Isabel Archer: The Architecture of Consciousness and the International Theme

Isabel Archer: The Architecture of Consciousness and the International Theme by Elizabeth Sabiston, York University I. "Emma's Daughters": The Birth of a Theme Isabel Archer is the most sharply etched of a long line of romantic, imaginative, provincial heroines whom I shall designate as "Emma's Daughters" (from their forerunner and prototype, Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse) in contradistinction to the very different "Pamela's Daughters" defined by R. P. Utter and G. B. Needham.1 In addition to Emma Woodhouse, Isabel's predecessors include Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Her successors in the twentieth century include Sinclair Lewis's Carol Kennicott in Main Street and Willa Cather's Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy. The "Emma"-heroine is womanly, active, energetic, and values her autonomy, whereas the "Pamela"heroine is girlish, passive, and helpless, even though she may set a moral example for others. Ian Watt remarks that the Richardsonian heroine "is devoid of any feelings towards her admirer until the marriage knot is tied" (161). The "Emma"-heroine's initiation into maturity, to the contrary, is usually precipitated by a jolting realization that she is passionately attached to a man with whom she fears marriage will be impossible. "Emma's Daughters" can all be described as "Female Quixotes," after the 1752 novel of Charlotte Ramsey Lennox, The Female Quixote, which influenced Jane Austen. Ironically, in 1843 S0ren Kierkegaard complained that European literature lacked "a feminine counterpart to Don Quixote," and Harry Levin commented in 1963 that 'To set forth what Kierkegaard had spied out, to invade the continent of sentimentality, to create a female Quixote—mock-romantic where Cervantes had been mockheroic —was a man's job. Jane Austen might have done it, but not George Sand" (247). He then proceeds to credit Flaubert with the creation of the first quixotic heroine, but actually Jane Austen had already "done it" in 1816, following the example of Mrs. Lennox's satire about Arabella, a motherless girl raised in provincial isolation on a diet of seventeenth-century French romances. Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, and James all focus upon a woman trying, like a Conradian hero, to realize her "ideal conception of her own personality." The basic components in all four works are a society that imposes more stringent limitations upon women than upon men, and a heroine nourished upon books rather than upon life, who is given to flights of fancy. Each heroine is frustrated both by her own ignorance and isolation and by a materialistic, conformist society that is even more hostile to the female imagination than to the male. Henry James has the advantage of building upon a "small tradition" served variously by Austen, Flaubert, and Eliot before him, and James is therefore the most conscious of his heroine's literary lineage. In his Preface to the New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady he quotes George Eliot (from Daniel Deronda) on the importance, in literature as in life, of "the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry": "In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection" (Preface 9). He compares his Isabel to some of Shakespeare's witty heroines, but especially to George Eliot's Hetty Sorrel, Maggie Tulliver, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth. As George Levine has also noted, however, the one Eliot heroine closest in conception to Isabel, Dorothea Brooke, is conspicuous by her absence (244-257). Eliot herself was indebted to Austen, and probably, though not provably, to Flaubert. In two different letters she speaks of reading Emma aloud around the time of composing Middlemarch. Whether or not she had read Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), it was reviewed while she was editor of the Westminster Review. The anonymous reviewer was probably not Eliot herself; he speaks intemperately of hurling the book across the room in disgust, and then retrieving it and being captivated by its stylistic virtuosity. Eliot's linguistic abilities, however, are well documented, and she did review Balzac's Le Volume 7 29 Numbers 2-3 The Henry James Review Winter-Spring, 1986 Père Goriot, so there is strong circumstantial evidence that this...