ABSTRACT
In this chapter we move to a specic gure, Mrs Adeline Luna, the sister of Olive Chancellor, heroine of The Bostonians. Olive’s sister is vitally important to James’s great, agonizing and insidiously funny novel. She is vital to its representational peculiarity and impact. She is also, within its labyrinths, the shrewdest yet most disempowered reader of representational impacts. She has complex and importantly contrastive roles to play in its construction of gender and of queer desire. Why, and how, do we disregard, deride and in some cases simply obliterate the powerful sibling gure and the powerful sibling bond, both of which are so crucial to this novel’s literary and cultural effects? Why does Olive Chancellor invite her Mississippi cousin to Boston? Ultimately both of these questions are connected with the writing of sibling love, how James’s readers respond to it and the cultural assumptions which permit it to be disregarded. Without sibling bonds queer attachment would not be visible or operative in this novel.
