Expressive Interiors and Perceptual Pleasure in Henry James’s The Bostonians

This essay explores the role that aesthetic objects and physical structures play in erotic exchanges between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians. The novel’s preoccupation with the tasteful interior of Olive’s home exposes James’s repeated conflation of character, desire, and material world through descriptions of perceptual experience. As a result, the novel’s apparent organization around rigid demarcations of space and distinct sexual categories obscures its far more contradictory modes of classification, which continually blur distinctions between the novel’s human figures and the objects and spaces that surround them.