Transformations

N HIS RECENT BOOK Novelists in Changing World, Donald Stone has shown how the careers of Meredith and James during the i88o's demonstrate the breakup of the Victorian era, Meredith's novels celebrating harmoniously integrated society after it no longer existed, and James's emphasizing the individual rather than his relation to larger social unit.1 Novelists in Changing World is very discriminating study, but its discussion of The Bostonians in the single context of the English Victorian novel to me to slight James's American literary background, and in particular to disregard Hawthorne's important influence on the novel. Stone remarks that James had intended very American tale in theme, but a distinctly Victorian novel in style. To support his argument, he points out the use, unusual for James, of an omniscient narrator who frequently intrudes on his narration, sometimes to look into character's mind, or to admit that he does not know what character is thinking; and of James's apparently closed ending that was more acceptable to an English audience than his previously open ones. He points out, also, that James's satire in the novel has quality, judgment with which one would be inclined to agree, particularly in James's depiction of the group at Miss Birdseye's apartment, Dickensian regulars, as Stone calls them, who seem to preexist rather than to develop in the manner of James's more usual characters. Mrs. Tarrant, whose brain succumbs to vapors of social ambition is especially Dickensian. (Stone does not mention-although he might well have-the lady librarian, an exemplar of Boston, whose name is Miss Catching.) He goes on to say that the novel's heroine, in her passivity, seems derived from Trollope's heroines, surely conclusion he would not have reached

Art · Literature · Romance · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• The Reader Who Likes a Complete Image’ vs. ‘The Arbiter of Destinies’

  Open Access•Anne-Claire Le Reste•Comparative Critical Studies•2007

  Add to list