Olive Chancellor later concludes that Basil has determined to destroy Verena's powers of utterance " because he knew that her voice had magic in it " ; he can be motivated only by " devilish malignity " ( B , p. 364) .sx Half-borrowing Coleridge's famous phrase , she imagines Ransom as a kind of Iago .sx Ransom is no more merely an Iago than he is an Othello ( though he thinks of himself , like Othello , as " unhoused " ( B , p. 14 ) , and his first name connotes royalty ) , nor is he simply the portrait of a father .sx One might say that he is the spectre incarnate of an outsize , excess manliness , a super-man .sx Of course Othello is not a specific source for this novel , in the usual sense of the word .sx When we read of Miss Birdseye that " Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone " ( B , p. 24 ) , we are not being encouraged to identify her with Othello .sx But echoes from the play are diffused throughout James's writings , and certain aspects of it particularly nourished his imagination .sx In some obvious thematic senses it is the most Jamesian of Shakespeare's plays , in its concern for the ways in which people can enter each other's inner worlds , for good and ill , the varying allure of psychic possession and trespass and betrayal .sx There is a striking passage in A Small Boy and Others in which James draws a distinction between the jealousy of which he believes his childlike self to have been free and the envy with which he believes it to have been consumed .sx He perpetually envied the being of others :sx " They were so other - that was what I felt; .sx .. " ( SBO , p. 101) .sx Iago would have understood James's fictional world .sx But this world , rife with Iagos as it is , draws richly and variously on Shakespeare's play .sx Othello especially fuelled James's creative anxieties about the charm of physical presence , the constitution of sexuality through and in the body and the voice .sx What is the measure of a man , of manliness - the presence of a " powerful , active , manly frame " such as Salvini displayed for all the world to see ( SA , p. 172) ?sx In a remarkable sequence in Notes of a Son and Brother we find James associating his own father with the powerful , active , manly frame of another famous nineteenth-century Othello , Edwin Forrest .sx The context is a series of loosely related anecdotes about his father's youth , a more rascally and 'Bohemian' youth than his son finds entirely credible .sx James remembers himself as a child asking his father to repeat the favourite story , " his most personal , most remembering and picture-recovering 'story' " ( NSB , p. 396) .sx The story is about the elder Henry's youthful return to Ireland to visit the family relations .sx He was a celebrity , but he was not so in his own right .sx He was eclipsed by the fascination of the Negro servant who accompanied him , but also and more importantly , he drew his fame from his own prodigious father , the Irish immigrant who had become a millionaire .sx Looking back to this grandfather's death in 1832 , the younger Henry James could identify with his youthful father - " I find myself envying the friendly youth who could bring his modest Irish kin such a fairytale from over the sea " ( NSB , p. 396) .sx The magic of tale-telling is always for James likely to rouse an echo of Othello , and it is a happy coincidence that an Irish maid called Barbara looms out of the mists of his father's romance .sx What kind of a past had his father enjoyed ?sx One of his early comrades had been Edwin Forrest , an actor whom the younger James had caught in his latter years , and whom he now recalls as a " rank barbarian " and " mighty mountebank " .sx Given that Othello was one of Forrest's most famous roles , it is unsurprising to find echoes of the play in the words " barbarian " and " mountebank " ( Othello , I. iii .sx 354 , and I. iii .sx 61) .sx More surprising is the recollection of his father's memory of calling on the great tragedian one morning to find him " fresh and dripping from the bath " , entering the room upside down , walking on his hands , " the result .sx .. of mere exuberance of muscle and pride and robustious joie de vivre " ( NSB , p. 400) .sx As with the Irish shenanigans , James recreates his father in a state of borrowed glory - drawing his identity from images of other manhoods , images of exoticism , of material success , of physical prowess .sx What or who speaks through the spell-binding 'frame' of a Salvini or a Forrest - or their female equivalents ?sx Through the bodies of a Basil Ransom and a Verena Tarrant ?sx These questions lie close to the heart of James's most troubled novel , and resonate through many of his others .sx We may guess that Salvini's Othello gave them a fillip in urging on James the different kinds of witchcraft that the human presence can exert and by which it can find itself possessed .sx The witchcraft of Othello's presence is not just a matter of his manly frame , but also of the stories he tells , of his voice as well as his body .sx Yet there is a fatal vulnerability in the nature of this power , dependent as it is on the thrill of presence , the risk , the exposure , the credulity and gullibility .sx Othello spoke urgently to Victorian readers and audiences , and to Americans experiencing the return of military heroes after the Civil War it could speak with some special nuances .sx When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr .sx came home wounded from the war , he found celebrity awaiting him , at least among a circle of admiring women .sx His father registered the impact made by his war-hero son with a certain ruefulness .sx I envy my white Othello , with a semicircle of young Desdemonas about him listening to the often told story which they will have over again .sx .sx Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr .sx could not have been the only non - combatant male to feel an envy for all the white Othellos returning from the war to entrance the young women .sx What position could a bystander assume in such a semi-circle ?sx Henry James became good friends with this particular war - hero , and together with another