Populism, privilege, and democracy in Henry James’s The Bostonians: encounters with community

ABSTRACT

Unusually for Henry James, The Bostonians (1886) addresses notions of “the people,” popular movements, and socio-political reform. Foregrounding the position of women, the narrative searchingly, if ambiguously, appraises conditions in the United States of the 1870s, following the Civil War. As Olive Chancellor (a Boston feminist) and Basil Ransom (a conservative Southerner) vie for possession of the malleable orator Verena Tarrant, the text explores the failure of “union” in both its personal and political senses. The populist-feminist rally concluding the narrative highlights the prevailing challenges to democratic possibilities. Community in its traditionally cohesive guise has metamorphosed into the “inoperative community” theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy. Mutually dependent, monadic “singularities” converge in tense encounter. “Community,” according to Roberto Esposito, inevitably separates such vulnerable “singularities” from themselves and others through the play of social relationality. The novel’s democratic orientation is nonetheless sustained by its capacious form and the hospitable engagement of its readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Henry James
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Roberto Esposito
• populism
• community
• democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 151.

² James, Hawthorne, 55.

³ James, Notebooks, 47.

⁴ James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, 184.

⁵ James, Notebooks, 47.

⁶ Howard, “The Bostonians,” 61.

⁷ Hochman, “Reading Historically/Reading Selectively,” 270.

⁸ Ibid., 272–4.

⁹ The novel gives only a few examples of Verena’s speeches, which tend to convey an impression of pedestrian vagueness. Philip Page has suggested that such cultivated lacunae are strategically contrived to stimulate the reader’s collaborative imagination (“The Curious Narration,” 382). Daniel Karlin has traced the type of the nineteenth-century female inspirational orator in the United States to Cora L. V. Hatch, “a spiritualist medium whose extempore speeches attracted huge audiences,” although she was also notorious for her “sensational love life.” The text’s equivalent of Hatch is almost certainly Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, who achieves passing satirical mention (introduction to The Bostonians, lvi).

¹⁰ See Graham, Indirections of the Novel, 37.

¹¹ Karlin, introduction to The Bostonians, xxxvii–xxxviii.

¹² Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145.

¹³ James, The Bostonians, 209–10.

¹⁴ Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 23.

¹⁵ Quoted in Bell, Henry James and the Past, 112; see also 103–5.

¹⁶ James, “Mr Walt Whitman,” 29.

¹⁷ James, The Bostonians, 152.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid., 153.

²⁰ Ibid., 160.

²¹ Ibid., 161.

²² Ibid., 31.

²³ Ibid., 70.

²⁴ Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 6.

²⁵ James, The Bostonians, 230. See also Hochman, “Reading Historically/Reading Selectively,” 275.

²⁶ For a fuller discussion of the feminist context, see Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 136–7, as well as Karlin’s account of the Women’s Movement (introduction to The Bostonians, xlvi–liv, especially xlviii–xlix).

²⁷ James, The Bostonians, 98.

²⁸ Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.”

²⁹ Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 9.

³⁰ Ibid., 9.

³¹ Ibid., 26.

³² See Esposito, Communitas, 126–8.

³³ Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 27.

³⁴ Ibid., 28.

³⁵ Ibid., 31.

³⁶ Kramer, “Masculine Rivalry in The Bostonians,” 139–42.

³⁷ Ibid., 144–5.

³⁸ James, The Bostonians, 107.

³⁹ Ibid., 111.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 112.

⁴¹ Müller, What Is Populism?, 101.

⁴² Graham, Indirections of the Novel, 33.

⁴³ James, The Bostonians, 15.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 134.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 236.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 271.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 274.

⁴⁹ Blair, “Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary,” 157–8.

⁵⁰ James, The Bostonians, 290.

⁵¹ Ibid., 291.

⁵² Ibid., 293.

⁵³ Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 38.

⁵⁴ James, The Bostonians, 358.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 372.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 366.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 370.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 371.

⁵⁹ From Lewis and Short, eds., A Latin Dictionary, 2014.

⁶⁰ James, The Bostonians, 371.

⁶¹ Ibid., 265.

⁶² Bell, Henry James and the Past, 102.

⁶³ Emerson, “Boston Hymn,” lines 57–60, 65–72.

⁶⁴ Emerson, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” 885.

⁶⁵ James, The Bostonians, 44.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 390.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 387.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 389.

⁶⁹ See Blair, “Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary,” 164.

⁷⁰ James, The Bostonians, 388.

⁷¹ Ibid., 388.

⁷² Blair, “Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary,” 165.

⁷³ Page, “The Curious Narration,” 374.

⁷⁴ Heidegger, Being and Time, 149–63, especially 156–7.

⁷⁵ Esposito, Communitas, 8.

⁷⁶ Bird and Short, “Community, Immunity, and the Proper,” 10.

⁷⁷ Esposito, Communitas, 139.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 139. Esposito’s explanation of community as “non-belonging” and a “no-thing” is suggestively linked to Heidegger’s 1950 essay on “The Thing,” which emphasizes the aspects of the “void” and a (pure) relationality that facilitates “a unity in distance and of distance … a distance that unites and … a far-awayness … brought near.” If distance cannot be addressed through a process of bringing nearer, Heidegger contends that the thing is “annihilated” (see Communitas, 144–5).

⁷⁹ Ibid., 139–40.

⁸⁰ James, The Art of the Novel, 222.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Merle A. Williams

Merle Williams is a professor emeritus of English and a research associate of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She was principal organizer of the colloquium on “Cultures of Populism” which gave rise to this special journal issue. She is author of Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (Cambridge University Press, reprinted 2009), and is completing a scholarly edition of The Awkward Age for CUP’s Complete Fiction of Henry James. An invited volume of her critical essays on James is in preparation. The edited collection Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South will be published by Routledge in 2021. Williams has produced articles and book chapters on the relations between literature and philosophy, Romantic poetry, and fiction from the nineteenth century to postmodernism. She has held visiting research positions in Germany, Sweden, and the United States.