henry james's social media cult doc

Hello friends—

First, some updates:

I wrote some reviews:

For LRB, I reviewed Creation Lake.
For WaPo, I reviewed The Third Realm
For Bookforum, I reviewed Intermezzo (the issue is coming).

I also appeared on The American Vandal podcast and talked about Lukács, my father.

Also, Chris Knapp’s States of Emergency is out now, and it is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read (and I read it a lot, because I acquired and edited it). I think it should win the Pulitzer.

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I am once again preparing my notes for my weekly The Bostonians seminar. This involves reading the weekly installment, making notes in the margins, and then transcribing my underlined passages to a piece of paper or whatever is handy so I have a kind of working outline. When I agreed to do the seminar months ago, I reread the whole novel, but did not take any notes because I wanted to leave my notetaking and annotating to the weekly run-up to the seminar. That way, I could react in real time, but also I could have the whole shape of the book in my mind as a kind of deep background.

This week’s installment of the novel is quite juicy because it establishes the counter campaigns that Olive and the Tarrants will fight against each other for ownership of Verena. This is a kind of all-encompassing ownership—spiritual, emotional, physical, material, etc.—that is usually entailed in marriage. That is, the transfer of a young woman as property from the house of her father to the house of her husband. However, in the case of marriage, such transfer of ownership and the ownership itself, has both a symbolic and a material character, mediated and established by the law and by custom. That is, the law makes material the symbolic character of marriage, and makes symbolic the material character of marriage.

There are other modes of transfer of responsibility and agency over people that are enshrined in law. For example, adoption, both official and unofficial. What I mean is that that, in the case of adopting or even abandoning a child, the responsibility for that child is transferred from one entity to another. In the case of abandonment or orphans, responsibility is transferred to the state or to some institution. In the case of adoption, it is sometimes transferred from one individual to another. Or from an institution to an individual, etc. This can also happen outside of a legal context, as in when an heir is designated. Though they may not legally become the child or dependent of the person doing the designating, they do become, often via custom but more often via the anticipation of the legal proceeding of the inheritance, tied to that person.

This is familiar to us from literature—think of Great Expectations or even Sense and Sensibility, where Willoughby is at the whims of his aunt, who controls his future though she is not technically his parent.

There was a tradition, predating civil partnerships and gay marriage in America, where gay people would adopt their partners so that they could inherit shared property or life insurance or so that they could be involved in healthcare decisions and estate planning. All because there existed no robust legal protections or even legal existence for same-sex partnerships under the law.

This becomes interesting in the case of Verena and Olive because they were women and it is the 19^th century, and there is no legal foundation for same-sex marriage though women are permitted, in some states and in some cases, to own property in their own right. Olive’s desire to wrench Verena from her parents—to save her from these tacky people of bad social origin and worse social habits—might be read as a kind of adoption scheme. Adoption in the sense of taking in an orphaned child or adoption in the sense of gay people finding legal loopholes to protect themselves from the law.

Of course there is a broader context for the relationship between Verena and Olive, the so-called “Boston Marriage.” Has there ever been a more perfect term? It refers to the long-term cohabitation of two women (usually of means) without the financial or material support of a man. First of all, it’s very funny to me that two women decide to live together and it’s read as quirky if there’s no man involved. Like, is it a home if there’s no dude around? Lol, sometimes patriarchy is too much. Simply too much. Anyway, Henry James was well-aware of this phenomenon. And one might say that milieu of The Bostonians, set mostly among the intellectual and social elite of Boston, particularly the feminist and revolutionary set, would be a particularly suited to the examination of the phenomenon of ladies doing it for themselves.

My favorite example of the Boston Marriage is of course Sarah Orne Jewett, author of The Country of the Pointed Firs (new edition coming from Unnammed Press in November, and it’s very good!) and her longterm partner Annie Fields.

It is impossible to read Olive and Verena’s relationship outside of the fact Boston Marriages were an…accepted? Known? Ongoing thing? Also relevant, I think, is that this is a Boston post-Civil War. A generation of American men are just…dead. Husbands, fathers, fiancés, brothers, sons. Which means that there is a generation of women who have come into wealth that might otherwise have been under the direct control of a man or earmarked for a man. A generation of widows and orphans, not quite heiresses, but, perhaps with more control over their financial destinies than they might have otherwise had.

