Populism, privilege, and democracy in Henry James’s The Bostonians: encounters with community

Abstract

ABSTRACT Unusually for Henry James, The Bostonians (1886) addresses notions of “the people,” popular movements, and socio-political reform. Foregrounding the position of women, the narrative searchingly, if ambiguously, appraises conditions in the United States of the 1870s, following the Civil War. As Olive Chancellor (a Boston feminist) and Basil Ransom (a conservative Southerner) vie for possession of the malleable orator Verena Tarrant, the text explores the failure of “union” in both its personal and political senses. The populist-feminist rally concluding the narrative highlights the prevailing challenges to democratic possibilities. Community in its traditionally cohesive guise has metamorphosed into the “inoperative community” theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy. Mutually dependent, monadic “singularities” converge in tense encounter. “Community,” according to Roberto Esposito, inevitably separates such vulnerable “singularities” from themselves and others through the play of social relationality. The novel’s democratic orientation is nonetheless sustained by its capacious form and the hospitable engagement of its readers.