At other times, the narrator describes him somewhat dismissively as “the stiffest of conservatives” (56), “a reactionary” (181), explaining his difficulty in finding a publisher for his writing by paraphrasing a rejecting editor, who “pointed out that his doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age” (180).
Basil is a Stoic, an admirer of Thomas Carlyle, and a skeptic about modern democracy. After quoting his most passionate attack, in conversation with Verena, on the “feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age […] of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities” together with his defence of “the masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality” (322), the narrator tells us with a pretense of apology that “The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise) with low, soft earnestness” (323).
It’s not clear if the narrator’s at times slightly amused disparagement of Basil’s beliefs is designed to disarm the reader—expected to be in sympathy with progressivism—or to create some distance between narrator and character. But if the views themselves are sometimes extreme and unpalatable, Basil himself is not. The novel deliberately presents his beauty of person—his self-control, his adherence to his chivalric creed, his kindness, his courageous endurance of loss—as the redeeming fact of the novel. Even Olive, as little susceptible to men’s attractions as anyone, notes that he is handsome, grimly predicting to herself that beautiful men tend not to be in sympathy with her movement: “men didn’t care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were good-looking” (19).
If Basil’s words alone cannot convince, his earnest passion and the integrity of his character are persuasive. In the climactic scene in which Verena and Basil debate their points of view, Verena listens to Basil’s “deep, sweet, distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled her cheek and ear” (316), and the reader knows that she is lost. Whether she wants to listen or not, she can’t help but respond.
We learn later that “the words he had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation […] had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there” until they “had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh” (370). Her recognition of the truth of Basil’s words occurs simultaneously with her coming to see herself as Basil sees her—as a woman wasted on the lecture circuit, meant instead to make a loving home. Shocked, awed, even at times appalled at the thought of her own dereliction, her disloyalty to Olive and the cause, she nonetheless finds that she prefers his image, his story: “It was simply that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at her from Basil Ransom’s expressive eyes” (370). All that she had once believed in, pressed upon her by Olive and others, has been overthrown, replaced by a simple and wondrous understanding of what it means to be loved as a woman by a man.
As a platform speaker, Verena had often spoken of love, declaring that her vision was “for a union [between men and women] far more intimate—provided it be equal—than any that the sages and philosophers of former times have ever dreamed of” (256). So she thought for a while. Basil attacked her theory, laughed it to pieces, and imposed his own valiant self in place of her pretty and vacuous phrases. He could do so, James suggests, because he offered her a real love rather than a theoretical one, and because Verena was susceptible to such love. For the Olive Chancellors of the world, constituted differently, incapable of responding to men without bigotry, no effective appeal is possible.
Olive is presented in the novel as a simultaneously tragic and ludicrous being whose impossible emotional demands on Verena irritate and stifle her. Ransom too, however, has designs on his beloved that are based as much in romanticized (mis)perception as in Verena’s real being. He too is guided by a beautiful ideal, cultivated in his chivalric imagination, and liable to deep, mortifying disappointment and unintended shackling. While clearly more in sympathy with Basil’s vision of human relations—it is, after all, based in ancient truths about men and women—James is fully aware of the tendency for all ideals to come into bruising contact with reality. In the final image of the novel, as Basil leads a weeping Verena from the Boston hall where she was to give her largest public address to date, we know that their marriage will involve many tears as well as laughter.
James was not sanguine about the possibility of seeing clearly—let alone opposing—the progressive mania that was already gripping the society he knew (150 years ago!). But he did give that mania vivid narrative form, demonstrating through his characters and their situations the deformities and willful misperceptions it could produce, and insisting that something far more humane, capacious, and inspiring could be realized. It is a vision rarely proposed today, but one just as essential to the triumph of love in our own era.
To divert slightly from The Bostonians. I recently read The Golden Bowl which you mentioed somewhere a while ago Janice. An intriguing book which I enjoyed immensely but then, I like a long read. I particularly enjoyed the development of the character of the Prince's wife Maggie. Next, The Wings of The Dove.
'The world according to Garp" by John Irving was critical of feminism, and in particluar presented radical feminists as deranged to the point of self mutilation