The Image Of The American Woman(isabel) In The Portrait Of a Lady By Henry James

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CHAPTER I. THE IMAGE OF THE AMERICAN WOMAN IN “THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY” BY HENRY JAMES

The good of one is always made of the others’ evil: that is the tragic component of happiness, the basis on which stands the Portrait of a Lady, one of James's masterpieces and also one of the best novels of all times. (Southgate, 2001: 2950) In this respect, James imagined Isabel Archer, a young American, "a happy temperament fertilized by a high civilization" (James, 1996: 61), which moves from his country to Britain, where she displays her fascinating charm, a mixture of intelligence, pride and curiosity.

The originality of Henry James lies in creating a type of woman with a life of her own like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, but nuanced with a sense of American independence that comes to dynamite the old social schemes of Europe at the time, not at all complacent women. Isabel Archer does not come to the Old Continent with the idea of ​​ a good game or sink into a society, living from the appearance, but she seeks to observe, learn and admire with the idea of ​​forming an opinion about how beautiful and reach can life be. Deep down she is an idealist, and like any idealist, she confuses freedom with happiness. In this respect, The Portrait of a Lady is a cruel novel like few others. One could believe we are witnessing the formation of a woman who struggles against the conventions of her time, a beautiful story of friendship with a young man who is going to die, a series of romantic relationships that end up surrendering to admiration for a man who seems sure of its principles, and we ended up finding ourselves before a world of terror, because the desire of some people to impose their power by shaping the destiny of others at their whim can not be qualified in any other way.

Isabel Archer is a hero without glory, a princess without a kingdom, a young woman who becomes a lady without wanting it. Her portrait reaches deep into the readers: it represents the woman who, having all the possibilities in her hand, loses them because she does not know how to manage her surroundings even enjoying the freedom to do so. Readers have seen it from all perspectives while Isabel has proven the nobility of these ideas, the convincing renunciations, her curiosity for life, her opportunities, being the image of a woman who "have suffered first, 
have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge", as McMaster (1973) appreciated in his study. (McMaster, 1973: 62-63)

Henry James acknowledged that the character of Isabel Archer was inspired by his cousin, Minny Temple, who despite dying very young, she became the centre of attraction for the writer and his environment: "a restless, curious, and eager to live girl". (James, 1996) Indeed, Minny may have been the excuse, but from the memory Henry James created a modern character, an American girl who was free of social prejudices but who ends up marrying in England and "having to deal with a society that demands a nineteenth-century marriage commitment". (Collins, 1976: 150) When she disembarks in London, Isabel is a recent orphan, an attractive but poor girl; however, she has a great capital: her intelligence. Her head is full of ideas, she aspires to know the world, to travel and to learn, to develop as an independent woman, and for that she needs to exercise her freedom. She rejects all the suitors who approach her, despite being rich men, because marriage would mean renouncing her ideals. She does not want anchors, nor moorings or responsibilities, although, in reality, Isabel does not accept her suitors because she is not in love. One day, thanks to the generosity of her cousin Ralph, she inherits a lot of money and becomes a millionaire. This variable makes her a "different woman": completely independent on the one hand (she no longer needs anyone to survive) and vulnerable on the other: "because a rich woman will be of interest to any unscrupulous person who falls in love with her money". (James, 1996) The inheritance liberates the woman, but it turns her into an attractive temptation.

The question posed by the author, and expressed by Ralph, is the following: "what will Isabel do with her life now that she is authentically free?". (James, 1996) Her energy and independence augur an interesting development, but nobody counted on Isabel could fall in love with the wrong person. Isabel, a cerebral woman who constantly vindicates her autonomy to make decisions, becomes an illusive and deceived little girl when she meets Gilbert Osmond. Love, as in so many other cases, "produces blindness, lack of perspective". (Niemtzow, 1975: 380) She does not see how the others can see and judges Osmond without objectivity, like any young lady in love. The novel gathers the opinions of those who observe it, and the immovable position of Isabel, ready to give everything to her chosen one: her life, her money, her freedom.

