Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

Capturing the real thing Howells never gravitated from realism to naturalism, with its emphasis on the determining influence of heredity and environment and its harrowing depiction of landscapes, social and natural, that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to humankind. There is a fundamental benevolence, a belief in human worth and social betterment, that is caught in one of the most famous remarks in Criticism and Fiction: 132 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 “our novelists concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.” That remark would have elicited sardonic laughter from Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), who was known as “bitter Bierce” and the “the wickedest man in San Francisco” among his contemporaries, and seemed to revel in both titles. Born in Ohio, Bierce participated in the Civil War. The war disgusted him, prompting him to see soldiers as little more than paid assassins and, when it ended, he moved to California, where he established a reputation as a brilliant and caustic journalist. Living in England for four years from 1872, he returned to California. He then published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, retitled In the Midst of Lifein England and in the 1898 American edition. Another collection of stories, Can Such Things Be?, followed in 1893. More than half the stories in the first collection, and many in the second, deal with the Civil War; they reflect their author’s feelings of revulsion for military life, and his bleak, bitterly comic view of life in general. Some of these stories capture the vicious confusion of battle, just as, say, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) by John William De Forest (1826–1906) does. Others use stream of consciousness and suspense endings to explore the subjectivity of time. The same dark light that simultaneously illuminates and shadows these stories also informs Bierce’s poems, and the ironic series of definitions collected in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). In 1913 Bierce traveled into wartorn Mexico, to escape American civilization and to seek, he said, “the good, kind darkness.” He must have found it, for he disappeared. At first sight, there are few connections between William Dean Howells and Henry James (1843–1916). But it is to Howells’s credit that, as critic and editor, he was among the first to recognize James’s talent. Credit is due to Howells all the more, perhaps, because as they knew, the two men came from very different backgrounds. James was born in New York City to a wealthy, patrician family, the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had amassed a large fortune. After being educated by private tutors until the age of twelve, he went to schools in Europe and the United States. Entering Harvard Law School in 1862, he withdrew after a year, and began to concentrate on writing. Reviews and essays appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review. In 1869 he returned to Europe, his first visit as an adult, first to England and then to Italy, which made a deep impression on him. It was while he was in Europe that his beloved cousin, Mary Temple, died. How exactly this affected his later fiction is open to debate, although the situation of an attractive, lively but doomed young girl certainly recurs, in such novels as The Wings of a Dove (1902) and in the novella Daisy Miller (1878). In any event, James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, appeared serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1871 (and in volume form in 1878). This was followed by his first collection, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) and Transatlantic Sketches (1875), and his first novels of real consequence, Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), and The Europeans (1878). The story “A Passionate Pilgrim” deals with the reactions of an eager American “pilgrim” when confronted with the fascinations of the complex European world of art and affairs. And James himself during this period was something of a pilgrim in Europe, which he came to regard as his spiritual fatherland, moving there permanently in 1875. During a year in Paris, he associated with such masters of the art of fiction as Flaubert and Turgenev, who encouraged his interest in what Flaubert called “le mot juste”; the right word, the careful planning of the language and structure of the novel so as to make it an accurate register of reality. Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 133 After 1876, however, he made his home mainly in London, although he maintained an American home in Massachusetts and, much later, moved to the small town of Rye in Sussex. In The American, James explores the contrasts between Europe and America through the story of a protagonist whose name betrays his origins and missions. Christopher Newman is an American who reverses the voyage of his namesake Christopher Columbus and travels from his own, New World to the Old World of France during the Bourbon period. The Europeans reverses this voyage, by bringing Europeans to New England. The transatlantic contrasts multiply and are more complex here, but the fundamental distinctions remain the same. The contrast between America and Europe is even more finely and fully drawn in the major work of the first period, and arguably James’s greatest novel, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). It is, as James put it, the story of “a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan living in Albany, New York, is taken up by her Aunt, Lydia Touchett. