Millicent Bell
THE BOSTONIAN STORY
It is well known that to translate is to traduce, and this is
true of the "translations" one medium makes of another, of the can–
nibalism habitually practiced - however tenderly - by film upon the
novel. Yet every film version of a novel is an instructive mistaking.
At the very least it can send us back to the original to make our own
rediscoveries, to force upon it, perhaps, a new translation or betrayal
of our own, what we call a new critical reading. The recent film ver–
sion of
The Bostonians
does this with special interest just now, for no
work by Henry J ames seems to be so directly concerned with one of
our own chief preoccupations - the question of the relations of the
sexes and of the nature and consequence of sexual difference in our
culture.
J ames's novel is certainly one of those works that seems to
change shape as the times change. Markedly unpopular with its first
readers, both as magazine serial and book, it never gained standing
in James's lifetime, and even he rejected it, finally, for inclusion in
his comprehensive New York Edition. Yet its greatness was suddenly
sensed by critics after World War II when its unsympathetic view of
Boston feminism in the 1870s seemed to speak to a later pessimism
concerning projects of social change. The return to critical apprecia–
tion of
The Bostonians
was initiated by three reprints, each accompa–
nied by an interpretive introduction that drew its inspiration from
this pessimism - Philip Rahv's, to the Dial edition in 1945, Lionel
Trilling's, to the Chiltern Library edition in 1953, and Irving Howe's,
to the Modern Library edition, in 1956. The views these writers ex–
pressed have been persistently influential, yet it seems likely that we
can now find other grounds than theirs for appreciating it.
The reading of the novel most compatible to the formulas of
film derives from a plot of pure fairy tale. A beautiful princess with
skin the color of milk and hair the color of flame falls into the hands
of a witch who lays her under a spell. Successive suitors attempt to
free her, but only one, a stranger from a far country, succeeds in
awakening her from the witch's enchantment by the power of his
love and his might at arms, and he carries her away with him to be
his wife forever.
It
is no surprise that Christopher Reeve, who repre–
sents Basil Ransom in the film, looks as healthily handsome as if he
