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on the fairy-tale happy ending of Verena's rescue . Quite brilliantly,
in fact, the screenwriter adds a further scene beyond Verena's last–
page departure with Basil from the Music Hall where she had been
scheduled to give her feminist oration. Our last ftlmic moment-not
given by James at all- is of Olive addressing the irate, frustrated
ticket-holders. Like a tragic protagonist she then seems to reach an
enlightenment in her moment of utter defeat and humiliation. She,
who has been so fatally "personal" in her attachment to an abstract
principle, whose idealism has been rendered suspect by her purely
private need, now attains a true and admirable impersonality when
she tells the audience that though they must be disappointed in miss–
ing Miss Tarrant's eloquence it is not, after all, the speaker that mat–
ters but the message, which even she can validly communicate.
But this is not James's ending, for James is really writing neither
romance nor tragedy , but comic satire, in
The Bostonians.
Romance
is disposed of in the novel's final line, which scotches the fairy-tale
happy ending by a wry authorial comment as her knightly lover pulls
a weeping Verena onto his steed, so to speak : "It is to be feared that
with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to
enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed." This rejec–
tion of "happily ever after" is clearly something that the filmmakers
could find no use for , desiring as they seem to have been to preserve
both
romance and tragedy (for two kinds of movie audiences?) and to
keep
both
Basil as fairy-tale hero and Olive as tragic heroine.
Yet it is prepared for in the novel. The married union is , in
fact, viewed with extreme suspicion throughout the book, for it is
really clear that, like Alice James, even the beautiful Verena has had
no valid alternatives, that all unions are -like the national one, so
recently restored by a bitter war - doomed to be compromises of do–
minion and submission, that democracy, political or domestic, is a
dream. Where could Verena have found an example of that marriage
which like the utopian vision of democracy and national unity allows
the fullest expression of individual self to each, and the strength of
combination at the same time? Certainly not in the marriage of her
parents - the hideously exploitive and hypocritical Selah Tarrant
and his wife who has given up every shred of original dignity or con–
viction. Verena greatly admires the feminist leader Mrs . Farrinder,
that Sherman tank of a woman of whose marriage it is simply said,
"she had a husband, and his name was Amariah." Of the domestic
possibilities of the once-married Mrs. Luna, Olive's sister, one can
only judge from the character of her atrocious little boy and her dis-
