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The Road from Memorial Hall: Future Imperfect in The Bostonians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Martin Griffin
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Extract

Henry James'S first substantial engagement with matters of nation, reconciliation, and memory — and his last until the “Richmond” chapter of The American Scene in 1907 — appeared almost twenty years after the end of the Civil War. Twenty years had also passed since James's 1865 Nation review of Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, with its caustic dismissal of the collection as “monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect,” and its final comment that the nation did not suffer through years of war “to put up with spurious poetry afterwards” (“Mr. Walt Whitman,” 626). There is an eerie foreshadowing, in the juxtaposition and the flavor of those phrases, of the trope of national reconciliation in James's novel The Bostonians (1886). Persuading the soul and the slighting of the intellect are questions of importance in that later text, but time has passed and people have changed. In this novel, the journey to the future now loops back and around, through memory and ideology, confusing and wrong-footing both political thought and emotional affinity. The difference between the James of the Whitman review and the author of The Bostonians is that the latter is no longer certain of where the spurious is located, or how the soul and the intellect — or even if such a dualistic paradigm can be maintained — should now respond to slights and persuasion. The chain of readings that has developed around the novel has itself looped back and around, from approving nods toward the sentiment of sex, through interrogations of the nature of American realism, to the unearthing of the conscious or unconscious empowerment of homoerotic passion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 29 , October 2005 , pp. 251 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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