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PARTISAN REVIEW
and explains their attachment to reform but, covertly , to this ex–
pression . And yet, the relation so designated did not have the same
psycho-sexual connotation for that age as it has for ours. Pre-Freudian
as James and his contemporaries were they may have had a subtler
- more accurately Freudian - sense of that gradient along which all
human beings are distributed with more or less of sexual responsive-
ness to both sexes, the polarized genital homosexual being only dif-
ferent by his or her location at the extreme of the gradient. Female
bonding, moreover, had a necessary social function in the nineteenth
century, for a society which so severely isolated the sexes drove
women upon one another for support and understanding . As Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg demonstrated in a famous article in
Signs
ten years
ago, such female relationships were intense enough and often ex–
pressed themselves so overtly in amorous word and gesture , in kisses
and embraces, as to be susceptible of the labelling of our own times ,
yet they would not have been marked out in this way a hundred
years ago , and often did not obstruct heterosexual marriage, were
tolerated components in married lives. They had their necessary
place in the social scheme.
James's Olive is clearly an extreme instance, since she actively
hates men and since it is her desperate wish to prevent Verena from
marrying. Yet with a sense of the general tolerance in the last cen-
tury for close female attachments we may respond more accurately
to the atmosphere of this novel in which
no one,
not even Ransom,
ever charges Olive and Verena with depravity.
It
is enough condem-
nation of Verena's parents that they give her over to Olive for pay-
ment without adding to their crime acquiescence in their daughter's
seduction by the bad witch. The fllm does not make her a witch,
since it finds its place in its own recent tradition of modern movies
and plays dealing sympathetically with homosexuality, but it makes
our suspicion of Olive's lesbianism a certainty. Visibility, the inevi-
table language of film, must, moreover, always be explicit in a way
words need not be - to
see
the embraces of Olive and Verena is to
have the sense of entering a privacy that James's verbal narrative
does not pierce . This visibility seems to remove all ambiguity for the
modern audience- although even the direct witness would not have
felt that way in the nineteenth century.
But the fllm translation, as I have already suggested , converts
the tale to tragedy, making Olive a tragic martyr or at least a Racin–
ian victim offateful passion . More certainly than the novel the fllm is
forced to make Olive its protagonist and, quite logically, cannot rest