It is important to note that not all of these relationships were romantic. There is nothing inherently romantic about deciding you want to live with your best girlfriend (platonic) and not have to deal with men. That is a beautiful thing. And it might be said that social acceptance of these arrangements and the social understanding of them as materially and socially expedient is what permitted women who were involved in lesbian relationships to engage in them.

I am not an expert, and I am sure there is a robust literature about this—please send me links to PDFs—and I am almost certain my speculations are off, but it is fun to ponder.

This coincides with the new women James is so interested in parodying but also taking quite seriously. Women are, in the wake apocalyptic shattering of the Civil War, remaking society or attempting to remake society and effect change. They have just seen the revolutionary turn of the abolishment of slavery and the vanquishing of the Confederacy. And so, the idea of female emancipation is not merely a kind of distant, gauzy dream, but something which feels shockingly, urgently at hand. They have just seen the world get blown up to free a people. It seems possible to them. There is a revolutionary energy suffusing their cause.

Back to Olive and Verena. At the end of last week’s installment, Olive invites Verena to her house and Verena shows up. Then Olive issues a proposal of sorts:

her impatience was such that before the girl had been five minutes in the room she jumped to her point—inquired of her, interrupting herself, interrupting everything: "Will you be my friend, my friend of friends, beyond every one, everything, for ever and for ever?" 

Verena has a very funny response, “Perhaps you like me too much.” I say proposal because, if you look at the structure of Olive’s outburst, it very much resembles a request that Verena make a vow to her. To be her friend of friends, beyond every one, everything. And that the term of this vow should be for the rest of their lives.

We spent a lot of time in last week’s seminar discussing whether or not Olive or Henry James himself is aware of how…well, gay, Olive sounds here. And if she is making a specifically queer entreaty. Can we say that she is doing that, in the 19^th century? Is she aware of her desires? Are we projecting onto her desires a set of 21^st century attitudes and understanding about queerness?

I’m not sure that I know enough about the modes of expression among 19^th century women of Olive’s social class to be able to say definitively whether or not Olive is knowingly engaging in euphemism here. What I do feel is available to us is that Olive is quite taken and quite overwhelmed by her feelings for Verena. And that she herself is not quite able to make those feelings into articulate or discrete entities. That to me has much to do with Olive’s own interior qualities. It also has something to do with, well, the social reality of the time. But I am not sure I know enough to say that she’s definitely, definitely making a sapphic gesture or move on Verena here. I do think that there are undertones. And that one can read desire—of a mixed quality—in her outburst. How can you not? It’s her soul crying out for what she most wants.

Anyway, Olive and Verena come to an understanding at the end of that chapter. That Olive will help Verena study German and all manner of other things so that she may make better use of her “gifts” as a speaker and avatar for their cause. Just as they are clasping hands, having made their vow to one another, with a line from Faust, lol, Basil Ransom appears like a serpent stealing into Eden.

In this week’s installment, Basil flirts with Verena, which causes Olive no end of displeasure. Verena grows more aware of the pain Basil’s presence causes Olive, and decides she is to take her leave. It takes some doing but eventually, she is off, and Mrs. Luna, Olive’s sister appears.

I find this moment interesting because Mrs. Luna is clearly hot after Basil:

"You are not to belong to any Miss Tarrant; you are to belong to me," Mrs. Luna said, having thought over her Southern kinsman during the twenty-four hours, and made up her mind that he would be a good man for a lone woman to know. Then she added: "Did you come here to meet her—the inspirational speaker?"

"No; I came to bid your sister good-bye."

"Are you really going? I haven't made you promise half the things I want yet. But we will settle that in New York. How do you get on with Olive Chancellor?”

Olive picks up on this vibe and, after being briefly disgusted because, gross, a man, she decides it will be useful to her in order to keep Basil (hopefully relocated back to New York and far away) from Verena:

Olive Chancellor looked from one to the other of her two relatives, one near and the other distant, but each so little in sympathy with her, and it came over her that there might be a kind of protection for her in binding them together, entangling them with each other. She had never had an idea of that kind in her life before, and that this sudden subtlety should have gleamed upon her as a momentary talisman gives the measure of her present nervousness.

