Before delving further, an outline of the plot would be helpful. The novel’s focus is Isabel Archer, an American woman visiting London, and her particular affectations (and affections) in navigating the world. Miss Archer is a deeply independent free-thinker, which (some might argue) problematizes the trajectory of her life. For instance, she continually turns down marriage proposals because she does not want to give up her life to others. While The Portrait of a Lady is largely a run-of-the-mill courtship and marriage novel in that respect, it’s the inversion of tropes that sets James’ novel apart.
The first surprising inversion is just how early and consistently marriage proposals are offered to Isabel and then when Isabel ultimately decides to marry Gilbert Osmond, who for all my money was the least likely candidate, James glosses over the courtship and rationale. For a book so committed to exploring the interiority of its characters, Isabel’s love of Osmond is given remarkably little attention. The most intimate and romantic moments in the book all occur with her other suitors—Caspar Goodwood, Lord Warburton, and, even her cousin Ralph Touchett, with whom she has debatably romantic moments. For someone so adamantly opposed to marriage to finally accept from the most banal candidate with no fanfare is a shocking turn in the book and it’s a perfect commentary on the mysterious internal forces that govern us. Not disclosing the love is one of James’ most radical moves in the book and my preference would actually be to remove the part a hundred pages later that retroactively justifies the marriage.
The next turn comes with the narrative focus of the novel. Following Isabel’s marriage, roughly halfway through the book, the focus moves away from her and shifts towards her step-daughter Pansy’s own courtship woes. The novel is much more about her suitors and her father’s response to them. Again, James pulls the rug from under us; unlike the marriage plots propounded roughly thirty years earlier through figures like the Brontёs, which were like Bildungsromans centered on a key figure’s life, James absconds with the plot of the book and hands it over to Pansy.
These moments of deviation from standard Victorian plots, in mind, speak to an early modernist ethic and hint at something more in James’ ambitions for the book. A moment ago, I suggested that James absconded with the plot and I use that phrase to attribute him a strange omnipresent quality on purpose. One of the other strange approaches of the book is that it is, for the most part, narrated from a third person omniscient perspective, sometimes excessively exploited to explore the interiority of characters. Yet, a few hundred pages in I started to notice more first person commentary cropping up. The narrator is ambiguous: sometimes a character’s innermost thoughts are revealed while later the narrator says something like “I cannot say” or “we cannot see” over a character’s shoulder while they read a letter. There is a blur of authorial construction, audience complicity, godlike powers, and so on. Imagine italics and all caps for the question “who is narrating this thing?!” I don’t know how significant these fast and loose narratological strategies James meant this to be, but it feels like a strangely subversive move.
Incidentally, the novel becomes more predictable as it wears on. Most chapters are pages of (overlong) interiority, analyzing all aspects of a character’s thought process followed by a few pages of dialogue. James then rinses and repeats. The pattern wears a little thin, but ultimately I think the book follows Brian Cox’s advice as Robert McKee in Charlie Kaufmann’s 2002 film Adaptation: “You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”
Surprising to me is that, especially early in the novel, the dialogue has a pseudo-philosophical quippy-ness that is the prototypical British register. I was going to suggest that James was drawing from the Wilde popularity of his contemporary Oscar, but it appears to me that most of Wilde’s works were staged after the publication of The Portrait of a Lady. What makes that even more peculiar and exciting to me is that Wilde is famously an aesthete who cares only for the finer things in life, which is the case for Isabel Archer’s husband Osmond, who is just the worst. In Wilde, the cleverness is an extension of his aestheticism. Here, the aesthete character is misaligned with cleverness, so it’s an odd disconnect that warrants further academic exploration in the many lives I don’t live.
On the topic of unlived lives, it’s painful to watch Isabel Archer’s life play out for the worse when so many other possibilities existed for her. In particular, her bond with her cousin Ralph is the most beautiful connection in the book. Ralph admires her spirit and when his father dies, he convinces him to leave her a significant amount of his wealth. In Ralph’s mind, it liberates Isabel. If she marries, he wants her to marry without a financial incentive, but he also doesn’t want her to know that he has made these arrangements for her because her independence will reject his support. The tenderness of Ralph’s care is beautiful, albeit ill-fated: having money is precisely one of the draws of Isabel for Osmond, who can expend her wealth adding to his collections. In my notes for the book, I wrote that I would have liked to have seen the fake inheritance storyline developed more fully. I wanted to see that confrontation, but the thread was unaddressed—like the rationale for marrying Osmond, like Isabel’s miscarriage. Ironically, the thread was picked up hundreds of pages later and it does form a central turn in the book when Isabel learns that Ralph had manipulated her fate.
