The Master
For his fifth novel, The Master (2004), Irish writer Colm Tóibín took as his subject the intriguing Henry James, whose life previously had been considered by several biographers. While the book is decidedly a novel, Tóibín closely adheres to the facts as he describes events during four years of the great writer’s life. The Master covers the period between January 1895 (focusing on the ill-starred premiere of James’s play Guy Domville) and 1899, after James had moved into his beloved Lamb House in Rye, England.
Tóibín excels in drawing connections between James’s life and his fictions. In the third chapter, he envisions James beginning to formulate the idea for a story:
Nothing was as it seemed. He had an image for his story of a governess, a person full of sweetness and intelligence and competence, excited by the challenge of her new duties, her charges, the boy and girl, whom the archbishop had told him about. And he had an image also of his mother and his aunt Kate, one of them carrying a lamp, entering the parlor where he sat, both appearing worried and exhausted, his mother’s lips pursed but her eyes all bright and her cheeks flushed, both of them sitting with him as Alice’s muffled cries came from upstairs, both women grim and dutiful in their chairs, more alive, more intensely involved than he had seen them for many years.
This recalled scene becomes the inspiration for James’s famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw.
Some readers see Tóibín’s book as a masterpiece; others are skeptical of the way it blurs the line between history and fiction. Most of the facts and period details check out, but it is challenging-bothersome to some—to determine with certainty which of James’s sentiments derive from recorded fact and which Tóibín has supplied. In a fashion that is appropriately Jamesian, Tóibín represses much information, and while the plot is likewise filled with subtlety and nuance, the narrator not only defers—in fact, pointedly refuses—to elucidate key events but reveals gaps in his omniscience; the result is that James’s interior life is in large part hidden rather than revealed.
In fact, it is almost as if James keeps important matters not only to himself but from himself. In his review of Tóibín’s novel in the New Yorker (June 28, 2004), John Updike wrote: “Tóibín’s Henry James, for all his powers of subtlety and observation, contains blankness and silence because he does not face or act upon his homosexuality—which is apparent to almost every character in the novel except him.” The result is a shadowy portrait and a read that at times can feel plodding, free as it is from precise description of character and detailed narration of events. Yet The Master is immensely readable for its formidable reimagining of the young James, whose voice Tóibín captures and even renders conversational.
In 2001 Tóibín explored literary homosexuality in his essay collection Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar. The Master was short-listed for the coveted Mann Booker Prize, as was his previous novel, The Blackwater Lightship (1999).
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Henry James’s The Bostonians through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
MARK TWAIN
As for the Bostonians, I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.
—from a letter to William Dean Howells (July 1885)
R. H. HUTTON
The Bostonians consists chiefly of a truly wonderful sketch of the depth of passion which has been embodied in the agitation of woman’s wrongs and woman’s rights,—a depth of passion which it is hardly possible for us in England to associate with anything short of religious fervour.... We must say that Mr. Henry James has fallen so deeply in love with his own study, that he is tempted to dwell on it and almost maunder over it, till it bores his readers; and it is not till we get to the second half of the third volume that the picture of the struggle between the fanatic friend and the imperious lover, for the heart of Verena Tarrant, rises to the highest point of interest and power.... We have never read any work of Mr. Henry James which had in it so much that was new and original, we must also say that we have never read any tale of his that had in it so much of long-winded reiteration and long-drawn-out disquisition. Perhaps that, too, is in its way a reflection of the thin, long-drawn elaborateness of Bostonian modes of thought.
—from an unsigned review printed in
The Spectator (March 1886)
G. BARNETT SMITH
The comedy of human life, in some of its special phases, has been cleverly set forth by Mr. Henry James in The Bostonians. The woman question forms the basis of the novel; and, under cover of the movement for the so-called emancipation of the fairer half of the community, he admirably illustrates the interdependence of the sexes. The true woman knows well enough that her real sphere is the home; enshrined in the affection of her husband and children, she wishes for no other, and there is certainly no other in which she could wield half her present influence over the destinies of the world. There have been many cases, no doubt, where women have suffered from the selfishness and brutality of man; but the millions of happy homes which have existed from time immemorial prove that these are only the exceptions. Mr. James gives us several types of women who represent the “forward” movement. Olive Chancellor is a young lady who is really filled with a genuine enthusiasm for her sex, believing that it has been maltreated for ages and made the sport of the creature man.... The book closes with the collapse of Miss Chancellor’s hopes; the moral being that all schemes must ultimately fail which seek to uncreate the woman whom God has made, and to reconstitute her as another kind of being. Mr. James’s novel is brilliant, full of points, and eminently readable; but it is rather tantalising not to afford us a few glimpses of the married life of Verena Tarrant and Basil Ransom, and the future of the disillusioned Olive Chancellor.