Much of the rest of the installment concerns Verena’s parents, the Tarrants, and Olive as they maneuver and feint for control, yes, but really, ownership of Verena.

Olive’s view of the Tarrants comes sharply into focus when, over the course their burgeoning relationship, Verena asks Olive why she won’t come to Cambridge to visit her even though they are such dear friends and Verena often visits her in Boston:

Olive expressed her reasons very frankly, admitted that she was jealous, that she didn’t wish to think of the girl’s belonging to any one but herself. Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant would have authority, opposed claims, and she didn’t wish to see them, to remember that they existed. This was true, so far as it went; but Olive could not tell Verena everything—could not tell her that she hated that dreadful pair at Cambridge. As we know, she had forbidden herself this emotion as regards individuals; and she flattered herself that she considered the Tarrants as a type, a deplorable one, a class that, with the public at large, discredited the cause of the new truths. 

She especially hates Selah Tarrant, Verena’s father—partly because he is a man and therefore a symbol of the ultimate authority over Verena, but also because he…is a man and she hates men (I didn’t make that up, she said that in an earlier chapter):

How little he amounted to Olive perceived after she had made Verena talk, as the girl did immensely, about her father and mother—quite unconscious, meanwhile, of the conclusions she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist without moral sense—that was very clear to Olive as she listened to the history of his daughter's childhood and youth, which Verena related with an extraordinary artless vividness. This narrative, tremendously fascinating to Miss Chancellor, made her feel in all sorts of ways—prompted her to ask herself whether the girl was also destitute of the perception of right and wrong.

So we have here a sense that Olive pities Verena and wishes she were free from her parents so that she might…live with Olive, lol. She is rather down on the virtues and the background of Selah, and we imagine that she is on a crusade to liberate this poor girl, a flower of democracy itself, is the phrase the narrator provides us through Olive’s focalization.

As for the Tarrants, the narrator of the novel takes great delight in sketching them as a pair of climbers who each view their daughter as a kind expedient or product. Mrs. Tarrant does seem somewhat invested in Verena’s happiness and what the relationship with Olive might promise for her long-term prospects:

But her mother liked to think that she was quick and graceful, and she questioned her exhaustively as to the progress of this interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said, it shouldn't be a permanent "stand-by" for Verena. In Mrs. Tarrant's meditations upon the girl's future she had never thought of a fine marriage as a reward of effort; she would have deemed herself very immoral if she had endeavoured to capture for her child a rich husband. She had not, in fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents of fate; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and the unmarried men, who were generally very young, were distinguished from each other not so much by the figure of their income, which came little into question, as by the degree of their interest in regenerating ideas. She supposed Verena would marry some one, some day, and she hoped the personage would be connected with public life—which meant, for Mrs. Tarrant, that his name would be visible, in the lamp-light, on a coloured poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. But she was not eager about this vision, for the implications of matrimony were for the most part wanting in brightness—consisted of a tired woman holding a baby over a furnace-register that emitted lukewarm air. 

Let’s take this bit apart, shall we? There is that word again, “marriage,” but it follows the observation that the arrangement between Olive and Verena would be a perfectly suitable final outcome for Verena. In other words, there would be nothing at all the matter with Verena ending up living with Olive long-term. Then proceeds a rather funny idea of rich men being a rather rare social commodity—this, of course, calls to mind the long tradition of domestic realist novel, in which mothers are always after marrying off their daughters. Here, James seems to be having a bit of a joke about it, turning it on its head and also demonstrating that in a society made more varied by the advance of capitalism and also democracy, there are other social forms available, such as the Boston Marriage.

Mrs. Tarrant then paints a rather dubious picture of marriage life: the lukewarm air from the furnace, the baby in the arms, a tired woman, etc.

And seems, after having said she’d be morally suspect for wanting a rich husband for her daughter, she imagines a rich lady friend as morally superior.

