Ralph is no casual observer, no matter how he defines himself. Despite the fact that he, too, adores Isabel, Ralph is delighted by the parade of prospective bride-grooms at her door. Taking vicarious pleasure from his cousin’s flinging aside the fears and doubts usually ascribed to young women, Ralph believes that she will reject the men who offer their hands in marriage, and he eagerly awaits this spectacle. ‘‘He knew that she had listened to others,’’ remarks James,
but that she had made them listen to her in return; and he found much entertainment in the idea that, in these few months that he had known her, he should see a third suitor at her gate. She had wanted to see life, and fortune was serving her to her taste; a succession of gentlemen going down on their knees to her was by itself a respectable chapter of experience. Ralph looked forward to a fourth and a fifth soupirant; he had no conviction that she would stop at a third. She would keep the gate ajar and open a parley; she would certainly not allow number three to come in.
Watching Isabel as if she were on stage, Ralph applauds her emotional and intellectual improvisations with all the possessiveness of one of the show’s backers.
For her cousin, Isabel is an oasis of mystery in the desert of convention. This is a twist on the usual state of the lover, who typically desires complete knowledge of the beloved’s every thought, and who laments the barrier of the individual self that comes between them. For Ralph, however, Isabel comes to represent all the joys of a world still mysterious, of a future left open to conjecture. He watches the expression on her face and speculates on its meaning; he asks for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance, and she holds for Ralph the fascination of an unraveled destiny.
These comments bear directly on the structure of The Portrait of a Lady, which is characterized by the withholding, rather than the dissemination, of information. What is revealed to the reader is revealed through a complex labyrinth of emotional curves, swerves, turns, and dead ends. The story is set up like a maze, where the reader eagerly pursues one path that promises enlightenment, only to find the narrator undercutting what has just been read. It is as if a route taken by the reader ends in a blank wall so that the reader must make an about-face and retrace steps to seek again what is of importance. This complicated method for the disclosure of information must be foregrounded in any discussion of The Portrait of a Lady for one crucial reason: the central concern of the story itself is the revelation of information and the epistemology of truth. The way the novel is written, with its sudden turns and mysterious hints of what is to come, is in complete contradiction to the honesty insisted upon by many of its characters.
As the novel progresses, the now wealthy and well-traveled Isabel becomes deeply attracted to Gilbert Osmond, introduced by Madame Merle as a man having ‘‘no career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything. Oh yes, he paints, if you please. . . . His painting is pretty bad.’’ Osmond, like Dracula, sleeps much of the day, has no employment, but still manages to make people around him ‘‘feel that he might do something if he would only rise early.’’ Why is Isabel attracted to so unlikely a candidate for her affections?
In one sense, Isabel Archer can be seen as James’s ‘‘portrait of a lady as a young artist.’’ Isabel doesn’t paint or write, but at the beginning of the novel she views the blank canvas of her own future with what can only be regarded as an artistic vision. Believing that she is responsible for creating and crafting her own destiny, she thinks she picks up and puts down her fate the way a painter would a brush or a writer would a pen. Instead, the reader realizes that Isabel is not the creator of her own life.
But she is the creator of a fantasy about Gilbert Osmond. She holds in her mind, early on in their relationship, an image of him that is quite telling:
It seemed to tell a story—a story of the sort that touched her most easily; to speak of a serious choice, a choice between things of a shallow, and things of a deep, interest; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that it had been the main occupation of a lifetime of which the arid places were watered with the sweet sense of a quaint, half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood.
It is clear that Isabel has invented and projected whatever integrity, sincerity, and passion she sees in Osmond, much as a child projects personality and responsiveness onto a doll, or a painter creates something beautiful out of ugliness.
Clearly Isabel confuses imagination with desire. Drawn to Osmond because he represents much more than he actually offers, Isabel tries unconsciously to overlook his selfishness, his whining, as well as his lack of accomplishments, because she regards him as authoritative and powerful; she regards him as someone who has achieved independence. James suggests that Isabel’s image of Osmond springs directly from her imagination rather than from his actual nature: ‘‘It was not so much what he said and did, but rather what he withheld, that distinguished him; he was an original without being an eccentric.’’ Isabel, then, turns away the traditional and ‘‘nice’’ men who want her and finds someone whom she wants, someone whom she believes she is freely choosing. In marrying Gilbert Osmond, and in rejecting the men who offered her easier lives, Isabel believes she is carving out her own destiny. She sees herself as a heroine or, at the very least, regards her choice as heroic.
