MILLICENT BELL
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a man and a woman instead of two men contend for one girl. Some
such reading seems to have been in the minds of the directors of the
film and governed Vanessa Redgrave's moving portrayal of Olive.
We cannot mock her as she runs sobbing on the beach at Cape Cod
searching for her lost love who is somewhere on the water in a boat
with Ransom, and we understand-horrified but participating-the
ambiguity of her visions of Verena's drowning. When she returns
later and falls into Verena's arms we do not dare to despise her,
though both scenes verge on the ludicrous. Redgrave has made her
performance the heart of the film and lifted the character to the
height of tragedy.
Yet one is not quite certain how James saw the relationship he
gives us without naming. He had set down his preliminary idea of "a
study of one of those relationships between women which are so com–
mon in New England." How did he conceive "those relationships"?
He had one close at hand in the case of his own sister. Alice had
suffered a not uncommon fate as the only girl in a male-dominated
household. Her two older brothers were the redoubtable intellectuals,
William and Henry; her two younger were Union soldiers who ex–
pressed their choice of the life of action on the battlefield. But for her
there was no alternative to marriage as a mode of self-definition, and
that mode was, for the bright, spirited girl, unappealingly illustrated
in her own mother, a complacently Victorian domestic saint. In
young womanhood, Alice took to her bed as a permanent arrange–
ment of life. But she managed to acquire in Katherine Loring a de–
voted friend who became nurse and possibly lover and who completely
assumed responsibility for her care. The family knew enough to be
grateful for a sustaining presence that relieved it of the burden of this
invalid member and offered Alice, asJames said, "a devotion so per–
fect and so generous" as to be "a gift of Providence." In 1883, the pair
joined Henry in England where they were to live in close contact with
him until Alice's death; it was in the early months of this proximity
that he began
The Bostonians.
Did the J ameses think of Alice and Katherine as "abnormal"?
There is no hint available in their letters that this was so.
It
seems
that the age we stigmatize as "Victorian" accepted the establishment
of close relationships of female bonding which our own day unhesi–
tatingly labels deviant. Such relations were indeed common in New
England, as James said; there was even a common term for them -
they were called "Boston marriages." James's title for his novel, in
fact, may refer not only to the locale which encloses his two women