 A real lovely friendship with a young woman who had, as Mrs. Tarrant expressed it, "prop'ty," would occupy agreeably such an interval as might occur before Verena should meet her sterner fate; it would be a great thing for her to have a place to run into when she wanted a change, and there was no knowing but what it might end in her having two homes. For the idea of the home, like most American women of her quality, Mrs. Tarrant had an extreme reverence; and it was her candid faith that in all the vicissitudes of the past twenty years she had preserved the spirit of this institution. If it should exist in duplicate for Verena, the girl would be favoured indeed.

She views Olive as such an alternative for Verena.

When it comes to Mr. Tarrant, Verena’s happiness not top of mind. The novel observes: “he looked at his child only from the point of view of service she might render humanity.”

He views his own job as her parent to keep her “ideal pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral life—this was a duty more imperative for a parent so closely identified with revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed profitable worldly connections.”

Mr. Tarrant travels a lot. He walks around town and calls in at the homes of his various (all female) patients—he is a mesmeric healer and probably a fraud, but one who seems to buy totally into his own funny gas. As to how he plans to maximize Verena’s talents and gifts as well as his own prophetic industry:

He produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate, of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-absorbing solicitude—the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers, paragraphs of which he had hitherto been the subject, but of which he was now to divide the glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his world, the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life; and, for him, if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be brought about by copious advertisement in the daily prints. He looked with longing for the moment when Verena should be advertised among the "personals," and to his mind the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in the year. Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of old which he used to pervade; but he could not persuade himself that through this medium his personality had attracted general attention; and, moreover, the sheet, as he said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so long as his daughter's physique, the rumour of her engagement, were not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively copied.

This is one of my favorite paragraphs in the novel because it so very captures a vibe in today’s world. I don’t know if you are mind-poisoned like me, but I enjoy watching really bad documentaries about particularly contemporary evils. I recently watched one documentary about an alleged cult involving a group of Instagram dancer-influencers. It involved the father of one of the dancers who started a church of sorts that took in and isolated these dancers and made them tithe all of the money they made from influencing. Then, their influencing was used to evangelize more to get more members and more money, all the while producing HOURS of content of them dancing like terrifying smiling robots to upbeat music on Instagram. It also, for some reason, involved embezzlement and real estate fraud. Meanwhile, their parents and families haven’t heard from them in months and in some cases, years.

There was another case involving a group of undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence. A father of one of the students turned the kid’s friend group into a cult, involving moving in with them and having sex with some of the young women.

We might also recognize this as a variety of stage-parenting. Those parents who turn their kids into stars or celebrities or even into monarchs, in days past. Now that anyone can become an influencer, even more children are having their lives turned into content, and they’ll never grow up with a sense of division between the private and the public.

Verena’s situation veers more in the cult/scam direction, I believe, because her father has tethered an ideological principle to his daughter’s stardom. He views her as a dissemination of salvation to the masses if only he can get sufficient publicity. It is a salvation mediated by him, controlled by him, his message because Verena herself lacks any real principles.

We hear this again and again throughout the novel, that Verena is docile and submissive. That she takes up whatever song flows into her mind and into her ear. It is one of the reasons Olive stakes such an intense claim over her. She would like to remove Verena, impressionable as she is, from the harmful influence of the Tarrants. The Tarrants would like to use Olive to get Verena into the good society so that they may climb up after her.

And in this way, the two factions are in a kind of war over her though at this moment in the novel, only Olive is aware that they are at war.

But to return to the idea of marriage here at the end, I would like to say that much of marriage is echoed in the structures of this conflict. Olive’s proposal. Her plan to totally own Verena. Mrs. Tarrant trying to set Verena up with a partner of good fortune and good reputation. Mr. Tarrant trying to set her up for a bold future. It’s almost as if James is unspooling all of our ideas and expectations contained in the idea of marriage and laying them out before us, asking of each thread, what does this really mean, how does this really function, what is at the bottom of this?

I think also, this suite of sixty or so pages in the book contains some of his finest irony and commentary. Also, we find really shocking parallels to our own time.

Okay! That’s all my gay marriage thoughts for this part of The Bostonians. I might write another post next week.

B