Family Plot in The Bostonians: Silencing the Artist's Voice

Family Plot in The Bostonians*. Silencing the Artist's Voice by Merla WoIk, University of Michigan Current feminist discourse has sparked a renewed interest in Henry James's The Bostonians. Yet despite appearances to the contrary, the primary concem of the novel is not the feminist movement in nineteenth-century America. Just as in The Princess Casamassima, where the subject of political anarchy becomes a vehicle for the exploration of personal powerlessness in the plight of Hyacinth Robinson, in The Bostonians James models his picture of a society imperiled by sexual conflict and power contests on the dynamics of family life, which is his principal concem. Central to The Bostonians is a version of the "figure in the carpet" of many James novels, a pattem of concerns that reveals the conflicts of a sensitive and vulnerable character, unschooled in the ways of the world. Older or more experienced characters, who are at once outwardly alluring, implicitly threatening, and ultimately betraying, commit the greatest of Jamesian sins when they violate the personal freedom of the naif. While the outline of this figure is familiar to readers of James, some important psychic implications have gone unnoticed. In novels such as The Princess Casassima, What Maisie Knew, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Bostonians, the relationship between the innocent and his or her more knowing friends constitutes a family unit; and the resulting conflict, a fundamental family conflict. Typically, the "child" of this family stands for the artist, if not by virtue of a specific artistic talent than because of a distinctly artistic sensibility, while those who threaten act in some ways as parents. This family dynamic informs The Bostonians, determining its focus, structuring its plot, shaping its societal concerns. In this account of the family dynamic, Verena Tarrant, the artist/child, blessed with the "gift of expression," attracts the powerful parent figures, Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom, who, charmed by the artist's voice, desire to control it and appropriate its power. Verena's real parents set the pattem for the domination and exploitation of their daughter. James introduces the subject of the restraints placed upon the artist's voice with the suggestion that Verena cannot perform unless her father "starts her up" (BO 61). This situation also evokes the dependency of a very young child upon a parent. And it is precisely this image of a child, vulnerable and passive, that James uses repeatedly to characterize Verena. Both Olive and Basil view her and treat her, in Olive's words, "so much like a child" (BO 87; see also 324). As is often true in James's novels, childlike passivity and trust Family Plot in The Bostonians 51 seem to invite parental treachery; here, the Tarrants sell their daughter for social and monetary gain. When Olive takes over the control of Verena from her parents, she also assumes their pattern. Many critics characterize Olive's relationship with Verena as lesbian, but that designation, as commonly applied, has no useful significance for this novel. A sexually active lesbian relationship is certainly not at issue here, and latent homosexuality can be attributed to any intimate relationship between two persons of the same sex. The relationship does embody, however, the perversity that many critics find in it. Suggested in the strange, intense relationship between Olive and Verena is a corrupted mother/daughter dyad.1 Olive acts as the incorporating mother who perversely governs her child's life and language. She gives Verena a home, organizes her life, writes her speeches, monitors her choice of friends, and even considers whether and whom she should marry. Underscoring Olive's attempt to take over Verena's life, James employs images of merger and envelopment throughout: for instance, Olive often throws her cloak around Verena or weaves a "web ... of dependence ... as dense as a suit of golden mail" (BO 172) in gestures that mimic the symbiotic relationship of mother and child. Basil, Olive's kin, seems at first to offer salvation for Verena from Olive's domination. Until the women's movement raised our collective consciousness, many critics took the lead of Lionel Trilling, who saw Basil as the hero, come to save...