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honest and distasteful siege of Ransom. Indeed, if anyone does re–
present sexuality of a "normal" heterosexual sort it is Mrs. Luna, but
how repulsively and calculatingly she uses her sexuality!
Trilling found the key to
The Bostonians
in the death - in 1881-
1882-ofJames's parents, and quoted what he calls James's "impas–
sioned memorial" to his mother:
"It
was the perfect mother's life - the
life of a perfect wife. To bring her children into the world - to ex–
pend herself for years, for their happiness and welfare - then, when
they had reached a full maturity and were absorbed in the world with
their own interests - to lay herself down in her ebbing strength and
yield up her pure soul to the celestial power that had given her this
divine commission." But this bitter naturalism, which makes woman
a creature like the spawning salmon that must die when its reproduc–
tive role is over, can only pretend approval. This murderous martyr–
ological view of motherhood cannot, really, be James's idea of the
best outcome of femininity.
His general view of marriage may be reflected on for a bit,
here. He had at some early point in life quite rejected the prospect of
marriage for himself. Speculation tires itself over the question of
whether or not he was undeviatingly celibate, whether or not he was
hetero or homosexual, whether, a child of the Victorian age I have
described, he sharply saw himself as absolutely one or the other.
This is clear. He feared for himself the compromises of marital union,
perhaps of any union beyond the most occasional emotional- or
physical- contact that his cautious personality permitted. "The port
from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential
loneliness of
my
life-
and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course
again finally directs itself," he told Morton Fullerton in 1900. What–
ever the exact psychic reasons - sexual inhibition, consciousness of
deviance or whatever- he embraced the solitary life and found in it
a positive value, particularly for the artist, as he expresses in "The
Lesson of the Master" (1888) in which a famous writer warns the
neophyte, "Marriage interferes!"
Verena, if we wish to think of her that way, is a sort of artist,
gifted with her natural histrionic talent and her beautiful voice, which
others wish to exploit-Olive for the Movement, and Basil, as he
bluntly tells the girl, for the caged canary song-notes that she will
warble before his hearth . But I do not believe thatJames was so seri–
ously concerned with Verena's artistic possibilities as with the general
threat marriage poses to human potential. Fear of the constriction to
an allotted social role and a surrender of a large measure of personal