—from Academy (March 6, 1886)
H. E. SCUDDER
When we say that most of the characters [in The Bostonians] are repellent, we are simply recording the effect which they produce upon the reader by reason of the attitude which the author of their being takes toward them. He does not love them. Why should he ask more of us? But since he is extremely interested in them, and seems never wearied of setting them in every possible light, we also accede to this interest, and if we have time enough strike up an extraordinary intimacy with all parties. It is when this interest leads Mr. James to push his characters too near the brink of nature that we step back and decline to follow.
—from Atlantic Monthly (June 1886)
JULIA WEDGWOOD
We will resist all temptation to criticize Mr. James’s last novel from any other point of view than as the production of a clever and brilliant writer whose wit and shrewdness force us to listen with pleasure to an adulteration of familiar truth with vulgar prejudice and a narrative written on a plan that seems to us nothing less than execrable. He is such good company that we sit helpless while he insults our deepest convictions, and listen with irritation to what we would term, with a sense of inadequate virulence, the interruption of a perpetual aside. To be told not only what his dramatis personœ express but what they thought and kept to themselves, what they felt inclined to express and why they refrained—to be, in short, taken into their inmost confidence on every interview with them—seems to us a violation of every conceivable rule of literary good breeding, and affects us in fiction with no less sense of fatigue and unfitness than such an experience would in life.... The most earnest, and in spite of some odious associations we will add the most valuable, page in the “Bostonians,” is devoted to a protest against what he calls
“the damnable feminization of our age.” How strikingly a latent touch of conscience accentuates protest! Mr. James is the greatest sinner in this “feminization” that fiction can produce. He gives us on this present canvas at the least three women to one man, and takes not half the trouble over the man that he spends on any of his women.
—from Contemporary Review (August 1886)
JOSEPH CONRAD
I want to thank You for the charm of Your words, the delight of Your sentences, the beauty of Your pages!
—from a letter to Henry James (October 16, 1896)
FORD MADOX FORD
Let me say at once that I regard the works of Mr. Henry James as those most worthy of attention by the critics—most worthy of attention of all the work that is to-day pouring from the groaning presses of continents. In saying this I conceal for the moment my private opinion—which doesn’t in the least matter to anyone, though it is an opinion that can hardly be called anything but mature—that Mr. James is the greatest of living writers and in consequence, for me, the greatest of living men.
—from Henry James: A Critical Study (1913)
CARL VAN DOREN
[James’s] Bostonians recall that angular army of transcendentalists whom Lowell’s essay on Thoreau hung up once for all in its laughable alcove of New England history. James regards them only too obviously from without, choosing as the consciousness through which they are to be represented a young reactionary from Mississippi, Basil Ransom, who invades this fussy henyard and carries away its prized heroine, Verena Tarrant, on the very eve of her great popular success as a lecturer in behalf of her oppressed but rising sex. By such a scheme James was naturally committed to making his elder feminists all out as unpleasant persons, preying on Verena’s youth and charm and enthusiasm, and bound to keep her for their campaign no matter what it might cost her in the way of love and marriage. But more than James’s own prejudices, his technical device contributes to a certain insufficiency in The Bostonians. It is too largely skeleton, without the blood which might have come from heartier sympathies, without the flesh with which James might have been able to round out a “purely American” tale had he not forgotten so much about American life. He had forgotten, or at least ceased to care greatly about it.
—from The American Novel (1940)
Questions
1. Do you believe that a marriage between Basil Ransom and Verena Tarrant can work out? Could it offer the partners as much happiness as grief?
