올리브 챈슬러의 성장이야기: 『보스턴 사람들』

The Bostonians as a Growing-Up Story of Olive Chancellor

The feminist heroine Olive Chancellor of The Bostonians (1886) written by Henry James has been criticized as a negative character by many critics. Mostly such critics favored he hetero-sexual relationship between Basil Ransom and Verena Tarrant, calling their relationship ‘natural,’ while the intimate female friendship between Olive and Verena was denigrated as a ‘morbid’ or an ‘odd’ relationship. However, in this paper, I attempt to argue that this novel does not end as Basil’s victory over Olive simply because he succeeds in kidnapping Verena in order to stop her speech in front of the large audience of Boston in the Music Hall at the end of the work. Many critics declare that Basil triumphs in the Music Hall episode because he puts live in a fatal crisis. But I do not think this is true, and I instead read this book as Olive’s growing-up story in which she stands alone as a public speaker for women’s emancipation in the end. This paper finds that James may not have been on the side of Basil, as many critics have argued; rather, James may have presented Olive not only as a tragic heroine betrayed by her soul mate but also as a courageous heroine who finally overcomes her defects and becomes an independent speaker for the public.