The Bostonians

Henry James

My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish. They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are willing to patronize us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a few moderate concessions; to say that there are two or three little points in which society has not quite been just to us. But any man who pretends to accept our programme in toto, as you and I understand it, of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him! It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have thought it all out.

James's novel about the early feminist movement is not flattering to women. Or it is very unflattering to Bostonians, not just the female variety. If you cannot tell from the quote above, women in The Bostonians are a flighty, exceedingly emotional, vindictive, silly collection of individuals. They have passion but they go about it very foolishly.

Perhaps it demonstrates my ignorance of Henry James, but The Bostonians was not at all what I expected. The story of a bitter old maid who is young and her infatuation with a hypnotist's daughter who she (the young old maid) sponsors into becoming a motivational speaker for women's liberation would have been surprising itself, but when you include a cousin from Mississippi, some very strange views about women and men, and finally marriage of tears, it leaves you with little to say.

I never expected James to be so wild.