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

More importantly, Ivory underlines the related theme of essentialism, or naturalism, versus human construction. This is seen in the careful visual composition of the pivotal New York scenes at the center of the film. While Olive is trapped indoors in an ornate, synthetically floral parlour, Basil woos Verena in a gazebo of natural wood twisted into a tortuous man-made structure. The film cuts between the two settings, emphasizing the various constructions of femininity available for Olive and Verena. Basil tells Verena that she is "made for love, for him." The imagery undercuts the assumed naturalness of Basil's position.

The Bostonians strikes a careful balance between translating James's intentions into terms with which the filmmakers personally agree and allowing some of James's fascinating ambivalence toward his subjects to remain. Christopher Reeve's Basil is charming, manipulative, sexy, villainous; Vanessa Redgrave's Olive is coldly obsessive and tenderly vulnerable, someone who does appear to give Verena more freedom than Basil might, but who nevertheless bought her from her father and closely directs her life.

Regarding the romantic aspect of the plot, it is intriguing that Ismail Merchant has stated that he believes the theme of The Bostonians to be the same as that of Maurice, made three years later-that of homosexual love (Ivory 16). Nonetheless, to Ivory and Jhabvala, The Bostonians is primarily a tale of warring personalities contesting the ownership of a human spirit, and secondarily a tale of feminism and lesbian love. Both films in any case provide a necessary corrective to a canon which has silenced women and homosexuals.

When Olive and Verena embrace, it is as if the women are trying to coin a new language of embrace. They approach each other delicately, almost diagonally. In contrast, Basil and Verena grasp each other conventionally, straight-on. Ivory presents Olive's approach as a necessary revision of the trappings of romantic love, not as a perverse or abnormal version of heterosexual love. The film's addition of Verena singing a verse of Poe's "Annabel Lee" is an interesting accent on James's ambivalent attitude toward the relation between the two women. In hearing Verena sing of the child-like state of "our kingdom by the sea," we wonder if their relation is not somehow half-formed or immature; yet the line "we loved with a love that was more than love" encourages us to see their affection as important and genuine. Finally, the music from Parsifal, which accompanies some of their scenes together, allows for the possibility of seeing them as Grail knights.

Ivory's more explicit conclusion to The Bostonians invites our support for Olive and encourages a tragic reading of Verena's conquest by Basil. James's own dramatic conclusion has been astonishingly ignored or mishandled by several generations of literary critics, and the Merchant/Ivory film is a welcome and intelligent corrective to a traditional misreading of Henry James and provides a long overdue feminist appreciation of The Bostonians.