In perhaps the most climactic moment of The Bostonians, Henry James's 1886 novel of feminist agitation and tragicomic love triangles, Basil Ransom, having successfully snagged Verena Tarrant away from at once Olive Chancellor, the suffrage movement, and a life on the public stage, does not watch Olive as she contemplates replacing Verena by herself ascending the stage to face the increasingly mob-like crowd at the Boston Hall she had rented for her protégée's entrée into the public eye. Writes James,

Olive is imagined here as at once martyr and virago, poised to face the public rather than an onslaught of bullets, or, rather, about to face the hissing crowd as if it were an onslaught of bullets, the scenes melting into, or altogether overwhelming, one another. But what to make of the strange slippage here between mounting a platform and a barricade? For the connection is not quite as off-hand, or as strictly metaphorical, as James's conditional tense implies. While the plurality of the reference – summoning any, all Paris revolutions – dispels its curious particularity, the figure of the “feminine firebrand” nevertheless quite strikingly conjures one of the most terrifying remainders of the Paris Commune – namely, the figure of the female petroleum-thrower or pétroleuse laying waste to the city, even as it points to the way that this figure so often haunted that of the suffragist in the late nineteenth-century American imaginary: