A. Mesmer (1734-1815)—and the occult shook fashionable society and intellectual circles. Seances—group meetings during which participants try to communicate with the spirits of the dead—abounded. The novelist’s brother William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, maintained a belief in spiritualism throughout his life and hoped to continue his researches beyond the grave. He asked his wife to attempt to contact him after he was dead, and she did try, but in vain. On another occasion, however, without his widow present, William was reported to have spoken from the other side. When Henry received news of the phantom voice, he called it “the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish” (Edel, Henry James: A Life, p. 670). Then, as now, vegetarianism was in vogue among the forward thinking, but the enlightened fell for other health fads as well. A number of the Transcendentalists became enamored of Fletcherism, an eating practice devised by the nineteenth-century nutritionist Thomas Fletcher that encouraged chewing food into a liquid mush before swallowing. Henry, Jr., took up the cause for a while and masticated with such vigor that William, a nonbeliever, blamed Fletcherism for Henry’s myriad bowel troubles.

If contemporary readers find these beliefs and ideas remote, I ask them to pause and reconsider. We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country from California to New York, of channeling, colonies, crystals, and raw-food crazes. In the United States, utopian quests for purity, perfection, and self-improvement, no matter how wacky, have always found fertile ground in which to flourish. The question remains, however: Why did Henry James describe the lively intellectual climate (with its admittedly nutty fringes) of Boston and its environs as “arid” and “vacuous”? James felt that American culture was simply too young and too thin to sustain him as an artist. He was continually pulled by the lure of Europe, by its old and visible history—its architecture, painting, ruins, and, of course, its literature.

For James, the single most important American writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He read and loved Hawthorne’s books as a youth, and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two would never be dissolved. Hawthorne, a sublime storyteller who criticized both American Puritanism and utopianism in his fiction, became the American literary precedent for James. When he woke up on May 19, 1864, to the news that the great American novelist was dead, the young Henry James sat on his bed and wept. Like most literary sons, however, he was critical of the father, and when writing about Hawthorne, he articulates his ambivalence about American fiction:

But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has widely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognizes, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance (Literary Criticism, vol. 1, p. 320).

However shallow James may have found American literary soil, he acknowledged that Hawthorne sprouted from it, and The Bostonians owes a debt to the older writer’s work, The Blithedale Romance in particular, which was inspired by Hawthorne’s brief, discontented participation in Brook Farm, Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist-Fourierist experiment in communal living. In his essay “Brook Farm and Concord,” James quotes the words of the skeptic Coverdale from Hawthorne’s utopian romance: “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from the old standpoint” (Literary Criticism, vol. 1, p. 387). It is a sentence that speaks directly to The Bostonians—not to any particular character, but to the effect of the narrative as a whole, which unearths its truths through the continual push and pull of people and ideas that find themselves in rigid opposition.

In the novel, two ideologies and two people are pitted against each other. In its simplest terms, the book presents us with a conflict between a reformer and a reactionary, between a triumphant North and a defeated South, between a woman and a man. The Bostonians is a novel of ideas, but the ideas articulated by James’s two battling characters, who are also distant cousins—Ohve Chancellor, a Boston spinster and champion of women’s rights, and Basil Ransom, a bitter archconservative from Mississippi—are not the ideas the book probes.