Read The Portrait of A Lady Online

Authors: Henry James

The Portrait of A Lady (3 page)

 
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 expected 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 history; 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.
The old gentleman at the tea-table, who had come from America thirty years before, had brought with him, at the top of his baggage, his American physiognomy; and he had not only brought it with him, but he had kept it in the best order, so that, if necessary, he might have taken it back to his own country with perfect confidence. But at present, obviously, he was not likely to displace himself; his journeys were over, and he was taking the rest that precedes the great rest. He had a narrow, clean-shaven face, with evenly distributed features, and an expression of placid acuteness. It was evidently a face in which the range of expression was not large; so that the air of contented shrewdness was all the more of a merit. It seemed to tell that he had been successful in life, but it seemed to tell also that his success had not been exclusive and invidious, but had had much of the inoffensiveness of failure. He had certainly had a great experience of men; but there was an almost rustic simplicity in the faint smile that played upon his lean, spacious cheek, and lighted up his humorous eye, as he at last slowly and carefully deposited his big tea-cup upon the table. He was neatly dressed, in well-brushed black; but a shawl was folded upon his knees, and his feet were encased in thick, embroidered slippers. A beautiful collie dog lay upon the grass near his chair, watching the master's face almost as tenderly as the master contemplated the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house; and a little bristling, bustling terrier bestowed a desultory attendance upon the other gentlemen.
One of these was a remarkably well-made man of five-and-thirty, with a face as English as that of the old gentleman I have just sketched was something else; a noticeably handsome face, fresh-coloured, fair, and frank, with firm, straight features, a lively grey eye, and the rich adornment of a chestnut beard. This person had a certain fortunate, brilliant exceptional look—the air of a happy temperament fertilized by a high civilization—which would have made almost any observer envy him at a venture. He was booted and spurred, as if he had dismounted from a long ride; he wore a white hat, which looked too large for him; he held his two hands behind him, and in one of them—a large, white, well-shaped fist—was crumpled a pair of soiled dog-skin gloves.

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