Abstract
There is a term missing from the chapter title. It is ‘publicity’: the world of spectacle, promotion, advertisement, calculation and construction of desire, which may be taken as characteristic of the industrial and marketing shifts graphing the consumer culture that began to structure American ways of seeing in the 1870s. The terms the title does contain are those which are most threatened by ‘publicity’, and some of the ways in which that threat is manifested in The Bostonians will be suggested.1
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Notes and References
This is not to deny that Verena herself is somehow innocent of active participation in publicity’s manipulations (see Alfred Habegger, ‘The Disunity of The Bostonians’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24, 1969, p. 207;
David Howard, ‘The Bostonians’, in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, ed. John Goode, London: Methuen, 1972, p. 72;
Susan L. Mizruchi, ‘The Politics of Temporality in The Bostonians’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction ,40, 1985, p.209), but it is to argue for her vacuousness as spectacle and as character in the sense of novelistic realism.
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 34.
‘The Art of Fiction’, Literary Criticism. Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp.50, 52.
‘Alphonse Daudet’, Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel, New York: The Library of America, 1984, pp. 247–8)
Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), Vol.III, pp.59–60.
Ruth Evelyn Quebe, ‘The Bostonians: Some Historical Sources and Their Implications’, The Centennial Review, 25, 1981, pp.82, 88). Of course such usurpations and separations are important for the novel, but the point is that they tell only part of the story which, in its most interrogative exercise, is to question how they came about.
T.J. Jackson Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertizing and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930’, The Culture of Consumption, ed. R.W. Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York, Pantheon Books, 1983), p.8. Lears’s analysis of the way in which the ‘decline of autonomous selfhood lay at the heart of the modern sense of unreality’ (pp.7–11) is the best succinct summary I know of amongst recent accounts of the subject.
Concise overviews of the deceit of advertisements are provided by Lears, ‘From Salvation to Self-Realization’, pp.21–2, and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang), 1982, pp. 138–9.
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© 1991 Ian F. A. Bell
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Bell, I.F.A. (1991). The Personal, the Private and the Public. In: Henry James and the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08056-4_7
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