Olive's View Of Verena In The Awakening

So Olive is like those who have recently entered Gnosis; she is “full of impatience; [she] wants immediate phenomenal manifestations, instantaneous astral projections, illumination, wisdom ... etc” (Weor, Perfect Matrimony 85). Whereas the Christian sees salvation in the next world, the Gnostic sees salvation in this present world. Eric Voegelin sees that the Gnostic man “no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the universe. For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape” (Voegelin 8-9). In Olive’s view Verena is a good and decent creature on whom she is able to influence easily especially Verena is still young (eighteen years). This wrong understanding of Verena causes Olive to be “haunted...
He sees that woman’s feeling should be directed towards being passive and private and to leave publicity to the tougher sex of men. This view reflects that Basil is conservative who holds stoicism and chivalry in the highest regard and at the same time his view contrasts the feminist view of liberation. He is like a stoic who is able to endure pain and suffering without complaining and who does not give any consideration for the stupid things in this world that most people care so much about. He believes that the age in which he lives is “talkative, querulous, hysterical, maudlin, and full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs, of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in store” (James, Bostonians 189-90). Basil naturally includes the women’s rights movement in the more hysterical categories of the
But women are always attracted to heroes. And though he is poor and has met no wider success in life, Basil Ransom is heroic. He is heroic in his self-confidence, his certainty and his defiance of the spirit of radical democracy. In her book Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia sees that Basil is an eminent character among James' male protagonists in being "a virile hero" (Paglia 611). Paglia’s opinion of Basil's virility can be linked to the concept of patriarchy, whereas her assessement of Olive is that she is "an irritable political ideologue whose summery Cape Cod has no connection to dangerous chthonian nature" (Paglia