IDENTITY AS ALTERITY IN THE BOSTONIANS:
IDENTITY AS ALTERITY IN THE BOSTONIANS:

Summary/Abstract: The Bostonians was read either as the reconstruction of Basil Ransom’s masculinity, by Leland Person, or as an image of the South, by Aaron Shaheen, as a show of “masculine rivalry” by David Kramer, or as Henry James’s view of the Civil War and Post, by Susan Ryan. Its discourse was analyzed both as the Boston marriage – lesbianism – that is, an alternative to the masculine world, by Kathleen McColley, and in terms of its “sympathy” towards each of the three main characters, by Michael Kearns. To all these interpretations, this paper tries to add an analysis of the way in which Henry James constructs Verena Tarrant’s identity as perceived by the other characters in the story, as ambiguous, as both mainstream, through her whiteness and apparent freedom as a public speaker, and as a social and an ethnic “other” – through her parents and her aspect – an “other” turned into a “white slave.” The focus is on two moments that I find to be most relevant in this sense: her appearance at Miss Birdseye’s feminist meeting, and her staying with Olive until she leaves the Music Hall with Basil Ransom. The first part of the paper deals with her family background and her physical description,in an attempt to understand her ethnic origins, which are never clearly expressed. In the second part I show her resemblance with the black slave characters in two important writings before the Civil War – Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Truth’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth – and I compare both Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom to traditional white slave masters. I write the term “white slave” between inverted commas to define a character who is neither completely white, nor black, but whom I see as being constructed after the pattern of a (former) black slave, without the writer actually stating it.

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