MILLICENT BELL
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as a dotty enthusiast "who knew less about her fellow creatures, if
possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she
had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrange–
ments." James actually finds other uses for Miss Birdseye as the
novel proceeds; she becomes a serene elderly fairy whose status as a
representative of confusion and delusion is less important than her
role of benevolent sponsor of the courtship of the young lover (about
whose interest in the Cause she is quite deceived by Basil's deliberate
contrivance). But the portrait of Mrs. Farrinder, politician of the
Cause, is a damning vision of how idealism can generate leaders in
whom the human element seems minimal. Still more repellent is the
quack mesmeric healer, Tarrant, who has discovered a better oppor–
tunity in the natural eloquence of his daughter and has hypocritically
primed her for the feminist lecture circuit. His wife, hardly any nicer,
grovels when Miss Chancellor of Charles Street takes up her child.
Olive, of course, is better than these others - her feminism is an hon–
est vision - but Ransom is not wrong, just the same, in finding her
morbid, someone who "takes things hard" constitutionally, who hates
men not only for the wrongs they have inflicted but because there is
no answering response in any part of her nature for what the sexual
relation with them can give. And she is a jailer, she is an exploiter,
she does presume to govern another life, no less than he.
But all of this unattractive company might be redeemed by
Verena. She is, on the one hand, really the princess of fairy tale, an
idealized American girl such as James had depicted before. Because
she is not merely the product of his naturalist-satiric imagination,
she escapes the compromising closeness of detail and relation to the
environment of all the other characters. She stands like a fresh young
goddess against the sordid scene which cannot account for her as it
accounts for everyone else. As such, her significance is mythic; with
her sweetness and passivity she stands for something virginal and
potential in the American world, something given by nature to frac–
tious and selfish mankind.
But she is also a real figure, a hopeful instance of a young femi–
nist who is both sincere and generous. Though she hates Ransom's
ideas she cannot hate him; she is able to feel kind interest even in his
publication of a reactionary article (expressing views that stir her
indignation) because it gives hope to his personal ambitions. Her
speeches may be worth careful examination. They are not at all con–
temptible, though simplistic, and full of a naive eloquence thatJames
does not make ridiculous . They give us a quite accurate picture of one
