The Portrait of a Lady Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Afterword

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note on the Text

  Henry James (1843-1916) spent his early life in America, but often traveled with his celebrated family to Europe. After briefly attending Harvard, he began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. Later, he visited Europe and began Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875, he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola and wrote The American. In 1876, he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. His other famous works include The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject.

  Regina Barreca, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, edited The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor and wrote They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted; Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales); and Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. She writes for the Chicago Tribune, The Hartford Courant, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Ms., and other publications, and has appeared, often as a repeat guest, on 20/20, 48 Hours, and Today. She can be reached via her Web site, www.ginabarreca.com.

  Colm Tóibín was born Ireland in 1955 and lives in Dublin. He is the author of five novels including the Booker-shortlisted The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, and of the short story collection Mothers and Sons. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time.

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  Afterword copyright © Colm Tóibín, 2007

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  Introduction

  ‘‘But who is ‘quite independent,’ and in what sense is the term used?—that point is not yet settled. . . . [I]s it used in a moral or in a financial sense? Does it mean that they have been left well off, or that they wish to be under no obligations? Or does it simply mean that they are fond of their own way?’’

  —Ralph Touchett, in The Portrait of a Lady

  In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James takes an enthusiastic, spiritually ambitious, emotionally charged, attractive and powerful young woman, and seems to set her up for the coming-of-age rites of wealthy young Americans made familiar by earlier writers. Our heroine comes to England in the full flush of her early adulthood, learns about European manners and mannerisms, and finds her American sense of self-reliance challenged. James then presents us with what has been regarded as the appropriately happy ending for such a heroine: she meets and marries a man some years her senior who will shape her ambitions to fit acceptable conventions and teach her to harness her energies for suitably feminine purposes. But The Portrait of a Lady, first published in 1881, is like other James novels in this one respect: it does not proceed according to formula.

  The heroine’s marriage does not signal the end of her story, but instead ushers her into an entirely new world: a world where Isabel Archer’s true character is tested and shaped in ways that place her firmly in the company of other great—and perhaps tragic—heroines. But unlike her possible companions in tragedy—Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Lily Bart—Isabel Archer’s passionate response to the quiet desperation of her married life does not lead to her death but to a sense of survival.

  Isabel Archer survives because she is the quintessential young American woman, one who has been raised to trust her own intelligence and intuition. As young as she is, Isabel instinctively resists the confinement of artificial manners and inherited values that usually characterize her European counterparts. James twins her American sensibilities with an understanding that the world is already moving in the new directions that will make it the modern world and so constructs a woman who, despite the more conventional aspects of her life, is clearly subversive.

  Isabel is subversive in ways even she does not intend or fully understand, in part because of her will toward independence. Isabel believes and repeatedly asserts that she is an independent young woman, but the very definition of the term ‘‘independence’’ for a woman is at the heart of James’s novel. Isabel’s adoring cousin, Ralph, questions precisely how the term ‘‘independence’’ applies to the nineteen-year-old woman from Albany: is it a matter of money, of morality, or merely a refusal to listen to th
e advice or warnings of others? Can a woman, especially a young American woman transported to Europe and given access to a fortune without an education in how to deal with either, be independent, given the limited options open to one in her position? Isabel is awarded financial independence through Ralph’s intervention but must learn the difference between freedom and independence. Even at the beginning of the book, Isabel is independent; only by the end of the work is she free.

  Early in the novel James tells us that it is one of Isabel’s theories about herself that she was ‘‘very fortunate in being independent, and that she ought to make some very enlightened use of her independence.’’ But even with all of her excellent qualities—we are informed by the narrator that she is ‘‘intelligent and generous’’ and has ‘‘a fine free nature’’—the question remains: ‘‘[W]hat was she going to do with herself? . . . Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.’’ Having intentions of her own, however, is no guarantee that Isabel is indeed free to choose her own destiny. The overriding tension in the novel concerns Isabel’s continuing belief in her own independence in light of her gradual awakening to the fact of her own subjugation, to the awareness that she seems fated to do the world’s will rather than her own.