Isabel Archer could be consider a modern heroine. In this respect, Niemtzow (1795) appreciated that "all the female characters that appear in The Portrait of a Lady have the profile of independent women with their own ideas". (Niemtzow, 1975: 382) They are very strong, they border on the extravagant for their excess of originality, they live on the margins of European society. This is a theme that is repeated in the work of James, the confrontation of American and European culture. Although all the women who appear in the novel have American origin-Mrs. Touchett, Isabel Archer, Henrietta Stackpole, Madame Merle, Countess Gemini-, they represent a woman's paradigm is completely different from that of European women, a phenomenon that is natural because they come from a different historical context. The United States was a new country, without tradition of social classes, with democratic ideas and geography with limits that are constantly changing, a hotbed of races, languages, cultures, a distant world, where these ladies have more living space. In front of them, the European of the world from the portrait of a lady are Victorian women, subjected to a rigid social system and unbreakable traditions; therefore "they respond to another scheme and have another pattern of behaviour". (Tanner, 1965: 207)

Mr. Touchett recognizes that sign of identity in his niece and relates it to his wife: "… her conversation, which had much in common with that of the young women of her country, to whom the world paid more attention than her sisters from other lands. Like most young Americans, Isabel had been encouraged to express herself; his observations had been heard; he had been expected to have emotions and opinions … Mr. Touchett used to think that he reminded him of his wife as a teenager" (James, 1996: 155). As a young man, Henry James travelled extensively with his family, had a cosmopolitan, open education, exposed to a broad and diverse world. This opening will produce in him a great curiosity for the differences and therefore he stops in the comparison, he is interested in the parallel; he carries it in his blood, it is part of his life experience. His life will oscillate between two worlds, to the point that he acquires British citizenship a year before dying, in 1815, resented with the United States for not entering the war.

On the other hand, Henrietta is the one who best represents modernity, at least in a more intense and aggressive way: she is independent and belligerent, a professional who makes a living with her reports, who travels, who comes and goes, who enters and leaves, and above all, who thinks, questions and antagonizes with complete freedom, without the limits of the feminine delicacy, understood in the classical and traditional sense, imposing on those of her gender. Neither does Henrietta think that marriage is necessary; she does not pursue it as an end, nor as a way of life, and in this lies her originality because when she finally does she looks for a partner, an equal with whom she shares the good things of life, but not to a master and sir.

At the same time, Henrietta ("whose presence is undoubtedly excessive", as James (1996) admits in the prologue) will be a cliché for the reader, very close to an ideological approach, because she embodies a concrete American model that James wishes to present as a novelty in opposition to European women. The writer needs the character, maybe that's why she's less natural. Henrietta reminds of the women from The Bostonianas, a feminine type of "advanced, suffragists, liberals, provocateurs women" who claim a space in the world to live within society but with the right to face their norms. (Martin, 1999:89)

Henrietta Stackpole is a young friend of Isabel, a journalist, acid, almost aggressive, who arrives in England to make a report about the devilish customs of the British. She is the contrast of Isabel because of her way of thinking, her manners, her attitude towards the present. Henrietta is the future, freedom in person but not that kind of freedom that Isabel wants: she wants to use it in order to improve her inwardly self, not to practice it in the face of others. Thanks to Henrietta, the readers discovered in Isabel a proud and somewhat lost woman regarding her next steps. She is waiting for events, as if life had to pass in front of her so that she can choose the best, without doing anything to change her circumstances. In spite of her overwhelming personality, the young journalist does not become sympathetic to the reader because James endows her with a coarseness and a frankness that comes in handy so as not to eclipse the much less forceful figure of Isabel. Next to Henrietta, Isabel seems a candid, romantic girl, raised by a liberal and permissive father. Product of her education, she values ​​her independence and decides to take charge of her life, without depending on a man. At the same time she is courteous, pleasant to deal with, likes to like. She does not attack with her forms, like Henrietta, but they only demand that they allow it to be autonomous. In a dialogue with her aunt, she exposes her feelings in this way:

"- But I like to always know what not to do.

– To do it? her aunt asked.

– To choose, Isabel answered." (James, 1996: 169).

That is why the mystery of what she will do with her life is the axis, since the character promises a different path than the one she finally takes: once she falls in love, she tramples on her ideals. Her delivery makes her a prisoner. And despite realizing her mistake, she decides to take the decision that she freely took: because she, before all and before herself, is an authentic lady. In this respect, one could celebrate the strength of Isabel, her consistent attitude, pride and dignity with which she assumes the consequences of her election.

James Arthur was thirty-seven years old when he made the first sketch of Isabel Archer and sixty-five when he revised it. As there are almost two Isabeles Archer, the reader will do well to choose his edition carefully, the last version always being preferable. There has been no novelist – not even Cervantes, Austen or Proust – with a consciousness as vast as James's. We would have to go back to Shakespeare to find, as Emily Dickinson said, a greater demonstration that the brain is wider than the sky. As a heroine of the conscience, Isabel Archer manifests in the revision of 1908 a palpably expanded consciousness. With the revision of Portrait of a Lady, the almost – identity of James with Isabel Archer intensifies.

