Possession and Personality: Spiritualism in The Bostonians

Abstract

EVERAL RECENT STUDIES of The Bostonians, by Henry James, have '3 stressed the importance of occult elements iin the novel. Such critics tend to take one of two tacks: either to examine the occult imagery for its own sake1 or to study the sources of the novel.2 In either case these critics demonstrate that in The Bostonians James was concerned with the kind of psychic phenomena with which his brother William dealt in the Society for Psychical Research. In fact, however, James's use of the occult is more central to the novel's theme than these critics have noted. If we take the occult imagery in The Bostonians seriously, three of the major criticisms that have been leveled against the novel evaporate: that Basil is not a good hero; that Verena is a great blob3 of a heroine; and that too much of the novel is taken up with matters extraneous to the story of Basil and Verena. For the simple story of a love affair between a hero and a heroine does not really stand at the center of the novel at all. What William James was really doing in his writings on the occult was revealing what psychical studies tell us about the manner in which the human operates here and now, in the natural world. Later, notably in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he was to clarify this process. This entire mind-process with which William James was concerned in his writings on the occult and in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the real subject matter of The Bostonians. Henry James shows here, as his brother had hinted and was later to demonstrate more explicitly, that the human is occupied by successive fields of energy, and that without these fields of energy, the word mind has no real absolute identity or meaning.