The Bostonians is almost like an allegory of the battle of the sexes. Olive the feminist and Basil the male supremicist engage in a battle of ideology, the battleground being Verena’s heart and mind. Despite Verena’s long indoctrination into feminism by Olive, Verena abandons her feminist commitments to surrender to Basil, a man she knows to be an unabashed anti-feminist. By the end of the novel, it appears that Basil has been right to think that an instinct to exist for nothing but a man’s love would prove to be the most natural and powerful force in Verena’s feminine nature, despite the superficial overlay of feminist ideology.

“The deepest feeling in Ransom’s bosom in relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage’s. She was profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex (what sex was it, great heaven? He used profanely to ask himself), would be relegated to the land of vapors, of dead phrases.” (339)

Basil wins, Olive loses and true love triumphs over unnatural ideologies. To readers who had managed to ignore the red flags about Basil and to miss the irony with which he is treated, that kind of reading might seem very plausible. They still might be forced to reinterpret the novel, however, when they read the last two lines of the book.

“But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not to be the last she was destined to shed.” (464)

Those last two sentences should be the final tip-off that this story is not an allegory about the triumph of red-blooded American manhood over evil feminism.

Although many aspects of the fictional world of The Bostonians are presented as being negative, that does not necessarily mean that their opposites are positive. It is a world in which nothing is trustworthy. Olive is satirized at the beginning of the novel when her sister Mrs. Luna says, “A radical? She’s a female Jacobin – she’s a nihilist. Whatever is, is wrong, and all that sort of thing….” (06) Olive’s view, however, comes close to being James’s narrative perspective. Whatever is, always has something wrong with it.

In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel was a carrier of values like freedom and expansiveness and self-fulfillment. Although the values that were linked with her were shown to be easily thwarted, they were never rejected by James. Isabel’s power to express her values in action may have dwindled, but the values themselves did not dwindle. In The Bostonians, by contrast, there is no character who is linked with “the good values”. There are no absolutes at all to serve as measures. The novel is close to an absurdist play, because it presents grotesqueries opposed to other grotesqueries. We are not invited to turn from one thing to another; we are just invited to turn and turn and turn. In this sense, The Bostonians is an already-deconstructed system of signs.

This begins when we are introduced to Mrs. Luna and Olive at the beginning of the novel. A smile on Olive’s face may look like “a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison (08),” and she may dress “as if she were got up for a sea-voyage (09)”; but Mrs. Luna has curls that look “like bunches of grapes (06),” her bodice is so tight it seems to crack with her vivacity, and her gloves are so long they look like stockings. One sister refuses to construct herself as an object of male desire or as a display of wealth; the other sister tries all too hard to do both. Both of their appearances earn the disgust of our male conneisseur and consumer, Basil.

Their political views and their ways of expressing them are similar to their appearances. This is demonstrated in one scene in which Mrs. Luna tries too hard to tell Basil how much she agrees with his ideology, but only achieves a comic effect.

“She could see by the way he talked that he was a conservative, and this was the motto inscribed upon her own silken banner. She took this unpopular line both by temperament and by reaction from her sister’s “extreme” views, the sight of the dreadful people they brought around her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that ‘the good old families’ would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated these topics (her treatment of them struck him as highly comical), for the purpose of leading him to the altar, of beguiling the way.” (198)

Mrs. Luna is certainly not one of the women Basil complains about to Verena when he censures modern old maids who don’t try to be marriageable (345).

Olive, on the other hand, doesn’t put on appearances of sociability when she thinks she must defend her principles. She is suspicious of any congeniality with Basil after she gets to know him, fearing that friendliness to him might require her to sell out in some small way, and no way is too small to fight over. When she meets Basil at Mrs. Burrage’s house before one of Verena’s speaking engagements, she comically bursts out with dramatic accusations in response to the mundane things that Basil says.

“…she asked him about his mothers and sisters, what news he received from the South. ‘Have they any happiness?’ she inquired, rather as if she warned him to take care not to pretend they had. He neglected her warning to the point of saying that there was one happiness they always had – that of having learned not to think about it too much, and to make the best of their circumstances. She listened to this with an air of great reserve, and apparently thought he had wished to give her a lesson; for she suddenly broke out, ‘You mean that you have traced a certain line for them, and that’s all you know about it.’

Ransom stared at her, surprised; he felt, now, that she would always surprise him. ‘Ah, don’t be rough with me,’ he said, in his soft Southern voice; don’t you remember how you knocked me about when I called on you in Boston?’

‘You hold us in chains, and then, when we writhe in our agony, you say we don’t behave prettily!’ These words, which did not lessen Ransom’s wonderment, were the young lady’s answer to his deprecatory speech. She saw that he was honestly bewildered and that in a moment more he would laugh at her, as he had done a year and a half before…” (258, 259)

Basil seems here like a gentle Southerner who is being unfairly attacked by a feminist with a persecution complex, and so he is. We know from James’s exposition of Basil’s inner thoughts, however, that Olive is accurate even though the context in which she expresses her accusations makes them absurd.

“…it was not merely a humorous idea with him that whatever might be the defects of Southern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for their chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could pronounce that word with a perfectly serious face.

This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that women were essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tiresome when they declined to accept the lot which men had made for them. He had the most definite notions of their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy in his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper homage. The chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity. He admitted their rights; these consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and tenderness of the stronger race. The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage for both sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women were gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a higher conception of politeness than most of the persons who desired the advent of female law-makers. When I have added that he hated to see women eager and argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched a state of mind that will doubtless strike many readers as painfully crude.” (197, 198)

It is part of the deconstruction of gender-linked values in this novel that, although Basil will pay homage to women for being feminine, he has great contempt and fear of femininity (or what he conceives of as femininity). This is revealed in a conversation with Verena.

“…I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the night, that there is is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is – a very queer and partly very base mixture – that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!” (343)

Several ironies can be pointed out about this speech. First, Basil is criticizing exactly the kind of femininity that Verena has, a femininity that he would like to appropriate for his own private enjoyment. Second, the line about daring, enduring, and facing the ugly facts of reality could describe Olive very well (although Olive is also self-deluding in some ways). Third and most importantly, the speech reveals the lack of absoluteness of femininity-linked values. That is significant, because those values are the measurements used by men to judge women. If a woman does not consider it a positive standard for herself anymore, there is no reason for her to measure herself by it anymore. To criticize femininity is to contribute to the destruction of gender-linked values in the fictional world of The Bostonians.

James has rendered all the old signs that were used to make gender-sense out the world a chaos in which A can be A and not-A at the same time. There is nothing to turn to in this fictional world as a positive absolute. That may be what some critics mean when they write that The Bostonians is about deteriorating sex-roles or the corruption of the feminine principle. I would argue instead that it presents a deconstructive flux of various gender-linked values associated with various characters, all of them paradoxical. The implication is that both the old and the new, the feminine and the male supremicist, are absurd. There is no hope offered for Verena and her sisters. There is nothing for Verena except double-binds within the terms of the novel.