Critical Oversights: The Aesthetics and Politics of Reading The Bostonians

This essay argues that The Bostonians exposes the formal logic of the Reconstruction romance as a genre that embraces the ethics of reunion by abandoning the politics of Radical Republicanism. Pairing the Southern Basil Ransom with the Bostonian Verena Tarrant, the novel imagines a reunited nation, but their anticipated marriage requires Verena to abandon her career as a reformer and orator. Readers of the novel must imagine a culturally Reconstructed Union at the very moment that Verena’s futurity becomes foreclosed and must reconcile the novel’s depictions of the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic with its content’s strategies of containment.