9 - The Bostonians and the human voice

Summary

A voice, a human voice, is what we want.

Olive Chancellor's cry for ‘a human voice’ comes just before Verena Tarrant is about to give her address in Miss Birdseye's apartment which will enthrall and captivate – in different ways – both Olive and her Southern cousin, Basil Ransom, and duly precipitate the action and struggles of the novel. The question of her ‘voice’ – its appropriation and development, its muffling and silencing – is central to the book, and this in turn opens up problems of rights and abilities of utterance, articulation, discourse, publication – speech and writing – in general, which are not only peculiarly pointed and relevant to the period of American history about which James was writing (the 1870s), but part – a central part – of a contestation and struggle which are endemic to our, and arguably any, society. It is a matter not only of who ‘has a voice’ – who holds the pen, who holds the floor – in society, but more searchingly of what is a voice, ‘a human voice’? It is because this is a matter of profound and permanent importance that I think James's novel about a group of Boston feminists in post-Civil-War America is as alive and urgent (and instructive) for us today as it was for his (mostly unappreciative) contemporaries.