"Damnable feminization"?: The Merchant Ivory film adaptation of Henry James's The Bostonians

Those critics who have seen Olive's and Verena's statements about equality and oppression merely as comic fodder for James are reading their own contempt for the women's movement into the novel. They also miss the fact that James equates Basil's and Olive's political sensibilities: they are both very conservative. When Basil rails at the "damnable feminization" of his age, with its "reign of mediocrity" (327), he sounds amazingly like Olive when she wishes for the age to become more feminized, "to make it feel and speak more sharply" after an epoch of laxity and demoralization (141). The core of The Bostonians is the epic struggle between two strong wills, two opposing sets of beliefs, but the opposition of Basil and Olive can be read as a case of extremes nearly meeting. The defining categories of masculinity and femininity are called into question: each character protests the same moral looseness in society but assigns the blame to the opposite gender.

Ivory provides us with several clues which aid in the simultaneous identification and opposition of Basil and Olive. In casting Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve, he surely took into account the considerable physical height of each, Redgrave's regal grandeur and Reeve's masculine power. The first scene of the film, showing Basil's and Olive's heads in stark outline against a black background in a carriage, sets the scene for a classic struggle of two large personalities. In casting Madeleine Potter, who appears in this film to be neither particularly beautiful nor brilliant, as Verena Tarrant, Ivory downplays the romantic impetus of the story. This coheres with James's presentation of Verena as somewhat vulgar and insipid. The polemical bent would have been quite different had someone like Helena Bonham-Carter, who has served Merchant Ivory so gorgeously in their E.M. Forster adaptations, been cast as Verena. Vanessa Redgrave's persona is the decisive factor in Ivory's adaptation. Her own revolutionary fervor informs her role as Olive Chancellor, and in allowing the film to climax so dramatically on her quivering and moving public address, the filmmakers ultimately affirm a feminist message, even though they have earlier retained some of James's criticisms of Bostonian feminism.

In addition to the opposition (or intersection) of masculine and feminine, of conservatism and radicalism, in The Bostonians James is concerned with the interplay and/or irreconcilability of a number of other binaries. Primary among these sub-themes is the argument between the personal and the public, particularly as it relates to the appropriate place of women, but more generally referring to the genuinely troubling problem of what role sexuality should play in everyday life. There is also the tension between the North and the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, as well as a consideration of the class issue (Basil is impoverished and bitter; Olive is independently wealthy). Ivory touches on these tensions, but settles on two other sets of binaries which broaden and universalize these debates. The screenplay adds a scene in which Verena's father, a faith healer, instructs a sick woman to chant "I am the child of reason." Here Ivory and Jhabvala emphasize the tension between reason and emotion which underlies Verena's situation. She is a natural, elemental creature who is moulded and manipulated by two camps which each wield, variously, feeling and rationality as weapons.