Ut Pictura Poesis: The Making Of a Lady

Ut Pictura Poe sis: The Making Of a Lady by Sandra Djwa, Simon Fraser University What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? ... How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? . . . And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. Walter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) As his title—The Portrait of a Lady—implies, Henry James is presenting a definitive portrait, definitive partly because composite.1 Several earlier images of lords and ladies drawn from writers as diverse as George Eliot, Robert Browning, Walter Pater, and Gustave Flaubert figure in his own large canvas. James is also genially asserting that he offers the last word on the subject. Despite her progenitors, the young Isabel Archer—natural, equivocably "independent," and "affronting her destiny" (PL 8)—is a uniquely Jamesian creation: the "original" identified and perceived in the opening scenes of the novel. More importantly, his portrait is characterized by the "felt life" (PL 6) through which James distinguishes a moral art from its Decadent opposite in the preface to the New York Edition of the novel. Ultimately The Portrait is to embody James's own aesthetic, one in which "truth," "experience," and those "metaphysical questions" so confidently dismissed by Pater are shown to be essential to any judgment of life and art. The figure of Isabel Archer appeared in James's imagination, he also tells us in the preface, like the "fictive picture" of Ivan Turgenev, as a vision of a young woman hovering, needing to be placed in the right relations and situations—that painter's vision which would bring out "the sense of the creatures themselves" (PL 5). The trick of handling an Isabel, he decided, would be to "[p]lace the centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness" (PL 10). The question posed by James's first perception of Isabel Archer as an image in a larger canvas—"Well, what will she do!" (PL 12)—is promptly answered by the plot. Isabel will do what any other American young lady taken under the wing of a wealthy aunt will do. She will visit the great European cities and museums: the National Gallery, St. Peter's, and the Uffizi—and—who knows?—perhaps find herself a husband along the way. The European tour, with repeated pilgrimages to the art museum, becomes the organizing principle of the plot. It is a characteristic framework for the experience of the American in Europe. James, like Nathaniel Hawthorne before him, found innocence and nature in the New World garden, but not art. It was to the Old World, especially Italy, the world of the court and of "lords" and "ladies" (and their artistic representations) that one must go for a knowledge of good and evil and thus a fully developed consciousness. The young Isabel, fresh from America, travels without constraint, eagerly absorbing "impressions" until she becomes weary of merely observing life. Her visits to the art galleries of Europe are charged with deeper meaning because it is there that the American innocent comes most directly into confrontation with the European past—with its history, its manners, and its morals. Consequently, the consciousness in which James places his "heaviest weight" (PL 10) is one that is preoccupied with seeing: with the recording of "impression" (PL 7) and with the subsequent judging of art objects. All of the individuals whom Isabel meets are strongly visualized. Some, like the senior Touchetts, are sketches; others, like Henrietta Stackpole, are caricatures; still others, like Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, are full-fledged portraits whose originals may be found in the Italian galleries. Each of these figures embodies a different conception of the aristocratic life that Isabel is forced to consider. Through her developing perception of these individuals, who are at first seen...