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THE BOSTONIANS Jackson Davidow READING Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 THE BOSTONIANS IN BOSTON Jackson Davidow 66 Davidow Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 After moving back to Boston, I had to peruse several bookshops in search of Henry James’ 1886 novel The Bostonians. How could the book be so hard to locate in its city of inspiration? Every other major James novel was always in stock, yet The Bostonians, the classic feminist killjoy, was notably absent. Wasn’t it a staple of local history and literature? Against the backdrop of Boston’s burgeoning feminist movement in the 1870s, The Bostonians pivots around Olive Chancellor, an upper-class suffragist; her estranged cousin Basil Ransom, a conservative lawyer from Mississippi; and Verena Tarrant, Olive’s gifted pupil and companion who is also courted by Basil. After promising never to marry, Verena moves into Olive’s Back Bay home, where they focus on emancipating women in law and society. Over the course of the novel, Olive and Basil vie for Verena’s love and loyalty. Whereas Olive longs to turn her protégée into the voice of the feminist movement, Basil wants to marry her and put an end to her activism. The Bostonians gave rise to the term “Boston marriage,” describing two women like Olive and Davidow 67 Verena living together in a monogamous partnership, fnancially independent of men. Boston marriage does not necessarily denote a lesbian relationship, yet the novel is teeming with same-sex erotics. Olive is very much enamored of angelic Verena, though it is unclear to what degree her love is requited. For both women, however, at times it’s hard to distinguish their commitment to feminism Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 from their deep affection for each other. Right after I found out I’d be returning to Boston for grad school, the terrible Marathon bombings took place. From Toronto, I anxiously kept track of the American news coverage with diligence. It was the frst time in a while that I felt something for Boston, that I cared about it in some capacity. That maybe after all these years I could stop pretending to be Canadian and embrace my four generations of Bostonian roots once and for all. After the city-wide lockdown and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest in the pit of a sailboat, I watched online as Bostonians emerged to celebrate the wounded suspect’s captivity. In horror I observed hundreds of white men assembling in the dark at the Parkman Bandstand on the Common. Just four days after the tragic bombings, they gleefully banged their shirtless chests, drunkenly belting patriotic songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Sweet Caroline.” As the mainstream media generated racist 68 Davidow reports on terrorism, a white man physically assaulted a random woman wearing a hijab. He screamed, “Fuck you Muslims! You are terrorists! I hate you! You are involved in the Boston explosions! Fuck you!”1 In the subsequent months, article after article was published in “liberal” newspapers and magazines about how white men and sometimes women Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 are exemplary Bostonians because they are heroic and resilient in the face of terrorism.2 The mantras “Boston Strong” and “Boston Pride” continue to be ubiquitous. They follow me everywhere I turn — advertised on Facebook, printed onto cocktail napkins, scratched into bathroom stalls. “Boston Strong” reeks of “Army Strong,” the U.S. Army’s recruiting campaign of the past decade. One has to admit how linguistically puzzling this noun-adjective brand is — why not “Strong Army”? Or perhaps it’s the other way around: “Army” modifes “Strong.” As if we live in an age when “Army” simply describes an everyday mode of living, feeling, and belonging to the strong nation. “Army” — rife with its imperialist, racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies — is the only way we can be “Strong.” “Boston” easily replaces “Army.” For me, the army of white frat boy go-go dancers decking the Parkman Bandstand inimitably encapsulated what it means to be Bostonian. The phrase “Boston Pride,” on the other hand, is certainly borrowed from the city’s gay pride celebration. In high school I used to live for these annual festivities. I planned my outfts months in advance and prayed that my acne wouldn’t be too atrocious. Marching in the parades around the Davidow 69 Common in my tightest skinny jeans (my “come- fuck-me pants” according to my disapproving mother), I was indeed desperate to get laid or fnd true love or both. Now I couldn’t care less about Pride. I just use it as an opportunity to rant about queer shame or protest intersectional political issues I consider pressing. I cannot celebrate my queer identifcation Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 at these corporate festivals. And I surely cannot celebrate being Bostonian. In Boston, I resort to literature and history in search of feminist and queer role models: strong Bostonians who fll me with pride. Though I know little about American literature, I initially sought out The Bostonians because it’s about feminism. Plus, Merchant Ivory Productions turned it into a mediocre flm. At frst, reading The Bostonians in Boston seemed like a scandalous political act, a big fuck you to my present-day hometown. It was a way to dissent from reactionary public discourse. According to James, the book’s title refers not to every Bostonian but specifcally to Olive and Verena, the feminists who embodied the city’s zeitgeist in the eyes of Basil. 3 (How might we characterize Boston’s zeitgeist today?) Before it got too cold, I made a point to read the 70 Davidow novel in public places, particularly on the Common, the oldest city park in the country. The common ground for all Bostonians. Here Ann Hibbins was hanged from an oak tree in 1656 for witchcraft almost forty years before the frst Salem witch trials. Two centuries later she inspired the creepy witch Mistress Hibbins who tries to further corrupt Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In addition to public executions, the Common has historically served as an important site of demonstration, from abolitionist meetings to Vietnam and ACT UP riots. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar Esther greenwood schleps here from the suburbs to see her psychiatrist. Between appointments she sits on the benches along the Common and reads “scandal sheets” — popular little papers announcing suicides, murders, and robberies. “I didn’t know why I had never bought any of these papers before,” Esther claims. “They were the only things I could read.”4 Reading The Bostonians became a performance, my point of entry to the past. I started to identify with Esther as I sat on the same park benches, reading madly to make sense of my role as a political subject in the contemporary city. What happened to the days when Boston was the international hub of abolitionism and feminism? What does it mean to be Bostonian today? How should a Bostonian be? Davidow 71 Though about feminists, The Bostonians is not feminist. To my dismay, reading The Bostonians in Boston was not in the least a radical gesture. Written by a male novelist who was, to be generous, wary of the women’s rights movement, the book is a literary attempt to fossilize and satirize a particular narrative of political struggle. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 For the most part, Verena is totally vapid. Her oracle-like ability to speak is constantly upstaged by her good looks and charm. She is caught in the middle of a vicious tug-of-war between Olive and Basil, who both manipulate her naiveté to their liking. Since Verena needs to please everyone, she is always on the verge of tears. Olive, on the other hand, still strikes me as strong-willed. Dry and awkward and man-hating, she dedicates herself to female emancipation and rails against the institution of marriage. Vanessa Redgrave’s depiction of her in the flm is far too lovely. Despite her discomfort talking in public, Olive approaches theorist Sara Ahmed’s fgure of the feminist killjoy who ruins everybody’s fun and happiness by speaking her mind. As Ahmed writes, “feminists are read as being unhappy, such that situations of confict, violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than being what feminists are unhappy about.”5 Olive incessantly points out the relationship between female suffering and suffrage, but her politics don’t get much more advanced than that. For James, the feminist movement thus functioned as a novelistic tool to portray women as unhappy rather than to designate why they’re unhappy. As 72 Davidow suffragist Lucia True Ames penned in her 1886 review of the novel in Woman’s Journal, “We hear a great deal about the great ‘cause’ for which all are laboring, but exactly what the ‘cause’ is, does not seem apparent.”6 Every now and then James vaguely alludes to how, for example, suffragists want “certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures, and others to be enacted,” but Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00056/1610842/thld_a_00056.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 on the whole the novelist is completely disengaged from the political discourse and activism of 1870s Boston.7 The book therefore isn’t really about feminism.
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