  From the start Isabel asserts her need for the good will of other people even as she insists on the predominance of her own judgment. Despite the fact that her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, is responsible for chaperoning Isabel from America to England after the death of Isabel’s parents, ‘‘our heroine’’ (as James often calls her) is wary about accepting the counsel offered by her well-meaning relative, even at the cost of her own reputation. When Mrs. Touchett suggests that it is simply not correct for Isabel to remain alone in the company of Ralph and his friend Lord Warburton after her aunt leaves the room, Isabel obeys her wishes with great reluctance because she does not understand the objection. Yet she nevertheless informs her aunt that she ‘‘always want[s] to know the things one shouldn’t do.’’ Thinking her niece merely contrary by nature, Mrs. Touchett rejoins, ‘‘So as to do them?’’ Isabel’s answer provides an early key to her character; she is not so simple as Mrs. Touchett assumes. Isabel wants to know what is done ‘‘so as to choose.’’

  It is not surprising that the choice that puzzles most readers of The Portrait of a Lady is Isabel’s choice of a husband. To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by readers of fiction, that a young woman in possession of a fortune must be in want of a husband.

  Isabel differs from many of her textual peers—and no doubt most of her readers—insofar as she does not regard marriage as the inevitable consequence of her adventures. ‘‘Among her theories,’’ the narrator tells us, ‘‘this young lady was not without a collection of views on the subject of marriage.’’ Of course she has opinions about marriage—what heroine doesn’t? But this heroine is different: ‘‘The first on the list was a conviction that it was very vulgar to think too much about it.’’ She is determined to resist the seductions of the easy, domestic and appropriately feminine path. She wants to plot a course of her own, but she has no idea yet what that course will be.

  Isabel first refuses the marriage proposal offered by Lord Warburton, a charming, sophisticated, rich English peer with liberal ideas, who would clearly be regarded as a great catch by any young woman—but who is not regarded in that light by Isabel. Isabel tests the strength of her will toward independence against the enticements offered by Warburton. He has grand and effective ideas about changing the world for the better. He is clever and sincere. He has an enormous estate that—to put the finishing touches on the fairy tale—even includes a moat.

  Offering to leave his family’s mansion and land to live in a place of Isabel’s choosing, Warburton declares that he’s had the house ‘‘thoroughly examined; it is perfectly sanitary. But if you shouldn’t fancy it you needn’t dream of living in it. There’s no difficulty whatever about that; there are plenty of houses. I thought I would just mention it; some people don’t like a moat, you know. Good-bye.’’ In contrast to his rather fumbling erasure of his own love for her, Isabel’s reply is a classic moment of self-assurance and composure. ‘‘I delight in a moat,’’ says Isabel. ‘‘Good-bye.’’ Why does Isabel refuse Warburton’s offer?

  In at least one respect the answer is the same as the answer to the question of why Hamlet does not immediately kill Claudius: there would be no story if these two acted with alacrity. George Eliot, a near contemporary of James, wryly noted that ‘‘the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.’’ Isabel, for better or worse, is destined to have a history. She tries to explain as much to Warburton when she announces: ‘‘I can’t escape unhappiness. . . . In marrying you, I shall be trying to.’’ So that he does not misunderstand her, Isabel explains that ‘‘I am not bent on being miserable. . . . I have always been intensely determined to be happy. . . . I’ve told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself.’’ If Isabel had married Warburton her life would have been the stuff of romantic fantasy, but Isabel’s fantasies lie elsewhere.

  Not for this heroine the quiet pleasures of the hearth and the joys of a safe and uneventful passing of days. Isabel reveals to her best friend, Henrietta, that instead of wanting safety, she longs for a taste of uncertainty. Her imagination is captured by the idea of ‘‘a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness.’’ Henrietta accuses her of sounding ‘‘like the heroine of an immoral novel,’’ and she may well be right. Isabel’s tastes run toward the edge of experience and the margins of acceptability. She regards herself in the light of an intellectual adventuress, willing to barter the ordinary for the uncommon.

