The Curious Case of Doctor Prance

The Curious Case of Doctor Prance Ian F. A. Bell, University of Keele The Bostonians is a novel beset by schisms: schisms of North and South, private and public, personal and impersonal, reformers and reactionaries, male and female. The novel attempts to interrogate the perceptual modes that collude in these schisms, ways of seeing that are characteristic of the world of publicity inhabited by James's text where spectacle, commodity, and the habits of consumption are defining imperatives.1 Interrogation is conducted at various levels and in various forms. By the novel's Hawthornesque anxieties about its own narrative power.2 By a questioning of the idea of 'union' in its application to both social and political relationships as a seeming solution to a divided world.3 By presenting through Verena Tarrant the suffering that ensues from living in such a world.4 I want to focus some of the issues of this complex subject by considering the figuration of Doctor Prance where, in a novel that takes the ideational reform of gender as its ostensible theme, we witness what amounts virtually to a literal re-forming of assumptions about the schisms of gender itself. My argument is premised on the proposal that we need to attend to Doctor Prance's dispersive function, her disruption of the antimonies that structure the other characters and provide the problematical locus for the novel's concerns in general. Her role, specifically, requires us to requestion the absolutist separations of work and release from work, sites of labor and those of relaxation, public and private behavior, and the range of gender-based perceptions that condition and perpetuate those separations. Doctor Prance provides telling access to one of James's most powerful preoccupations: his antipathy towards those modes of seeing and understanding that freeze the world into intolerant binary structures and thereby threaten its relational practices. The presentation of Doctor Prance is marked by an almost total absence of those "personal" details we expect in a novelistic expression of "character," an absence that is singular in a work that James himself describes as "something like Balzac" (HJL 76).5 Her first appearance is as a name on a sign (BO 24), and this is one of only two occasions where she is accorded the color of a christian name; on the second occasion, that name is distanced from the text by parenthesis (BO 36). Her intimacy with Miss Birdseye circumscribes her main activity in the novel, and that is marked by the details of a shared absence of physical feature (BO 24, 37) and a shared bespectacledness (BO 28, 31). In fact, her physical presence is characterized only by her cropped hair, the detail that enables Ransom to recognize her in the dusk at Marmion (BO 301). Ransom is the sole person with whom she converses, and he recognizes The Curious Case of Doctor Prance 33 at their first meeting that her profession renders her "incapable of asking him a personal question" (BO 38). Here, "personal" is set against what Ransom calls the "private lecture" they see Olive receiving from Mrs. Farrinder, a privacy that, Doctor Prance notes, will not obviate the necessity for payment. Ransom's phrase conjoins two disparate terms, and it is left to Doctor Prance to reveal that disparity in her reminder of the commercial world that structures reformist performance and where publicity ensures that nothing is for free, nothing is "private ." The moment is prepared for by the narrative's distinctions between two forms of the "public" world and by the lecture itself. These two forms are shaped by the vivid contrast between Miss Birdseye (BO 25, 27) and Mrs. Farrinder (BO 27-28), whose differences are carefully plotted point for point. The ultimately affectionate portrayal of Miss Birdseye is of a public fife that has suppressed the "personal," whereas the frightening picture of Mrs. Farrinder is of a public life where the "personal" is not present even to be dismissed. Physiognomically , they are formed by the shared lecture-hall in which the former is the audience and the latter is the performer (BO 25-28). In Mrs. Farrinder, "public" partakes of the qualities of her eye, "large, cold, and...