Despite Ralph’s loving gesture backfiring, and despite him not really being a suitor to Isabel, their love was the most wonderful part of the book to me. To return to the idea of “wow[ing] them in the end,” the last act of the book is a tour de force. Ralph is dying back home in London (Isabel is living in Italy by this point) and she is determined to go see him before his death. Osmond forbids it, intimating that the split will be everlasting. Isabel thus steals away secretly and her goodbyes to the nunnery-ified Pansy are beautifully done. Before, she learns some other secrets that I won’t spoil, and while the particular revelations are a little lacklustre by today’s standards, the ending nonetheless feels powerful. Her reunion with Ralph and his death are a tragic, but fitting, end. Ultimately, the book ends with a sense of irresolution, but that seems completely consistent with the point of view James has demonstrated towards life throughout the rest of the book.
Let me focus for a moment, though, on Ralph. The sickly figure perseveres for the sake of Isabel. The devotion to her feels so sincere and pure: “He wanted to see what she would make of her husband—or what her husband would make of her. This was only the first act of the drama, and he was determined to sit out this performance. His determination had held good; it had kept him going some eighteen months more, till the time of his return to Rome with Lord Warburton. It had given him indeed such an air of intending to live indefinitely that Mrs. Touchett, though more accessible to confusions of thought in the matter of this strange, unremunerative—and unremunerated—son of hers that she had ever been before, had, as we have learned, not sculpted to embark for a distant land. If Ralph had been kept alive by suspense it was with a good deal of the same emotion—the excitement of wondering what state she would find him—that Isabel mounted to his apartment the day after Lord Warburton had notified her of his arrival in Rome” (392). First, see what I mean by the many-claused sentences? Second, I love that Ralph sees the position as one of suspense.
The ultimate moment is when Ralph is returning to London to die. The most romantic passage in the book, and the most beautifully tender passages I’ve read in some time is not even one of Isabel’s suitors:
'I shall keep that for my last pleasure!’ said Ralph.
In answer to which she simply kissed him.” (497).
The intimacy in their friendship is so loving and Ralph expressing his devotion to her is Cyrano-level sweetness. The fact that he reserves his last living pleasure as their reunion is just the most heartbreaking-slash-heartwarming moment that feels contemporary despite being from a dry 19th century novel.
Aside from the romance, there are a number of ethical dimensions to the work. In my Philosophy of Literature course during my undergraduate, I remember an essay (title and author pending—sorry, folks) that was discussing what made art good. The author examines the ethical dimension of art and elevates Henry James’ The Golden Bowl as a moral work from which we can learn, beauty not necessarily withstanding. In The Portrait of a Lady, we are presented with some models of ethical behaviour and their consequences, sometimes for better and sometimes for the worse. For instance, Pansy has a devotion to her father’s wishes and when she shows the least sign of disobedience she is shipped back to the nunnery.
There are two central ethical dilemmas that were most compelling. The first revolves around Lord Warburton, one of Isabel Archer’s former suitors. Long after being rejected, he visits Italy and meets Isabel’s step daughter Pansy. He falls in love with her and wants to pursue her marriage. Meanwhile, Isabel has to navigate the intricacies and contingencies of the situation. James writes, “If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own—was this the service her husband had asked of her? [...] She asked herself with dismay wether Lord Warburton were pretending to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another satisfaction and what might be called other chances” (419). There’s a peculiar dynamic here where Isabel has to decide whether Lord Warburton is not pursuing Pansy duplicitously. Isabel must decide whether to use Pansy as a pawn and essentially sacrifice her to marriage with Lord Warburton to ensure that his advances are not directed her way. It’s the sort of Kantian ethical impulse to decide whether we use people as means to ends or as ends in themselves.
James approaches a similar question from a different angle in the marriage between Isabel and Osmond. When James ultimately expounds on Isabel’s rationale for marrying Osmond, he describes his “indefinable beauty” (422) but that at the same time he was “helpless and ineffectual.” She then experiences contradictory sensations towards him, feeling “a tenderness which was the very flower of respect.” James embellishes the description, calling him “a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward and yet not putting to sea” (422). She then takes a “maternal strain” towards him. She reflects that the money bequeathed to her was at the core of her care for him, but in her generosity there’s also a self interest: “At bottom her money had been a burden, had been on her mind, which was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more prepared receptacle. What would lighten her conscience more effectually than to make it over the man with the best taste in the world?” (422). There’s a contradictory impulse within her: she wants to provide for Osmond, but at the same time in doing so she relieves her own burden. In moments like that, it’s curious whether they are treating each other as ends or means. (Subtitle for another boring essay I’ll never write: “Kantian Ethics at Work in the Work of Henry James”).
Truth be told, I hadn’t intended to write such a lengthy review of a book that is, in many ways, a straightforward and simple story. Perhaps it’s just because the book is so long and I was forced to spend so much time with it, but I think the more charitable approach is to give Henry James credit where it’s due. The Portrait of a Lady has a number of subtle, nuanced components that make for a ‘classic’ novel. While James seems to be falling from favour in the academy (correct me if I’m wrong), there are still some quiet innovations in his work that are worthwhile for book enthusiasts to explore.
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