ex-soldier , he spent a month of the post-war summer of 1865 in North Conway in the company of his beloved cousin Minny Temple .sx In the elegy to Minny that forms the closing chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother , he wrote that " 'North Conway' .sx .. has almost the force for me of a wizard's wand " .sx It was not a semi-circle that he recalled , however , but a circle , " a little world of easy and happy interchange " ( NSB , pp .sx 506-7) .sx As the memory grows warm , he elevates the magical image to a 'Circle' - with Minny at its centre .sx James kept his eyes and ears open as the white Othellos enthralled their Desdemonas .sx Twenty years later , as he was working on The Bostonians , Grace Norton quizzed him on the prospects of his setting up in matrimony with the British female .sx James thanked her for the thought , but asserted robustly :sx " I shall never take that liberty with her and shall to a dead certainty never change my free unhoused condition " ( L3 , p. 54) .sx He would preserve his own liberty so that he could watch the Othellos losing theirs .sx In The American Mrs Tristram calls Christopher Newman " the great Western Barbarian " , and she warns him that Claire de Cintr e is " a supersubtle Parisian " ( AM , pp .sx 45 , 178) .sx This recalls Iago's shameful description of the " frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian " ( I. 3 .sx 354-5 ) , but the allusion passes over Newman's head .sx ( " Supersubtle " becomes such an integral element of James's vocabulary that he would have had to coin the word himself , had Shakespeare not obliged .sx ) The echo returns , with a vengeance , at the climax of Newman's recognition that the supersubtleties of the Bellegardes have robbed him of his selfhood :sx " He had nothing to do , his occupation had gone , had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life " ( AM , p. 529) .sx It is symptomatic that the wound with which he has long been associated should now begin to 'ache' again , as he faces the prospect of a complete self-abandonment .sx The passage in Othello on which James draws most frequently , however , is the scene before the Senate in which Othello justifies his marriage to Desdemona by re-telling the story of his life .sx Thinking of his time at Harvard Law School , for instance , James recalls Othello's phrase " the tented field " ( I. 3 .sx 85 ) to claim the precarious , even negative analogy between the scene of his own wound and the scene of civil war :sx " The Cambridge campus was tented field enough for a conscript starting so compromised; .sx .. " ( NSB , p. 417) .sx In a pregnant few pages in one of the Prefaces , he reflects on the virtues for the writer of giving indirect representation to " moving accidents and mighty mutations and strange encounters " ( LC2 , p. 1259) .sx James is thinking in particular of the fantastic , the supernatural or mystifying ( the passage bears closely on 'The Turn of the Screw') .sx The effect of these will fall flat unless they are represented by their effect on and refraction through some attendant , attentive consciousness .sx Three times in quick succession James recurs to Othello's phrase " moving accidents " ( I. iii .sx 134) .sx That scene before the Senate connotes for him the magic of a truly dramatic tale-telling , where the teller and his listeners and their mutual responsiveness are all necessarily on show .sx But the most favoured of all Othello's sayings is the one with which he triumphantly concludes his tour-de-force :sx " This only is the witchcraft I have used " ( I. iii .sx 168) .sx This clinchingly rebuts Brabantio's charge that his daughter could have been won only " By spells and medicines , bought of mountebanks " , by " witchcraft " ( I. iii .sx 61 , 64) .sx These words are vital to James's imagination - spells , charms , magic , witchcraft - as the following range of illustrations seeks to demonstrate .sx There is evidently more than one way to read Daisy Miller , but James wrote a detailed letter to Eliza Lynn Linton about his intentions for the tale , explaining the " keynote " of her character and her conduct .sx He concludes his defence of Daisy's innocence and his own " innocence " in creating her :sx " This is the only witchcraft I have used " ( L2 , p. 304) .sx There is a generous way of reading Daisy's character and conduct , and there is a suspicious way .sx Poor Winterbourne gets left as Iago .sx The wry self-assurance of Othello's great line is good for quelling suspicions and unmasking ungenerosity .sx In 1904 , as he prepared to cross the Atlantic for the first time in twenty years , James was irked by a letter from his brother William .sx Henry was planning to travel in the company of a Mrs Benedict and her niece , her sister and niece of Constance Fenimore Woolson .sx A decade earlier James had helped them in the melancholy business of sorting through Miss Woolson's effects after her suicide in Venice .sx James told his older brother :sx " As a lone and inexpert man I simply and naturally assented to that very kind proposal .sx ... But that is the only witchcraft I am using " ( L4 , p. 306) .sx No , he is not enthralled by women , nor seeking to enthrall them .sx The irritated and defensive tone can partly be explained by the scurrilous gossip that has reached William's ears .sx Henry is rejecting with scorn the rumour that he is engaged to be married to a certain Emilie Busbey Grigsby , who believed herself the look-alike of his own Milly Theale .sx There was no escaping from Venice , it seemed , from the malignant intrigues around sex and marriage .sx Indeed the whole letter brims with indignation at " this nightmare-world of insane bavardage " :sx It's appalling that such winds may be started to blow , about one , by not so much as the ghost of an exhalation of one's own , and it terrifies and sickens me for the prospect of my visit to your strange great continent of puerile cancans .sx Who and what , then , is safe ?sx ( L4 , p. 306 ) .sx It was as if Iago now ruled the world , the very spirit of newspaperism , of the gutter gossip that twenty years previously James had begun to excoriate in The Bostonians .sx