"In the Dusky, Crowded, Heterogeneous Back-Shop of the Mind": The Iconography of The Portrait of a Lady

"In the Dusky, Crowded, Heterogeneous Back-Shop of the Mind'. The Iconography of The Portrait of a Lady by Adeline R. Tintner, New York City I. The First Portrait of a Lady (1881) Since the very name of TAe Portrait of a Lady designates it as a work of art, the novel receives from the first an iconic emphasis. The word icon is used here both as Panofsky defines it, the element that involves iconography, the stady of works of art for tiieir meaning rather than for their artistic values (26), and as die OED defines it, "an image in the solid." Those images "in the solid" wiU fluctuate from works of art to works of utility treated as works of art in the later version of the novel. The function of the contained objects in TAe Portrait reveals itself on analysis as a major element of James's craft. We know from his letters that he wanted tiiis novel to "immortaUze" him, and tiiat it was to be in relation to his previous writings "as wine unto water." The proof of James's expertise in handling die many iconic references in TAe Portrait lies in the way they are quietly absorbed into the texture of the book, and it is only after we have examined the novel that we realize with what ingenuity and skiU they have furthered James's narrative aims. The icons in the 1881 version of TAe Portrait divide tiiemselves into several groups. Since the main male character will be GUbert Osmond, die taste-dominated man and coUector, works of art wiU be of prime importance. The museum masterpieces James chooses, however, are only three specific ones: the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline Museum, the interior of St. Peter's, and die Correggio Virgin and Child in the Tribune room of the Uffizi. Each is situated at an important stage in the development of die story and each is attached to a character—the Gladiator to Warburton, St. Peter's to Isabel Archer, and the Correggio Virgin and Child to Henrietta Stackpole. The many other works of art occur only within metaphors where they act as indices to, and symbols of, the other characters. An introductory icon appears on die very first page as a porcelain cup belonging to Mr. Touchett that is larger and of a different shape from die rest, just as he is. Its importance wiU emerge later. The other real icons are the houses, which express the lives of those who occupy them. Gardencourt starts the series, followed by die Albany house from which Isabel is rescued by her aunt. Its bolted door acts as a symbol of Isabel's confined and constricted Ufe. Then there is Lockley Hall, the kind of house Isabel would live in if she marries into the English aristocracy. Osmond's Florentine viUa is sharply contrasted not only to Gardencourt, the house of freedom, but also to Lockley, the house of pattern, with its deceiving, carefuUy arranged mask. It is a potent force in deciding Isabel's estimate of Osmond. The Palazzo Crescentini, Mrs. Touchett's Florentine viUa, has a name pointing to a fractional life suggesting either growth or atrophy. The Palazzo Roccanera, Isabel and Osmond's house, has a name pointing to deatii and darkness. Significantly, its frescoes are by the sixteenth-century painter Caravaggio, whose pictorial inventions are associated witii darkness, whereas the frescoes in the Touchett house, also sixteenth-century, are described as "pompous." The second powerful icon is the carriage, introduced when Henrietta is alarmed after Isabel sends Caspar packing. "Do you know where you are drifting?" she asks her, and Isabel answers that she does not, but that her idea of happiness is a "swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads tiiat one can't see." The passage is a reminder of Emma Bovary's dream of happiness, which never comes true; it recaUs the Flaubertian "au galop de quatre chevaux," and it is accented by Henrietta, who thinks Isabel sounds "like die heroine of an immoral novel" (PM 153), tiien the common verdict on Madame Bovary. Isabel is the essence of the romantic personality for...