Ralph understands why Isabel would make such a choice, even though he can also see that it is disastrous for her.
She was wrong, but she believed; she was deluded, but she was consistent. It was wonderfully characteristic of her that she had invented a fine theory about Gilbert Osmond, and loved him, not for what he really possessed, but for his very poverties dressed out as honours. Ralph remembered what he had said to his father about wishing to put it into Isabel’s power to gratify her imagination. He had done so, and the girl had taken full advantage of the privilege. Poor Ralph felt sick; he felt ashamed.
The very reasons that cause Ralph to love Isabel will later cause Isabel to love Gilbert Osmond. Both Ralph and Isabel choose to act the same way in light of their own desires: they want to give money that is rightly theirs to the person who has most completely captured their imagination. They believe that by giving their money away they in turn will allow the other to grow and thrive. In both cases, they are wrong. Their tragedies are based on a matched set of misjudgments.
Osmond does not love what is best about Isabel, a fact that is not lost on Osmond’s sister. The Countess is sorry to see Isabel’s attraction to her brother because she is resigned to her brother’s effects on women: ‘‘Well, it is a pity she is so nice,’’ the Countess declared. ‘‘To be sacrificed, any girl would do. She needn’t be superior.’’ To attract Osmond in the first place, Isabel had almost unwittingly buried her superiority, ‘‘effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth.’’ In a way, therefore, honest Isabel was disingenuous. She pretended to be more ‘‘feminine’’ inasmuch as she pretended to be more submissive, more compliant, less intelligent, and have less integrity than she actually possessed. As for Osmond, ‘‘He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship. . . . But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man . . . she had mistaken a part for the whole.’’
Why doesn’t Isabel simply leave Osmond? When Henrietta asks the same question, Isabel replies, ‘‘I’m extremely struck . . . with the off-hand way in which you speak of a woman’s leaving her husband. It’s easy to see you’ve never had one!’’ Isabel does not stay with her husband because of the usual social pressures or because of some abstract idea of what is e
xpected of a woman in her position; she is quite willing to override convention. Isabel stays because of her commitment to the bond of her word, and she stays because she is unwilling to abandon what she still sees as a decision made out of her sense of independence. She married Osmond because she wanted to; she regards it as the representation of her will to choose and to not remain caged in someone else’s vision of her life.
Isabel tells herself that she must accept responsibility for her actions, even if she has blundered tragically.
It was impossible to pretend that she had not acted with her eyes open; if ever a girl was a free agent, she had been. A girl in love was doubtless not a free agent; but the sole source of her mistake had been within herself. There had been no plot, no snare; she had looked, and considered, and chosen. When a woman had made such a mistake, there was only one way to repair it—to accept it. One folly was enough, especially when it was to last forever; a second one would not much set it off. . . . She had said to herself that we must take our duty where we find it, and that we must look for it as much as possible.
She sees her marriage as evidence of her independence— but we know it is not. Sometimes in seeking to avoid our fate, wrote the philosopher Seneca, we leap to meet it. Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond because Madame Merle wants Pansy Osmond to have a better life than the one she was forced to lead. In this way Isabel’s ‘‘decision’’ to marry Osmond is rendered bankrupt. The text makes clear that Madame Merle has manipulated Isabel into marriage with the skill of a professional seducer: as if she, not Osmond, were to be the partner. As the novel progresses, we know that Isabel believes that she acts on the world, even as we see that she is acted upon. But she is not just acted upon: although she is chosen by Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle primarily for her fortune, she is also chosen for the richness of her character. The irony, of course, is that Osmond wants to deplete that character as soon as possible. He delights in the idea of reshaping Isabel: ‘‘If, however, she were only willful and high-tempered, the defect might be managed with comparative ease; for had one not a will of one’s own that one had been keeping for years in the best condition—as pure and keen as a sword protected by its sheath?’’