Since Isabel is James's most Shakespearean character, her identity is placed in the reader's perspective. In the revised edition James guides us further; that is why it can be affirmed that in 1881 Isabel is a richer and enigmatic personality than in 1908. In other words, as her gaze on Isabel changes, the most accomplished American novelist seems to trust readers less and more in himself. In 1881 Isabel is the victim of her own search for autonomy. In 1908, James converted his partial loss of autonomy – caused by errors of judgment – into a dilation of consciousness. At the apparent cost of a good part of freedom, he sees many more things. By adopting a current mood: the feminist reader would be more satisfied by Isabel of 1881 than the actual ones, whose first concern is to guard against deception. Isabel's early tendency to self-confidence, brave but erroneous, is replaced by an emphasis on the superior optics of one's identity. Self-confidence is the main doctrine of Ralph Waldo Emerson and – as in some inner plane James must know – Isabel is a daughter of Emerson.

Considering that Henry James Sr. never managed to become independent from Emerson, one must read very carefully his son's comments about the Sage of Concord: „He does not exaggerate one much, nor does he fall short, if he says that of Emerson's writings that in general he does not they are not compounds at all. But there is no one with a firmer and constant vision, and above all more natural, of our needs and our capacity in terms of aspiration and independence. … the rarity of the genius of Emerson, who for the attentive people has erected it in the first American spirit of letters and uniquely singular …” The first observation is almost absurd of so patronizing; just read Emerson's essay entitled "The Experience" to disagree with James. But the second paragraph is pure Isabel Archer; that is exactly the vision of her. As for the third, I doubt James really thought that; he preferred Hawthorne, Emerson's uncomfortable travel companion.

The passionate Hester Prynne, from The Scarlet Letter of Hawthorne, seems to me a much more Emersonian heroine than Isabel Archer, who flees from passion as Henry James fled from her. Emerson loved his two wives, Ellen and Lidian; maybe with more passion to Ellen, who died so young. The person responsible for the repression that Isabel exercises over her sexual nature is not Emerson but James. Never a reader of novels, Emerson read The Scarlet Letter but underestimated it; and I doubt he would have admired Portrait of a Lady. Nevertheless he would have recognized in Isabel Archer an authentic daughter of him, and deplored the aestheticism that leads her to choose for husband the horrendous Gilbert Osmond, a parody both of Emerson and Walter Pater, high priest of the aesthetic movement in England.

It may be useful, for a first reading of Portrait of Lady, to understand that Isabel Archer is always presented to us by the narrator, Henry James, and by her admirers: Ralph Touchett, Lord Warburton and Gaspar Goodwood (unforgivable and scandalous name! ) Regarding Isabel as a dramatic personality, in the Shakespearean sense, James is able to give us very little. We give him confidence for the complex and masterful skill with which James studies his conscience, and for the very strong effect he causes in all the characters of the novel, women or men – with the ironic exception of her husband, the poseur Osmond. For him, she should not be more than a portrait or a statue; Isabel's soulfulness offends him in his narrowness. As all readers acknowledge, the crucial enigma of the novel is why she marries the strenuous Osmond and, even more, why she returns with him at the end. Why do so many readers, women and men fall in love with Isabel Archer? If already in the first youth one is a sufficiently intense reader, it is very probable that his first love is fictional.

Famously defined by James as "heiress of all ages", Isabel Archer attracts many of us because she is the archetype of all those fictional or real young girls who yearn for doom: girls who seek the full realization of their potential without laying aside an idealism that is reluctant to selfishness George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch has brave aspirations, but her transcendent yearnings lack the element that adds Isabel to Emersonism: a drive toward inner freedom at almost any cost. Since Isabel is the self-portrait of James as a lady, her conscience must be extraordinarily broad, almost rival to that of her creator. This makes the moral judgment that the reader makes about his character rather irrelevant.

The novelist Graham Greene, disciple of James, insisted that his moral passion in Portrait of a Lady focuses on the idea of ​​betrayal as exemplified by Madame Merle, who successfully plotted to marry Isabel with Osmond so that he and Pansy ( Merle's daughter with Osmond) can enjoy Isabel's fortune. But, despite the deception, Madame Merle left little trace in the comfortable conscience of Isabel. Treason obsessed Greene much more than James.

