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sponse to the charge that he could not write about society - the way
the French naturalists were doing-and that he had turned his back
on the study of his own native materials - as some of his American
critics reproached him. Both impulses promoted the composition of
a work which contends with its own ironically present patterns of ro–
mance and tragedy by its view of the basic structures of real life and
local scene. So , his subject, as he said, was "very national, very typi–
cal. I wished to write a very
American
tale, a tale very characteristic of
our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient
and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was : the situation of
women, the decline of the sentiment of sex , the agitation on their
behalf."
The three last phrases in this well-known statement are ambig–
uous, and James's exact meaning along with the reason for their
peculiar order has not been satisfactorily explained by the numerous
commentators upon the novel who have quoted them. Only the third
has an indisputable sense - he wished, among other things , to char–
acterize the new movement for women's rights which had succeeded
abolition as a leading reform cause. A good many modern historians
have confirmed the impression James seems to have had that femi–
nism had been born out of the lingering energies of abolitionism;
certainly many of the early leaders had broken the prejudice against
public speaking by women on abolitionist platforms . Like Miss Birds–
eye in the novel, they harked back to "the heroic age of New England
life - the age of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and
earnest effort, of moral passion and noble experiment. " But some–
how, James seems to say, as he presents the company of grotesques
and self-servers who meet in Miss Birdseye's parlor, the waters of
New England idealism, once fed from the purest springs of protestant
ethicism, had grown murky and unwholesome. In an iron age of cor–
rupt national politics and ruthless business expansion, reformism
itself had become less pure, great causes had yielded to trivial ones
in a proliferation of fads and crankism - and even a legitimate social
issue like female rights was confused by the hysteria, morbidity, ec–
centricity of its partisans.
J ames has a good deal of sour fun in characterizing this com–
pany in his novel, beginning with Miss Birdseye , who seems based
on Elizabeth Peabody, a much-beloved relic of the abolitionist past
who had been a friend of Emerson and edited the
Dial.
Readers of the
novel's early chapters, including his brother William, were shocked
by his portrayal of her (in a famous passage of Theophrastan humor)
