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Title: The Bostonians: A Novel (Penguin Classics) by Henry James, Richard Lansdown ISBN: 0-14-043766-5 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: unique among james's novels
Comment: I don't think this is one of his very best works and prefer The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady, but it is interesting and enjoyable nonetheless. None of the characters are very reasonable (the main characters are, perhaps, not even agreeable), and the reader is torn between taking sides with Olive, Verena, or Basil, even though James has a slight bias for Basil, a reactionary. The structure of the novel seems excentric when compared with James's other novels: Basil, the hero, is absent for long stretches, and the finale includes a bit of comedy with a policeman. This scene verges on slap-stick and comes as a shock, in an otherwise intense and somber love story. The prose, however, is beautiful throughout and easier to read than that of his later novels.
Rating: 5
Summary: Scathing? Yes. Spellbinding? Yes. Hilarious? Yes. Boring? NO
Comment: This is the high point of the Henry James middle period. I don't think any book so perfectly captures the spirit of a city than The Bostonians does. It's obvious that James is critical of the people of Boston, and has great fun with a great era (spirituality, free love, communal living, feminism, and seances in the post-Civil War America), yet at the same time, I think this is a great description (and a truthful one) of the home of the eban and the cod. The battle between Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom for the soul of the very confused spiritualist speaker Verena Tarrant (Ah, those Jamesian names again!)is not only powerfully doen, but I think this book has much more humor in it than Portrait of a Lady does. (Although, this does not diminish either work in the least.) I could speak all day about this book, and given a chance I will. But I urge you to take a chance on it. I was Massachusetts born and raised..but out in the Western end of the state, and we tend to feel Bostonians sometimes think a bit too well of themselves. Apparently, over 100 years ago, things were the same. There is so much more to this book, read it, and realize that we, at the beginning of a new millenium, are hardly as progressive or as innovative as we like to think we are.
Of course, the greatest irony of this book comes not within its pages, but when you visit the grave of the James family. Henry James ashes were interred in the ground on the family plot, and now and forever, the family plot looks not upon the city of New York, or the expanses of Europe, but rather, Henry James, for all eternity, is facing th city of Boston. e
Rating: 5
Summary: He really hated his home town.
Comment: When he says the "Bostonians" he means "the lesbians." I was pretty interested in the story of a Boston marriage, but it got increasingly mean-spirited toward the end, when the dashing right-wing Mississippian convinces the young woman to leave the older one and a full suffrage lecture-hall and run away with him-- she finds it seductive to be told she must have no will of her own.
I went looking for criticism of this book and found little in Gale, but two essays from 1990s by Wendy Lesser and Alison Lurie. Lesser argues against the feminist line that the book is a misogynist polemic; she responds that Olive (the lesbian) and Basil (the Mississippian) are both complex characters, sometimes weak, sometimes strong and sympathetic. (She quotes Hardwick that James is our best female novelist because his women are powerful and interesting.) Lurie looks at the novel as more about politics than gender: James came home from Europe and found he hated America; showed the South re-conquering the North in Basil's conquest of Verena.
I disagree with Lesser: Basil is shown as naive and occasionally weak but dashing and full-hearted -- I'm sure he is an idealized self-portrait of James. Olive is honest and principled but so bleak and unhappy that her love is purely destructive. Her strength lies less in her principles (Mrs. Birdseye after all is equally principled but utterly weak) than in her vaulting ambition. She reminds me of Dixon's Thaddeus Stevens in The Klansman -- passionate, scheming, perversely principled, but essentially evil. Both come from Milton's Satan, seen as a Yankee.
Which brings me to Lurie's version. I agree with her that the novel is about politics, but disagree that he was writing against America -- I think he was just writing against Boston. The hostility the novel met at the time stemmed from his nasty portrait of the old transcendalist Elizabeth Peabody (his minor character Mrs. Birdseye); this is a less irrelevant reaction than critics portray it, since she's a stand-in for everything he despises about his own Boston roots, a hatred which drives the novel. An equally weak but even more despicable character is Verena's father, a mystical fraud whose nomadic career has certain resemblances to James's father's -- resemblances strengthened if Verena is modeled on Alice James. The Boston reform tradition is alternately weak-minded and hard-edged, and basically loveless -- a spirit of drafty wet lecturehalls. Where Basil is hot-blooded -- he feels about Mississippi a tragic love he can't bear to speak of in conversation -- Olive's New England feeling is only cold philosophy.
How real is the political alternative which Basil represents? We see much less of him than of Olive; James knew Boston but not Mississippi. But I think James like some of his peers yearned for a certain reactionary romanticism which northern intellectuals associated with the South -- a Burkean spirit of cavaliers and kings. (Basil's name means "king," and his emerging career is writing political essays said to be hundreds of years out of date.) Basil's defeat of Olive to marry Verena -- he imagines his own seizure of her from the podium of Fanuiel Hall as a political assassination, with shades of John Wilkes Booth -- is clearly a re-conquest of the North by the old South. What he offers for an American future is less Enlightenment, more Middle Ages -- less rights, more responsiblities -- less cold charity, more warm friendship.
James/ Basil reminds me of Henry Adams in the "Education." On the one hand, Adams saw the warm (mildly homoerotic) friendship of exceptional men (modeled on himself and John Hay) as a strategy for national progress. On the other, Adams developed a similarly St. Gaudensian aesthetic of the medieval -- the cathedral against the dynamo. This was the first, aesteticist reaction of the northern elite to the soullessness of postbellum America, which we forget because it was replaced by Teddy Roosevelt's more muscular alternative.
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Title: The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics) by Henry James, Harry Levin ISBN: 0140432337 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1987 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: The House Behind the Cedars (20th Century Classics) by Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Donald Gibson ISBN: 0140186859 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Wings of the Dove (Penguin Classics) by Henry James, John Bayley ISBN: 0140432639 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: June, 1986 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper ISBN: 0451525213 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: March, 1996 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The Blithedale Romance by John Updike, Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0375757201 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 14 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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