Henry James's Southern Mode of Imagination: Men, Women, and the Image of the South in The Bostonians

Abstract

In addressing issues of "sectional reconciliation" between the North and South, James's The Bostonians does more than consider the changing notions of gender during the Gilded Age. The novel also meditates on how gender roles are related to a rapidly industrializing American landscape. Leaving rural Mississippi to find work in the urban Northeast, Basil Ransom is loath to abandon his aristocratic agrarian ideals. Because agrarianism was central to nineteenth-century forms of southern selfhood, Ransom attempts to "cultivate" the young suffragette Verena Tarrant into an embodiment of the South as a means of resuscitating his own masculinity.