Narrative Time and Anti-Queer Prejudice in Henry James’s The Bostonians

Abstract

Recent critics provide compelling accounts of Olive Chancellor’s unprecedented queerness in The Bostonians. Where these accounts tend to focus on how James approaches Olive as a type, they often leave unexplored the full force of both Basil and the narrator’s prejudice in shaping Olive’s representation. This essay re-orients the discussion to the novel’s narratological structure and examines how James frames the politics of her sexual difference through a prejudicial narrator who erases sympathetic portrayals of Olive’s difference. James responds to dangers that queers faced in participating in public social life and offers narrative strategies by which to read Olive sympathetically. The essay offers a reconsideration of formal practices in narratology and queer theory and suggests that The Bostonians provides important context for reading queer narrative style at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.