Yet Isabel maintains sufficient independence to break away at least temporarily from her marriage, ultimately choosing to be at Ralph’s deathbed than remain in the tomb (the name of the house is Italian for ‘‘black rock’’) that Gilbert Osmond has made their home. As Isabel faces the misery of her marriage, acknowledging that she has not been mistress of her own destiny, she also comes to understand that the groundwork for her present had been laid long in her past. It was not just her inheritance or Madame Merle’s machinations that forged her life. ‘‘It suddenly struck her that if her Aunt Lydia had not come that day in just that way and found her alone, everything might have been different. She might have had another life, and today she might have been a happier woman.’’
Clearly, even at the close of the novel, Isabel believes that the proper world for anyone, male or female, is the world of intelligence, of honest effort, of moral strength. Isabel’s grip on her image of her life slips through her fingers and scatters, like a drop of mercury splashing on the floor: elusive in the first place, now gone forever. Isabel stays with Osmond in part because of the force of habit, emotional exhaustion, fear of the mockery of others, and an unwillingness to believe that she has made a great mistake not only in her life but with her life.
Yet Isabel remains one of the sturdiest, strongest and most powerful heroines in any nineteenth-century novel, becoming more heroic in her ability to survive than most of her contemporary textual heroines are in their deaths. Compared to Isabel’s fierce and independent judgment, the wills of the other characters pale. Her ability to think for herself, coupled with her internal desire to do as much good as she might, sets her apart from the rabble of the European salons, and from the diluted heroines of lesser novels, who succumb to the evils of a world for which they are too good. Isabel does not sacrifice herself on the altar of social expectation or duty.
If the conventional plots offer heroines marriage or death, it is obvious that James is determined to script a new plot for Isabel. She is not, we imagine, going to fade into the background, a quiet martyr to her husband’s narcissism, or even a mere prop and guide for her stepdaughter, Pansy. Isabel’s story cannot be contained within the acceptable plot of resignation and unhappiness so familiar to the heroine who has made a failed marriage. Isabel does not surrender and she does not die.
It might be desirable to die; but this privilege was evidently to be denied her. Deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite for renunciation—was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost exhilarating, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength—it was a proof that she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be that she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet.
Independence for Isabel implies something she must react against or free herself from; freedom implies genuine choice, not only reactions born of the wish to choose. She struggles to come to terms with her life—all of it, not just the paths of which she is most proud. This, finally, marks the achievement of her true independence. At the end of the novel, and for the first time in the novel, Isabel Archer is free.
—Regina Barreca
1
UNDER certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. The persons concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony I have mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker-chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup, of a brilliant pattern from the rest of the set, and painted in brilliant colours. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house. His companions had either finished their tea or were indifferent to their privilege; they smoked cigarettes as they continued to stroll. One of them, from time to time, as he passed, looked with a certain attention at the elder man, who, unconscious of observation, rested his eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling. The house that rose beyond the lawn was a structure to repay such consideration, and was the most characteristic object in the peculiarly English picture I have attempted to sketch.
It stood upon a low hill, above the river—the river being the Thames, at some forty miles from London. A long gabled front of red brick, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of picturesque tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it, presented itself to the lawn, with its patches of ivy, its clustered chimneys, its windows smothered in creepers. The house had a name and a h
istory; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent, and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain; bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points, and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination, and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure. Besides this, as I have said, he could have counted off most of the successive owners and occupants, several of whom were known to general fame; doing so, however, with an undemonstrative conviction that the latest phase of its destiny was not the least honourable. The front of the house, overlooking that portion of the lawn with which we are concerned, was not the entrance-front; this was in quite another quarter. Privacy here reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior. The great still oaks and beeches flung down a shade as dense as that of velvet curtains; and the place was furnished, like a room, with cushioned seats, with rich-coloured rugs, with the books and papers that lay upon the grass. The river was at some distance; where the ground began to slope, the lawn, properly speaking, ceased. But it was none the less a charming walk down to the water.