The Re-Formation of Urban Space in The Bostonians

This paper argues that James’s The Bostonians—which he wanted to be “as local, as American, as possible, and as full of Boston” –bears out the geographical, political, and aesthetic effects of the filling of Boston’s Back Bay in the postbellum era, which problematized preconceived notions about public and private, local and national spaces. From a series of early landscape passages to the political battle between its main characters, The Bostonians shows James groping for a way to describe and reconcile the fragmented modern city created by the filling of the tidal marsh along the Charles River.