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle and their tubercular son, Ralph. There, she declines the proposals of both Caspar Goodwood, a rich American, and Lord Warburton, an English aristocrat. Wealthy now, thanks to an inheritance from Mr. Touchett arranged for her by Ralph, she then accepts the proposal of an American expatriate, a widower and dilettante living in Florence, Gilbert Osmond. She is introduced to Osmond by another expatriate, Madame Merle, and is impressed by his taste and refinement. Soon after marriage, however, she discovers him to be selfish, sterile, and oppressive. She also finds out that Osmond’s young daughter, Pansy, is actually the daughter of Madame Merle and that this was the reason for the woman’s introducing her to Osmond and promoting the marriage. Despite Osmond forbidding her, Isabel leaves for England when she hears Ralph is dying, and is at his side when he dies. Despite a last attempt from Caspar Goodwood to persuade Isabel to go away with him, though, Isabel determines to return to Osmond. And the novel closes with her accepting her destiny, or perhaps more accurately the consequences of her choices, and preparing to go back to a home that is more like a prison. Stated baldly, the story has strong elements of romance or fairytale, just like The Scarlet Letter: the awakening of a sleeping beauty, the three suitors, a villain whose “egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers,” a heroine held captive in “the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation,” the sick young cousin who observes and admires her from afar before dying, the voyage of an American Adam – or, rather, Eve – and their exile from Paradise. But what distinguishes it, in the reading, is its adherence to the substantial realities of the social life and the subtle realities of the life of the consciousness. Isabel Archer is as much like the heroines of, say, Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda by George Eliot as she is like Hester Prynne: the imaginative maneuvers of the book represent as much an encounter between the American and the European as its story does. It is both of and about a collision of cultures. One reason for the subtle but substantial reality of Isabel herself is that James focuses on her. James wanted to reveal the full implications of the developing consciousness of his protagonist. So the reader experiences a lot through her, and shares the lively animations of her mind on the move but, in addition, sees her from the outside, through the comments and often critical commentary of the narrator – and through the observations of characters like Ralph Touchett. We understand her sense of herself, 134 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 her moods and changes, but we also take the measure of “the whole envelope of circumstances” in which she is implicated. Characteristically of James, the strategy is part of the debate. That phrase, “the whole envelope of circumstances,” is used by Madame Merle, who has adapted to a European vision sufficiently to believe that self and circumstance are indivisible. Isabel disagrees. Subscribing to the American romance of the self, she believes in freedom as an absolute and the individual as somehow separable from circumstances. James wryly complicates the debate by intimating that his heroine’s profound belief in herself, her “fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion,” may itself spring from circumstance. She has grown up in a world, the new world of America, where there have been few forms or authorities, no rigidly enforced social practices, to challenge that belief. But that complication is further complicated by the clear admiration that Isabel’s “flame-like spirit” inspires in the narrator, observers such as Ralph Touchett, and the reader. There is candor and honesty here, a fundamental integrity and capacity for wonder as well as innocence, an openness that leaves her vulnerable – and, by some measures at least, humanly incomplete. With the characters surrounding Isabel, some are quietly developed, and the reader gradually comes to know them: sometimes for good, as with Ralph Touchett, and sometimes, as with Osmond and Madame Merle, for ill. Others, like Lydia Touchett, are flatter and deftly summarized when they are introduced. All, however, contribute to our understanding of the heroine and the representative character of her transatlantic encounter. A minor character such as Henrietta Stackpole, for instance, another young American woman abroad, helps the reader place Isabel further; so do the sisters of Lord Warburton, “the Misses Molyneaux.” Henrietta is self-confidence and independence to the point of bluster. The Misses Molyneaux are compliant and decorous to the point of vanishing into their surroundings. The character of Isabel is mapped out using such minor characters as coordinates, in a manner James had learned from Jane Austen. And it is mapped out, too, in Isabel’s perilous voyage between the possibilities represented by her first two suitors and the alternatives they vigorously embody: America, with its devotion to individual initiative, enterprise, and possibility, and Europe, with its adherence to mannerliness, custom, and tradition, the rich fabric woven out of the past. Isabel’s voyage is a literal one, to begin with, when she leaves New York for England: landscapes that here, as throughout James’s fiction, have a symbolic as well as a literal application, with the starkness and simplicity of the one contrasting with the opulence and grandeur of the other. But it becomes an intensely symbolic one: when Ralph Touchett tries, as he puts it, to put some “wind in her sails” by arranging for her to receive a bequest from his father. Isabel, too, tries to put wind in the sails of someone else. She is drawn to Gilbert Osmond precisely because she believes she can help him fulfill the requirements of his imagination. With Goodwood or Warburton, she would, in a sense, be embarking on a ship that has already set sail, committing her destiny to one that had achieved full definition before she appeared; she would, perhaps, be resigning herself to the authority of another. But with Osmond, she believes, it would be she herself who would enable the voyage, create the