First Time

Thoughts are few and far between in the morning. Groggy. Mind not seeming to function. Why do I feel most verbal as I'm trying to go to sleep? No idea.

Well, I'll give it a try.

I finished The Bostonians a few days ago, and I'm still digesting it. It really got under my skin, nowhere near as engaging as The Rise of Silas Lapham. To think that Silas was so much better received in the US than The Bostonians. While controversy apparently clouded The Bostonians' reception from it's first few serial installments until the present day, people read characters in the novels as critiques of political luminaries of the day, I think what is much more disturbing, and perhaps what caused so much ill will, was that James, as he does so well as we all know, refused to compromise his characters for his readers' comfort. Feminists, well suffragists then, were appalled that Olive and Miss Birdseye were so, well, riddled with human weaknesses and even, at times, pettiness. That Olive is really the heroine of the novel, not Verena as James told his publisher nor Basil, Verena's love interest, doesn't become so obvious until much of the way into the novel. The pain the Olive experiences, her ultimate self-imposed martyrdom at the end, her attempt to change the world in the only way she knows how, these are what gives the book so much oomph, I think. As Mrs. Farrinder points out early in the novel, if Olive cannot or will not speak out for women's rights publicly, she has money so let that be Olive's contribution to the movement. Olive takes this advise to heart, adopts Verena who has the "talent" for public speaking, and systematically molds Verena into the perfect spokeswoman for the suffragist movement.

Basil is a problem. He is disturbing, his ideas so antithetical to Olive's and our own sensibilities. I admit it was difficult for this reader not to hate this supposed romantic lead. That, after Verena inundates him with passionate language about the rights of women and the hope for a better world, he responds by telling Verena that the best place for her is in his kitchen and that her talent for speaking can be accommodated by erecting a dais in the parlor on which she may speak to him, oh, it just feels odious. However, at least he is consistent. He laments the loss of masculinity in the world. That the world has become a treacherous place, in his view, is due to the loss of machismo, or perhaps, men capable of gutsy decisions. Of course, his world view was formed during the South's Reconstruction and feels both the loss of the South's traditional way of life and hatred of the carpet-baggers come to make money off the South's need to rebuild. No wonder he has a dislike for a government and a people that could allow these things to happen. However, even he remembers that there were plantations run by single women, a thought that quickly exits his mind.

Oh, but I could not stand Basil at times. The last scene is almost tame when I think back to those conversations with Verena. Still, he carries Verena away from her parents, from her ward, from her life as a speaker, to come live in his kitchen. I do love the last sentences. As Basil is taking Verena off to her new life:

But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.

So life will not be rosy, and Verena will not acquiesce as far as Basil would like.

Olive meanwhile ascends the platform in Verena's place at Boston's Music Hall. One is left with the impression that she is to be booed, hissed, reviled. She is not the speaker the audience has come to hear. But Olive needs this. She wants to feel loathed. Perhaps she has found another way to contribute to the movement, a way that more closely fits her own impulses. After all, she has never been comfortable having money. She much rather prefers to suffer, to feel the pain that those women less fortunate than her must endure daily. Finally, she gets an extra large dose of that, and a nice little repudiation of her attempt to use Verena just as Verena's father had used her years earlier. She needs to be repudiated. She knew it was wrong. While Verena could have been a great tool for the movement as molded by Olive, Verena would still have been only a tool. Olive is guilty of the crime the men of her time have committed; she has subjugated a woman to do her will. Even if the cause is noble, this crime needs to be addressed.

So no one gets what they want. Well, maybe Olive. Basil and Verena are off to an unhappy marriage. Olive perhaps receives some redemption. At least I hope she finds some peace. I like to think she got up on that rostrum in the Music Hall and gave an address which may have been rejected by her audience but that led to her finding some belief in herself. She doesn't need a Verena. She is incredibly intelligent, and she knows her "material". After all, she educated Verena.

Ok. So my first blog has become a poor piece of literary something or other. Soon, I will examine how language, the written word, seems to have so much more power over me than my own life. Living in my head and all that....