2. Do the characters of Olive and Basil tell us anything about how ideas and passions can—in a single person—work with and against each other?
3. Is the novel’s treatment of feminism fair? Is there a suggestion that Olive’s feminism is a by-product of her perhaps implied tendency toward lesbianism and not valid outside that context?
4. How do you explain Verena? Does she dissociate when she lectures? Does a public self, created by public speech, subdue her private self? Is she a kind of puppet put through her paces by Olive, her ventriloquist?
5. Would it be fair to say that this is not just a novel about something that could have happened at a certain place and time, but that it is a novel about something that happens perennially, wherever there are humans, even if the manners and issues differ? If so, the book still has something to say to us about ourselves. But what?
For Further Reading
Writings by Henry James That Relate to The Bostonians
The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
Literary Criticism. 2 vols. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. Groups James’s criticism as essays on literature, American writers, English writers (vol. 1) and French writers, other European writers, and prefaces to the New York Edition (vol. 2).
The Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
The Princess Casamassima. London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1977. This edition includes the author’s preface.
Selected Letters. Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Selected Literary Criticism. Edited by Morris Shapira. London: Heinemann, 1963.
Biographies
Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. A condensed and revised version of Edel’s original five-volume biography (see directly below).
——. Henry James: 1882-1895, The Middle Years. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962. Especially relevant to The Bostonians, this is volume 3 of Edel’s five-volume Henry James, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953-1972.
Horne, Philip, ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Allen Lane, 1999.
James, Alice. The Diary of Alice James. Edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964.
Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.
Matthiessen, F. O. The James Family. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.
Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Criticism
Allen, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Bell, Ian F. A., ed. Henry James: Fiction as History. London: Vision Press, and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984.
Castle, Terry. “Haunted by Olive Chancellor.” In The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modem Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Dupee, F. W., ed. The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Allan Wingate, 1947.
Edel, Leon, ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Fetterley, Judith. “The Bostonians: Henry James’s Eternal Triangle.” In The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Blooming-ton and London: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Geismar, Maxwell David. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
Goode, John, ed. The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James. London: Methuen, 1972.
Griffin, Susan M., and William Veeder, eds. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Lucas, John, ed. “Conservatism and Revolution in the 1880s.” In Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: Essays. London: Methuen, 1971.
Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
McMurray, William. “Pragmatic Realism in The Bostonians.” In Henry James: Modern Judgements, edited by Tony Tanner. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Powers, Lyall H. Henry James and the Naturalist Movement. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971.
Tanner, Tony. Henry James: The Writer and His Work. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Princess Casamassima.” In The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press, 1950.
Westbrook, Wayne W. “Selah Tarrant à la Daudet.” Henry James Review 5:2 (1984).
Bibliographies
Bradbury, Nicola. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James. Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1987.
Edel, Leon, and Dan H. Laurence. A Bibliography of Henry James. 1957. Third edition, revised with the assistance of James Rambeau. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
a Highest peak in the Harz Mountains in central Germany and legendary setting for witches’ spring Walpurgis Night revelry; famously described as such in part 1 of Goethe’s Faust (1808).
/>
b An impudent, shameless woman of loose morals; the allusion is to the infamous wife of King Ahab of Israel as recounted in the Bible in books 1 and 2 of Kings.
c Street in southern Manhattan in the financial Wall Street neighborhood.
d The Charles River, the longest in Massachusetts; divides the cities of Cambridge and Boston.
e To flirt with; to court.
f Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of England’s most important poets of the Romantic period.
g Actress connected with music-hall or theatrical entertainments.
h Auguste Comte (1798—1857), French mathematician and philosopher; he founded Positivism, a system of philosophy that recognizes only positive facts and observable phenomena.
i Then-unfashionable area located between Boston and Roxbury, south of the Back Bay.
j Hired four-wheeled coach drawn by two horses.
k Horse-drawn trolley car.
l The Boston Evening Transcript, a popular local paper published from 1830 to 1941.
m Set form of words or conventionalized statement in which something is defined or declared.
n A look of haughtiness; the reference is to the Roman goddess Juno, female counterpart of Jupiter.