Although Portrait of a lady is a kind of tragicomedy, to very few readers the book will move them to laughter. Despite the unpleasant sharpness of Osmond and Madame Merle, and the different types splendidly exemplified in Isabel's admirers – Touchett, Warburton, Goodwood – James takes care that the center of our concern is always Isabel. What matters without a doubt is his portrait; everything else only exists in relation to it. His figure means too much for James and the sensitive reader to be comfortable with a comic perspective, whatever it may be. Nor does James allow irony to dominate the story of Isabel's odyssey of conscience, however absurdly ironic her situation may be. She accepted Osmond under the illusion of choosing – and conceding – freedom. She had thought that he knew all that was worth knowing and that in turn she would want to open to him all the knowable things of life. That terrible mistake would seem almost a cruelty of James towards the heroine, but James suffers with her and for her and the error is absolutely capital for the book.

"Life needs mistakes," observed Nietzsche. Neither Henry James nor Isabel Archer are Nietzscheans at all, but the aphorism illuminates the great mistake of Isabel. Why this blindness? To ask it another way: why does James inflict such a catastrophe on his self-portrait as a woman? In the revisions for the 1908 edition, an authentic falsehood, uselessness and snobbery obscure Osmond considerably, which makes Isabel's erroneous judgment all the more peculiar. Osmond's first description reaches out to warn the reader that Isabel's future husband does not bode well: He was a man in his forties, with a tall but well-formed head, and his hair was almost shaved, still thick but prematurely gray. He had a thin, narrow face, extremely modelled and composed, with no other fault than that effect of a certain tendency to an exaggerated affiliation, to which the shape of the beard contributed not a little. That beard, trimmed in the manner of sixteenth-century portraits and supplemented by a clear moustache whose tips acquired a romantic ascending bias, gave its possessor a foreign, traditionalist appearance, and suggested that the gentleman was a scholar of style. His conscious eyes, curious however, at the same time vague and penetrating, intelligent and hard, expression of both an observer and a dreamer, would have assured that he only studied the style within certain well-chosen limits, and that in so far as one looked for it he found it. A very lost one would have been found to determine his climate and his country of origin; It lacked any of the superficial signs that often make the answer to that question insipidly easy. If he had English blood in his veins, it was probably with some French or Italian contribution; but, fine coin as he was, there was no sign in it of the seal or emblem of the current coinage that guarantees the general circulation; he was one of those elegant and complicated medals that are recorded for a special occasion. He had a slight, thin figure, a little languid, apparently neither tall nor short. He dressed like someone who does not take for it any other annoyance than avoiding vulgar clothes. Osmond, an American established in Italy, "was a scholar of style," but "only within certain well-chosen limits," and "insofar as he sought it, he found it."

Magnificently James, the observation reveals to the reader how narrow and unreliable is Osmond. Compare this with the first description of Isabel Archer in the novel: He had looked around again: the meadow, the big trees, the Thames lined with reeds, the beautiful old house; and occupied in that review had made place in him his companions; with a grasp of observability, easy to conceive in a young woman, it was evident, at once intelligent and emotional. He had seated himself and set aside the little dog; the white hands rested in his lap, crossed over the black dress; his head was up, his eyes were alight, and he loosely turned his silhouette to one side and the other, in harmony with the vivacity with which he clearly collected his impressions. These impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear and serene smile. – I've never seen anything so beautiful.

Isabel is a scholar, not of style, but of people and places, and never within well-chosen limits. Intelligent and emotional, aware of her beauty, alert to her numerous impressions, amicably amusing: it is not strange that Ralph Touchett, Lord Warburton and the elderly Mr. Touchett have fallen in love with her at first sight, nor that we fall in love as soon as we see her with more clarity. In the 1908 edition there are 170 pages between the two preceding descriptions, but, although delayed, the juxtaposition is direct and disconcerting. The sublime Isabel Archer – like the Shakespearean heroines Rosalinda, Viola, Beatriz, Helena and others – is bound to marry badly, but neither Ralph Touchett, nor Lord Warburton, nor Gaspar Goodwood are potential disasters; Gilbert Osmond is a catastrophe. It is up to each reader to judge whether it is true that Henry James makes the choice of heroin persuasively inevitable. As much as I love James, Isabel and Portrait of a Lady, I've never been persuaded, and I consider that choice the only flaw in an otherwise perfect novel. The young woman's blindness is necessary for the book to work, but the most Jamesian Isabel of the 1908 revision is too perceptive to be fooled by Osmond, especially since, definitively, is the "heir of all ages".

