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PARTISAN REVIEW
were drawn in cartoon outline (as befits Superman), though James's
own description of him requires that he look sour and worn, down
on his luck, embittered by the defeat of the South and the collapse of
his family fortunes. He looks, in a word, as though the dew were still
fresh on his romantic virtues . But more sophisticated critical sum–
maries of the story have also tended to make Ransom into some sort
of romantic hero - at least a Byronic one . Trilling saw him as "an
ideal intelligence ... an imagined proto-martyr" of the Southern
Agrarians, "an intelligent romantic conservative ." The combination
of conservative politics and a fear of "the loss of manhood," Trilling
claimed, made him an upholder of an older heroic strain in an age of
degenerate radicalism, and made it necessary that he capture his
female prize, the beautiful young feminist, Verena Tarrant, even
though this triumph meant the defeat of her principles and of her
hope of an independent selfhood.
Not everyone has accepted this heroic Ransom, however. Howe
criticized Trilling's view, recognizing James's pervasive irony in
handling this figure, and concluding that while Ransom "lays claim
to a disenchanted realism, he reveals more than a touch, as James
meant he should, of the sentimental and callow." One can go further
in noting the brutalism beneath his sentimentality, as the language
by which James represents his thoughts about Verena often shows
(for example, "if he should become her husband he should know a
way to strike her dumb" or, "to go away proved to himself how secure
he felt, what a conviction he had that however she might turn and
twist in his grasp he held her fast") . Yet Ransom wins, according to
Howe, because he must, because his ideology, however questionable
in itself, is not as "equally in opposition to the natural and the human"
as his opponent's. He is still the heroic champion of naturalness.
The opponent, Olive Chancellor, had been identified explicitly
as lesbian in Rahv's essay. While previous readers had been well
aware of the exaggerated intensity and desperate need expressed in
Olive's hold of Verena, it required the modern viewpoint, sensitized
to the identification of homosexuality, to recognize this attachment
as expressed (though not necessarily "genital") eroticism. For some,
no doubt, such an idea makes Olive simply the fairy-tale witch, a per–
verter and corrupter of young innocence, and makes the hero's suc–
cessful capture of the girl a "rescue ." Today, however, more readers
will recognize the nature of Olive's passion and still reject the charac–
terology of the fairy tale, reading the novel in another romantic way
as simply concerned with a love triangle, the oldest of plots, in which
