The Bostonians and the Civil War

This essay asks what difference it makes to read James's novel, The Bostonians, with Iola Leroy-that is to read it as a novel of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Doing so turns out to entail reading James with Whitman, a coupling that foregrounds the deep male—male relations read as idealized but unachieved in the period's—and James's—visions of reunion and reconciliation.