women histories, incest sexual abuse. institutionalized. But what if ...

film THE
Back in the seventies, I
wrote an appreciation of
Henry James' The Bostonians, that
classic tale of feminism versus male
supremacy set in nineteenth-century bluestocking
Boston. At stake was the heart and
mind of pliable, pearly-voiced Verena; ba1>
tling to possess her were the spinster suffragette
(and man-hater) Olive Chancellor
and the charmingly paternalistic Southern
gentleman Basil Ransom. In this mortal
showdown between pinched but passionate
female righteousness and male gallantry
seething with violence, James' novel eerily
foreshadowed some of the tensions within
the twentieth-century women's movement.
In response to the piece I received an angry
letter from a prominent feminist novelist,
who didn't so much object to my take on the
book as to my enthusiasm for James himself,
whom she found irrelevant, apolitical,
and too restricted in his choice of subjects.
James can hardly be accused of
ivory-tower elitism: he was a keen observer
of social strata and manners, and could be
overtly "political" when he wanted to be (The
Princess Cassamassima, about revolutionary
politics, the occult, fanaticism and radical
chic in London, is as immersed in issues
and -isms as anything in Dreiser or Zola).
In The American Scene, James poked restlessly
around the immigrant quarters of
New York and Ellis Island. In almost all of
his novels, and specifically in Washington
Square and The Wings of the Dove, which
have been made into splendid new movies,
there are excursions into the seedier sections
of New York and London respectively,
and into the lives of characters either
perched perilously on the last rungs of
respectability or fallen off the ladder altogether.
I think what my letter writer meant
was that James wasn't a radical reformer,
wasn't a polemicist for equal rights, as she
herself was. At that time of maximum fervor,
you were either at the barricades or you
were branded as an enemy
winter 1998 - 56
WOMEN OF HENRY JAMES
by
Molly Haskell
It seemed hard, to me, that James
should be accused of political inadequacy
given the fact that there have been few
writers, male or female, who took such a
consuming interest in women, or gave
themselves over so thoroughly to probing
the minute workings and psychological
breadth of a woman's sensibility. His view of
women was conflicted, to be sure, and he
possessed some of the condescension
toward the "weaker sex" with which he
invests Austin Sloper, father of Catherine,
in Washington Square. That small jewel of
a book, first made into a stage play, The
Heiress (1947), by Ruth and Augustus
Goetz, then a memorable movie (1949) of
the same name directed by William Wyler
and starring Olivia de Havilland, has been
brought vividly, and with some striking differences,
to the screen by Polish director
Agnieska Holland (Muropa, Europa and
My Secret Garden). At the heart of both productions
is the struggle between the father
and his daughter over whether the latter
will or will not marry the handsome Morris
Townsend, a fortune hunter whose intentions
are apparent to all but the simple and
besotted Catherine. But it is precisely
Sloper's underestimation of his daughter,
and all women, that is confounded in the
end. James, though a creature of his times
and an inheritor of his father's very traditional
views of women, has managed to get
underneath the smug veneer of the patriarchy
(here shown, as in The Bostonians, in
its most appealing form), and to subvert it
through the moral heroism of a lonely and
unprepossessing woman.
The astonishing thing is just how
unprepossessing Catherine is, as if James
had accepted a dare to create a character
wholly without charms, without beauty,
without compensating wit or intelligence,
without even cultural curiosity, a little
loud in her dress, too physically robust to
be alluring in the prescribed feminine
way...and then bring us round,
making us not only respect Catherine but
love her.
Olivia de Havilland in the Wyler
version, and Cherry Jones in the recent
Broadway revival, played Catherine as
plain but strikingly self-possessed, statuesque
in her pride, a figure who rises fairly
rapidly to defeat both father and suitor in
a feminist revenge play
Jennifer Jason Leigh, on the other
hand, in Holland's riskier and sometimes
farcical version, is roly-poly and a stumblebum
from the beginning, panting for her
father's affection and only dimly aware of
his disdain. In one questionable scene, a fat
child actress, dressed garishly, plays a
young Catherine who embarrasses herself,
excruciatingly, by peeing on the floor when
asked to sing at a birthday party
Holland's choices, which make the
story more physical, more
palpable, may not please
purists, but they assuage
some of the pain through
humor, or express it in convulsions
of violence: Catherine's
beloved mother dying in child-1
birth, leaving husband and child bereft and
isolated; the adult Catherine falling to the
ground in a paroxysm of grief over the
departing Morris. Jennifer Jason Leigh,
whose career threatened to run aground in
mannerisms of dysfunction, gives the performance
of a lifetime. Her gradual trans-