Intimacy and Spectatorship in The Portrait of a Lady

Intimacy and Spectatorship in The Portrait of a Lady by Dennis L. O'Connor, Georgetown University In her rich interpretation of The Portrait of a Lady, Juliet McMaster explores Isabel's devotion to suffering, immobility, and death as a wish to make her life into a work of art. She cites Isabel's "theory that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization. . . . she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was." Ms. McMaster rightly stresses Isabel's desire to be "simultaneously the artist and critic of her own nature," and I welcome her insight that Isabel "wants appearance and essence to be identical, as they are in art, but not in life." Isabel's "aestheticization" of the self raises fundamental questions about her relation to the world and to other people, especially since her need to define herself and to exclude any other interpretation colors her attitude toward intimacy and spectatorship. In the present essay I shall trace the consequences of her fierce insistence on being the sole interpreter of the text of her life in order to place her in the continuum of earlier and later Jamesian protagonists who choose renunciation over communion. I will begin with the last chapter of the novel because Isabel's ambivalence, as well as her desire for freedom and self-justification, becomes dramatically clear in this final rejection of her first suitor. Fearing sexual intimacy, Isabel rejects Caspar Goodwood with perfect consistency. "[She] had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different. ... the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid, and strange, forced open her set teeth."'' Suggesting a vagina dentata as well as a portcullis, Isabel's set teeth powerfully image her implacable resistance to noetic and to sexual penetration. When Goodwood says, "'Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock,'" (55: 488), his phallic aggressiveness horrifies her so that she chooses the living death of Gilbert Osmond, rather than risk losing her well-defined self in sexual intimacy. This dread of losing self-control makes Goodwood's kiss feel like white lightning: "[She] felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence ... made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free" (55: 489). Although she feels Goodwood's love and even senses that "to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying," Isabel chooses the dark safety of her loveless marriage with Osmond. Faced with Goodwood's sexual power, she knows he is solid, dependable, honest—truly "good wood." But then Isabel Archer also amply deserves her name: this 1. "The Portrait of Isabel Archer," American Literature, 45 (March 1973), 57. For similar views of I sabe I, see Sal I¡e Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 130-31; Tony Tanner, "The Fearful Self: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady," Critical Quarterly, 7 (1965), 205-19; Annette Niemtzow, "Marriage and the New Woman in The Portrait of a Lady," AL, 47 (1975), 377-95; Daniel J. Schneider, The Crystal Cage: Adventures of the Imagination in the Fiction of Henry James (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), p. 104 et passim; William Veeder, Henry James—the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 217-29; Michael Routh, "Isabel Archer's 'Inconsequence': A Motif Analysis of The Portrait of a Lady," Journal of Narrative Technique, 7 (1977), 128-41. For a discussion of Isabel in terms of puritan ism, transcendentalism, and the romantic self, see Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 131. 2. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Robert D. Bamberg, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 488, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Because of the...