The Peculiarity of Social Life: Reform and Gender

Abstract

James’s choice of reform as the substantial subject of publicity in The Bostonians bears strongly in mind the properly civic resonance of the dissociations discoverable in Emerson. For the wider issue of James’s historicism, we should remember that Emerson’s handling of the equation between private and public occurs in the context of that earlier period of radical commercial change during the 1830s and 1840s. This period had already provided a focus for James’s attention at the end of the 1870s when he chose it as the setting for the action of Washington Square and The Europeans, texts where (especially in the latter) again we find Emerson’s informative presence. The concerns with the changing nature of ideas about the self and with the fiscal instability that engage the main preoccupations of these novels are concerns which characterise the major shifts in the American economic history of the nineteenth century — the shifts from the sphere of accumulation to the sphere of reproduction where the latter begins its visible ascendancy towards the end of Reconstruction.