  The luxury of the ordinary is not completely lost on Isabel, however. James tells us that ‘‘she would have given her little finger at that moment, to feel, strongly and simply, the impulse to answer: ‘Lord Warburton, it is impossible for a woman to do better in this world than to commit herself to your loyalty.’ But though she could conceive the impulse, she could not let it operate; her imagination was charmed, but it was not led captive.’’1

  Ralph Touchett shores up Isabel’s idea of herself as a woman whose unique character will place her in remarkable circumstances. As fond as Ralph is of Warburton, he is even more attached to the idea of Isabel as a woman who is destined to carve out an unusual destiny. Arguing that, had she married Warburton, she would still have had a good life, ‘‘a very honourable and brilliant one,’’ he goes on to claim, ‘‘But relatively speaking, it would be a little prosaic. It would be definitely marked out in advance; it would be wanting in the unexpected.’’

  Lord Warburton is not Isabel’s only suitor; neither is he the first to sense that recognizing Isabel’s independence of spirit might be the easiest way to gain her affections. When her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood, offers to allow her to ‘‘keep’’ her independence, Isabel believes that true independence rules out the idea that another person can award it; if someone ‘‘allows’’ you your independence, you are no longer independent. ‘‘Who would wish less to curtail your liberty than I? . . . What can give me greater pleasure than to see you perfectly independent—doing whatever you like?’’ asks Caspar Goodwood, because ‘‘it is to make you independent that I want to marry you,’’ to which Isabel, always on her guard around Goodwood, replies, ‘‘That’s a beautiful sophism.’’

  When she turns down Warburton she is pleased with her gesture; when she sends Caspar Goodwood away she is devastated, even though she makes the choice deliberately. Turning down two good, intelligent, and wealthy men forces Isabel to confront her own ambitions. When her au
nt questions Isabel’s motives for turning down Warburton’s offer, Mrs. Touchett intuits that Isabel might ‘‘expect to do something better.’’ Isabel’s belief, as she tells Goodwood, is that she will probably never marry. But that is before Ralph persuades his father to give Isabel a large inheritance and before she has even tasted the first mouthful of life as a woman of means. It would be a misreading to think that Isabel believes she will marry a man greater than Goodwood or Warburton; instead she desires merely to write the script of her own life in her own hand.

  The shine is taken off of Isabel’s triumphant moment of what she believes are the unique gestures of independence in turning down not one but two excellent proposals of marriage, however, when an experienced woman of the world tells Isabel she should not consider her refusal of a good proposal as so important or creative: ‘‘We have all had the young man with the moustache. He is the inevitable young man; he doesn’t count,’’ says her coolly sophisticated and world-weary friend, Madame Merle. Every attractive young woman with money has refused offers, Madame Merle implies, and Isabel should set her sights higher when looking for triumph. Drawn into a web of fascination woven by Madame Merle, Isabel believes that she is being advised by an older, trustworthy, sincere counsellor, who wishes only the best for her. She could not be further from the truth. Madame Merle wants Isabel to act in ways she herself could not, but she has breathtakingly selfish reasons for this, as Isabel will discover.

  Ralph, too, wants Isabel to do what he cannot. With exhilaration Ralph anticipates a future full of voyages into unmapped emotional territories for his cousin, imagining experiences for her that he himself could never embark upon. In fact, the invalid Ralph is in love with Isabel because she is the only individual, among all the human beings about him, able to relieve his ennui; he is thrilled by the state of happy uncertainty into which he is plunged when he is in her company or when he observes her career. Ralph believes that he wishes only to observe and be left to his own interpretations of her actions, but of course it is his action—the insistence that his father give Isabel a large inheritance—that redirects the course of Isabel’s life.