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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First [168] Lines —— 0.03 —— Norm PgEn [168] chapter four The Political Is Personal What Henry James’s The Bostonians Can Teach Feminist Activists Any study about American fiction devoted to feminist activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must necessarily consider Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians. It is, after all, the only canonical text from the nineteenth century whose central heroines are woman’s rights activists. For that reason, it has for years seemed anomalous not only in James’s oeuvre, but in American literature in general.1 Nevertheless, at the time James wrote to his editor, J. R. Osgood, to describe his plans for the novel, the author thought his topic exemplary rather than unique: The subject is good and strong, with a large rich interest. The relation of the two girls should be a study of those friendships between women which are so common in New England. [. . .] At any rate, the subject is very national, very typical. I wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions , and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf. (Complete Notebooks 19–20) James’s assertion that the debate over gender reform was the “most salient” point in American life was made at a time when the woman’s movement was taking its first tentative steps into the national limelight, making it clear that it was not a “fad” that would soon die out. For example, in 1882 (during which time James was visiting the United States) both houses of Congress established standing committees to hear reports on woman suffrage. To twenty-firstcentury readers, his related contention that the subject of woman’s rights was a “very national, very typical” one for fiction might seem less plausible, given the critical invisibility of most novels written about feminist activism. However, as I have shown, there were in fact several authors writing fiction about the “agitation on [women’s] behalf” throughout the second half of the nineteenth the political is personal 169 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [169] Lines —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [169] century. Because I am interested in the dialogic relationship between these literary texts and the actual woman’s rights movement, as well as what real-world feminist activists can learn from such a relationship, my focus up until now has been novels expressly written to promote women’s rights. It might be difficult to see the possibility of either dialogue or instruction in The Bostonians’s relationship to real-world feminist reformers, but I would maintain that the potential for both exists in James’s novel. Unfortunately, many woman’s rights activists contemporary with James did not see this potential. In a review published on March 13, 1886, in the Woman’s Journal, the official organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association (awsa), Lucia T. Ames offers a critique of The Bostonians that is representative of the way most of them received his novel.2 Although Ames claims that “[I]t seems hardly worth while to take the trouble to issue a protest against this caricature,” she issues a rather lengthy one. She calls The Bostonians “inartistic,” claims the two female protagonists, Olive and Verena, “belong neither to Boston nor any other city,” and assures her reader that this fictional “world of abnormal women” will “elicit a universal protest.” She ends by suggesting a new name for the novel— “The Cranks.” There is no evidence of a massive outpouring of disapproval from feminists—like Ames predicted—but any number of woman’s rights activists likely kept quiet not because they tacitly approved of the novel but because they were indifferent to it. In her article “Feminist Sources in The Bostonians,” Sara Davis deSaussure writes, “the feminists who might have raised objections to the novel were busy writing their own history and were uninterested in the unflattering picture...

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