How Now, Voyager?
53
asking her Blessed Lord to offer guidance in her latest lesbian love quest. Gone
it would seem are the days of easeful authority wherein the Upper Cruster holds
and keeps the upper hand.
Yet this does not prevent the Proper Bostonian from becoming an iteration
that for us is indeed a sort of othered identification, and to use the Barthesian
lexicon Homi Bhabha fluidly employs, it is indeed a possessor of “mythic
prestige” redolent of a rich “symbolic consciousness” (Bhabha 70). And if we
follow Bhabha’s instruction, it follows therefore that we must desire the Other.
The ambivalence in this particular instance has a marvelous historical/literary
avatar in William Dean Howells, the Ohioan who made his pilgrimage to
Boston, but whose later relocation to Manhattan signaled the city’s descent from
Athens of America to banned-book-ridden backwater. Thenceforth, its denizens
might be perceived as having the romance of decay—something like decadent
Venetians perhaps. This also allows us to draw on Clifford Geertz’s construction
of the moment of comprehension of another culture as akin to getting a joke
(Local Knowledge 80). Yet we must also consider something beyond the facility
of decadence; recall the earlier, fundamental change in the culture of the city as
it was transformed from hotbed of rebellion prior to the American Revolution to
bastion of good taste and morals a century later. What is more, a place regarded
as the most “English” city in America—certainly that is the heart of Beebe’s
argument about the city’s culture—thereby we have seen Boston exchange the
rebel’s liberty cap for the epigone’s hat-in-hand, and foredoom itself to
secondary status even as it grasped the laurels.
Consider the opening sequence in Now, Voyager in which a series of shots
gradually take us inside the Vale mansion—impossibly located on Marlborough
St. in Back Bay. Impossible as this absurdly imposing edifice has a driveway,
lawn jockey, and the name “Vale” imposingly engraved in stone. (Features that
Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the film’s source, found laughable.) The camera
takes us inside to the well-drilled hustle and bustle of the household preparing
for the arrival of teatime guests—and one intruder. The servants settle down; all
is in readiness; the mise-en-scene holds it breath. This moment is shattered by
the tapping of a man’s pipe on a, no doubt, antique China vase. “Messy things
pipes, I like ’em” explains Dr. Jaquith to an unflappable footman. Claude Rains’
Jaquith is of course the intruding psychiatrist challenging instantly the decorum
and authority of Gladys Cooper’s Mrs. Henry Windle Vale. Now both
performers are British, but only one, Mrs. Vale, is a Proper Bostonian. She is as
stiff as he is rumpled, as distant as he is beckoning. The rigid reception she
grants him is a beautifully textured presentation of the Proper Bostonian
phenomenon of having “customs but no manners.”
Of course this phrase comes from Cleveland Amory, who surely had little
idea how important his text The Proper Bostonians would turn out to be