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Olive Chancellor's Parlor

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Olive Chancellor's Parlor The final version appears in How One City’s Cultural Tradition Shaped American Identity in the Nineteenth Centry: Essays on Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. 39-56. The Bostonians, or, Life among the Bourgeoisie: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Olive Chancellor’s Townhouse Elaine Pigeon Several months before The Bostonians made its appearance in serial form in Century Magazine in February 1885, James published “A New England Winter,” a short story about an aspiring American artist who lives in Paris but goes home to Boston to visit his mother. This tale clearly marks the beginning of James’s experiment with literary naturalism, a movement that was closely aligned with French impressionist painting, or the new realism as some preferred to call it. James’s protagonist, Florimond Daintry, is one such painter and his impressions of Boston provide some remarkable insight into James’s view of Boston. Upon observing his former home town, it occurs to Florimond that it was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful. He became familiar with the slushy streets, crowded with thronging pedestrians and obstructed horse-carts, bordered with strange, promiscuous shops, which seemed at once violent and indifferent, overhung with snowbanks from the housetops; the avalanche that detached itself at intervals, fell with an enormous thud amid the dense procession of women, made for a moment a clear space, splashed with whiter snow, on the pavement, and contributed to the gaiety of the Puritan capital. (111) Having “forgotten the details of American publicity” (112), what struck Florimond as he strolled down Washington Street was not only the marked increase in commercial activity, but the predominance of women, both inside and outside the myriad shops lining the street. In addition to “the sisterhood of ‘shoppers,’ laden with satchels and parcels” (111), behind the gleaming plate- glass windows, in the hot interiors, behind the counters, were pale, familiar, delicate, tired faces of women…. But the women that passed through the streets were the main spectacle. Florimond had forgotten their extraordinary numerosity, and the impression that they were perfectly at home on the road; they had an air of possession, of perpetual equipment, a look, in the eyes, of always meeting the gaze of crowds, always seeing people pass, noting things in shop windows, and being on the watch at crossings; many of them evidently passed most of their time in these conditions, and Florimond wondered what sort of intérieurs they could have. He felt at moments that he was in a city of women, in a country of women…. The talk, the social life, were so completely in the hands of the ladies, the masculine note was so subordinate, that on certain occasions he could have believed himself (putting the brightness aside) in a country, or in a seaport half depopulated by the absence of its vessels. (112-13) Although the narrator does not refer to it, the glaring absence of men was, at least in apart, a consequence of the Civil War, which clearly places the story in the same period with which The Bostonians is concerned. We know from his transcription of the letter to his original publisher, J.R. Osgood, that in James’s conception of the novel, he wanted to focus on “the most salient and peculiar point” of American social life, leading him to consider “the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf” (Notebooks 20). As “A New England Winter” suggests, James was deeply struck by the public rise of women, a phenomenon due to New England’s famous female reformers, including those abolitionists who had taken up the mantle of the women’s movement, the central subject of The Bostonians. “The characters,” James writes in his letter, “are for the most part persons of the radical reforming type, who are especially interested in the emancipation of women, giving them the suffrage, releasing them from bondage, co-educating them with men, etc. They regard this as the great question of the day—the most urgent and sacred reform” (18). Besides the well-known reformers usually taken into account such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Anna Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Victoria Woodhull, there is another native New England reformer who achieved international fame as an abolitionist writer who is frequently overlooked in discussions of James’s The Bostonians, namely Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is my contention that in his conception of the novel, James was 2 much more deeply engaged with Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin than previously recognized.i Before turning to James’s novel, I would like to briefly consider what has often been regarded as the first great American novel.ii Initially, Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the abolitionist newspaper the National Era in forty-one installments from 2 June 1851 through to 1 April 1852 and proved to be a stunning success (Belasco 30). When John P. Jewett contracted to publish the novel in March, Stowe was well on her way to becoming the most popular writer of the day. Stowe’s most recent biographer, Joan D. Hedrick, reports that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 10,000 copies within the first week and 300,000 by the end of the first year” (223). In Great Britain, sales of the novel more than tripled “the already phenomenal figures of the United States, reaching a million and a half in the first year” (233). From its publication on 20 March 1852 through to the end of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remained a bestseller, outsold only by the Bible (Robbins 99). In addition, towards the end of 1852, Stowe’s novel was adapted for the stage and opened in Troy, New York, where it was also a huge success; it then went on to tour the country for the next thirty-five years (Belasco 34). Thus it is no surprise that Leon Edel should note that the young James saw Barnum’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at his Broadway Museum in 1853 (1:101). “This was an abridged version with a happy ending,” Edel remarks. “Later Henry saw the full version in six long acts at the National—eight tableaux and thirty scenes—an evening particularly remembered because it happened to be the occasion of his first theatre party” (1:102). In his autobiography, James comments on these two viewings, kindly reserving his “ironic detachment” for his second experience of the play and thereby allowing himself to recapture the initial cultural excitement Uncle Tom generated: “We lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel,” James writes, adding that it also had been his first experience of “grown-up fiction” (92). Commenting on the novel’s remarkable effect, James concedes that 3 nothing in the guise of a written book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and ‘noticed,’ probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest…. If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of Mrs. Stowe’s picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home[.] (92) When he conceived of his own “very American tale,”iii James must have been acutely aware that he was competing with Stowe’s world-famous novel, thereby necessitating a response to that work. In fact, it is generally accepted that in order to claim a masculine ground for the novel,iv James’s experiment with literary realism was an attempt to counter the distinctly feminine sentimentalism exemplified by Stowe. In Black & White Strangers, Kenneth W. Warren deftly sums up the argument when he points out that realism’s quarrel with Stowe enabled the identification of sentimentalism with the figure of the New England reformer. More specifically, he draws attention to the link between Verena Tarrant and Stowe, observing that Verena’s “success is readily identified with Stowe’s through Miss Birdseye’s exclamation that ‘I have seen nothing like it since I last listened to Eliza P. Moseley’” (94). James soon clarifies the connection between Eliza P. Moseley and Stowe in Basil Ransom’s brief commentary on the cause of the devastating civil war: “The Abolitionists brought it on, and were not the Abolitionists principally women? Who was that celebrity that was mentioned last night?—Eliza P. Moseley. I regard Eliza as the cause of the biggest war of which history preserves the record” (The Bostonians 72). As Warren notes, Basil is paraphrasing the famous statement Lincoln supposedly made in 1863 when he was introduced to Stowe: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” James further underscores the association with Stowe by giving his fictional abolitionist “the name of the runaway slave, Eliza,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Warren 94). Perhaps the most intriguing and productive connection between Stowe and Verena is James’s making the latter an inspirational speaker whose power comes from a source outside her self, that is, from a higher authority. “’It’s not me, mother,’” Verena insists before speaking at Miss Birdseye’s gathering. Selah 4 Tarrant, her father, a mesmeric healer, corroborates: “It was some power outside – it seemed to flow through her” (44). In order to help calm Verena and prepare her “to let the spirit come” (47), she would close her eyes and her father would then place his hands on her head, as if magically opening a channel.
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