James, the most subtle of the masters of the novel (Proust aside) applies all his art to make the error plausible. Osmond – he says – is "the convention itself": something whose theoretical function is to free us from chaos, but whose practical effect is to turn off the possibilities of Isabel. She takes her daughter Pansy basically as a work of art to be sold, preferably to a rich and noble husband. "Gold coin" walking, Osmond sees in Isabel not only a fortune (that his relatives have bequeathed him the Touchett) but also "a material of work", a portrait to be painted. But Isabel only notices all this when it's too late to save herself. Why? James gives us several indications, none definitive. There is Pansy, who awakens in him maternal instincts (the son she has with Osmond dies at six months and James suggests that shortly after the sexual relationship of marriage dies). And there is his growing obsession with "choosing" a way of life: Ralph Touchett is his relative and is sick; Lord Warburton represents the English aristocracy, before which Isabel's American condition retreats; Gaspar Goodwood, his early Albany suitor, is too possessive and passionate, he loves her too much.

Like Henry James, Isabel wants them to love her, but not to be the object of overwhelming sexual passion. In addition James imputes the decision in favour of Osmond, a man of expensive tastes and limited income, to the generous idealism of the girl (after all, she is very young) and to the guilt caused by inheriting from the Touchett. Reach with all this? Although I – I repeat – I think not, James is very Shakespearean and perhaps realistic about the mysteries of the marital choice. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway and then lived twenty years apart from her, in London, sending money to Stratford for her and the children and going to visit them as little as possible. James, homoerotic to the core even if he did not take him to the act, expressed an extraordinary consideration for the value and sanctity of heterosexual marriage, while observing dryly that on the other hand he had life too little to venture into that blessed state.

Although it is also enigmatic, it costs me less to resolve why at the end of the story Isabel returns to Rome and Osmond. Having once again rejected Goodwood, she nonetheless experiences (and fears) the force of her passion: "for a moment he looked at her furiously in the gloom, and the next moment she felt his arms surrounding her and his lips on hers. The kiss was like a white flash, a glow that spread, and spread again and lasted; and it was extraordinary as if, upon receiving it, she felt every one of the things of his rude manhood that she had least liked, each aggressive piece of his face, his figure, his presence, justified in his intense identity and united with that act of possession. He had heard that the castaways, in the water, follow a succession of images before sinking. But when he came back the darkness was free. "

He is free to take "a very straight path" back to Rome and Osmond. That will keep her safe from Goodwood, but at best life with Osmond is going to be an armed truce, and this is the end of the heiress of all ages? James does not tell us, because he has already fulfilled his role in history; he does not know anything else, and it is probable that at this moment he does not know more Isabel either. But what will it be of her potential for greatness of spirit and breadth of consciousness, without which the book would founder? James has refused to give alternatives to the miserable Osmond; unlike this one, Goodwood threatens the sense of autonomy. But even in 1908 Isabel's other option could have been herself: divorce and a financial settlement would have freed her from Osmond. This may still happen, but James gives no clue. Although of evil spirit, Osmond is not as formidable as Isabel. She returns, I infer, to elaborate the consequences of her idealistic folly and affirm the continuity of her conscience. In its final form, Portrait of a lady requires a careful and comprehensive reading. Maybe Isabel's choice does not satisfy us, but her story speaks again of a motive to read: to know better the conscience, too valuable for us to ignore.

Focusing on the character again, Isabel is unusual, an exceptional woman, a heroine who is the hero simply for being different. James makes dramatic pauses in the narrative so we can deepen and understand the character better. The reader matures and grows with her, even admiring her; however, James orphans the reader in the last scene of the book. It is the only time that you do not know the decision that Isabel takes for her own thoughts if not that a secondary character is responsible for bringing it up so that the reader develops his own ending. After hundreds of pages sharing thoughts and feelings, it is at the end, at the crucial and most important moment, where we remain blind and deaf waiting for that explosion of information to reach us in any way possible.

As one would observe, each reader will interpret the ending in a different way. Some assume that once Isabel returns to Rome, she will break with that fake marriage in which she left her youth and an unexpected passion; and others believe that it disappears trying to find itself.

In this extensive work, the main character promises from the beginning a different path than the one he later takes, because once he falls in love, he tramples on his ideals and tramples on himself. His dedication to that love makes her prisoner; and despite realizing her mistake, she decides to stay with her decision because … for her, for all and for herself, she is a true lady. A lady deeply modern and advanced to rigid social conventions, full of unanswered questions and with a desire to be free so heartbreaking, that as the novel progresses we can feel its wings getting smaller and smaller until the moment they disappear. His case represents a paradigm of modernity that still influences our thoughts. And it is she, it is Isabel Archer who could remind us of our deepest desires as women and contemplate what we become as we grow up.