destiny. In fact, this is not the case at all. Osmond, as it turns out, had just as firm a notion that he would be her providence when he married Isabel. What all this adumbrates is a theme interwoven with the contrast between Europe and Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 135 America, and dear to the heart of Hawthorne as much as James: the human use of human beings. The complex interplay of character focused in the figures of voyaging reminds us that to declare oneself may be to deny another. James’s response to the problem he opens up, as he examines his characters’ attempts to negotiate their freedom, is a dual one, and is typical in the sense that it involves what happens in The Portrait of a Lady and how it is written. What happens is that Isabel decides to go back to Gilbert Osmond. To run away with Goodwood would suggest that Madame Merle had been right after all, an admission from Isabel that the “envelope” of her unfortunate circumstances was influential enough to make her evade the consequences of her own actions with a man she never loved. To return involves an acceptance of those consequences, and a fulfillment of a promise made earlier to Pansy, Osmond’s daughter, that she would come back. The choice on which the novel ends depends on a subtle balance between self and circumstance, in that it involves the recognition that expression of the one properly depends on awareness of the other: that freedom is a matter of responsible, realistic self-determination. And that same balance is at work in its narrative texture. James, as he meant to, does not yield to the determining nature of circumstance here, although he admits its irreducible reality. Nor, while emphasizing the power of consciousness, does he present that power as separate and inviolable. What he does, in his fictional practice, is what he preached in his criticism. He enters into a complex series of negotiations between the “moral” and the “felt life,” the messages communicated by the narrative and its status as a dramatic experience. Not only that, he shows that assertion of the one depends precisely on acceptance of the other: that, like any other living organism, the meaning of the novel is its being. If the first period of James’s career could be described in terms of moral realism, and the third in terms of psychological realism, then the second could be called a period of dramatic realism. James used careful manipulation of point of view, elaborate patterning of contrasting episodes and characters, and a focus on dialogue and dramatic scene to achieve here what he always sought: “the maximum of intensity,” to use his own words, “with the minimum of strain.” The results are powerfully evident in a novel like What Maisie Knew (1897) that explores adultery, infidelity, and betrayal. The entire story, although written in the third person, is told from the point of view of the perceptive but naive young girl Maisie, who is just six years old when her parents are divorced. The strategy enables James to achieve economy, intensity, and irony as he combines and implicitly compares what Maisie sees with what the narrative voice intimates. Towards the end of his second period, James confirmed his reputation as a writer of short stories with tales many of which were about writers and writing, like “The Lesson of the Master” (1888), “The Middle Years” (1893), and “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896). In their own modest fashion, these stories prepare the way for the emotional and psychological subtleties that characterize the three major novels of the third and final period of James’s career: The Ambassadors, written in 1901 and published in 1903, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl (1904). In all three, James returns to the international theme. In The Ambassadors, for instance, Lambert Strether is sent by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Newsome, to persuade her son Chad to return to Massachusetts. Gradually, however, he grows less enthusiastic about his mission, as he becomes more 136 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 and more receptive to the charms of England and France. This story of transatlantic encounters acquires some clarity by an elaborate balancing of scene and character: there are four major scenes set in a plainly allegorical garden, for instance, in which knowledge is slowly acquired and, in the course of the action, Chad and Strether change moral places. But it also acquires a certain mystery, even opacity, from James’s determination to follow the smallest refinement of emotional detail, the slightest nuance of social gesture – and from a style that, in the service of this pursuit, often becomes formidably intricate. In the last few decades of his life, James devoted much of his time to preparing the New York edition of his works. He also wrote eighteen new prefaces for his novels. He traveled widely, and wrote about his travels: in The American Scene (1907) and Italian Hours (1909). He published two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914); and a third volume, The Middle Years, appeared posthumously in 1917. James assimilated the tendencies of his own age: the mix of realism and romance, the moral rigor, the preoccupation with selfhood. He also anticipated the direction in which many later artists were to move: towards a concern with the complex fate of being an American in an increasingly internationalized culture, the conviction that the truth of life and the truth of art are one and the same. A summative and seminal writer, he stands at the juncture between two centuries. He was also, complexly, his own man.

Preview questions:

1. The Portrait of a Lady, as its title would suggest, is largely devoted to the character of Isabel Archer. How does James use his psychological portrayal of Isabel to justify her decision to surrender her treasured independence in order to marry Osmond?

2. Discuss Henry James's“international theme”.