Touring Memorial Hall: The State of the Union in The Bostonians

The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.

Henry James, The Bostonians

As the meeting place of the familiar and unfamiliar, tourism is no stranger to Henry James studies. Numerous critics have tracked the stories of the unassuming American traveling in Europe, exploring James's "International Theme" by focusing on the meanings of various characters' "confrontations with cultural artifacts and social arrangements . . . in foreign settings" (Buzard 15).¹ Stateside, The American Scene has garnered the most attention as the Jamesian text in which a sense of traveling and travelers engages issues of culture making, commodification, and exchange. In addition to the broad strokes of tourism, specific tourist sites feature prominently in James's novels, functioning as the locations for crucial turning points in the plots. Early examples include Daisy Miller and Roderick Hudson, in which the title characters' respective visits to the Roman Coliseum fatefully couple romance with ruin. In The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson's holiday to the country estate Medley develops into a scene of dislocations, all of which are structured by the geographical one. More generally, pairs of protagonists from The American to Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl assemble only to dissemble in the galleries of renowned museums. In these instances, tourism gives visible shape to less tangible relations of encounter and negotiation. Ostensibly a mechanism for categorizing places and subjects into familiar and foreign, sightseeing brings the two into proximity, but in the Jamesian text, this proximity ultimately points to the very difficulty of making such identifications. Similarly, while tourist sites' material and symbolic specificity shape the encounters that occur there, in James's work, these sites simultaneously draw attention to the very construction of spatial configurations and identifications.

This is certainly the case in The Bostonians. Set in Boston after the Civil War, the novel resonates with a highly charged sense of sectionalism, bringing together protagonists who are staunchly loyal to their political positions, loyalties that are identified with very particular geographies. From the seemingly mappable pairs of North/South, Boston/Cambridge, and Boston/New York to the more conceptual couplings of public/private, exterior/interior, and local/national, The Bostonians is replete with places staked out, contiguous, and contested. Shaped by a shuttling between spaces and loyalties, the novel pivots on the scene of tourism at Harvard's Memorial Hall, a place that epitomizes the novel's understanding of space as "both a thing . . . and a social process, at once solidly material and ever changing" (Mitchell 30). Memorial Hall is, simultaneously, staked out (as Northern territory), contiguous (to both Cambridge and the city of Boston that Cambridge borders), and contested (in all of its geographical, gendered, and sectionalist identifications). Asserting and undermining spatial identity and identifications, Memorial Hall is the place where the conservative Southerner Basil Ransom extracts a promise of loyalty from the young Verena Tarrant, the dazzling future of the suffragist cause and seemingly loyal companion to Bostonian Olive Chancellor. Much later in the novel, when Basil's geographical and psychological proximity to Verena has become relentless, Olive muses that it was at Harvard where Basil "had then obtained an irremediable hold upon her" (372).

And yet, Basil's ability to secure that hold during the tour of Harvard is curious. Memorial Hall commemorates Harvard students and graduates who died during the Civil War fighting for the Union cause. Verena takes Basil for a tour of the memorial, positioning him as the conservative Southerner, in order to ground his status as outsider, opponent, and defeated party. The tour, then, originates as her attempt to diminish Basil's rising stature by taking him to "'the great place that towers above the others'"(245). But by the end of the novel, it is Basil who is described as the "towering eminence" (375). Taking on the attributes of the place that symbolizes his greatest opposition, the Southerner has moved into the role of victor, not just by the end of the novel, but by the end of Harvard...