New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady (review)

316 The Henry James Review choice of 'nothing,' The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, makes 'nothing' its governing principle" (120). Terming James's work in this novel "feminine writing," Walton points to the fact that its female characters teach Densher "how to write. All the characters in the novel continually compose their own fictions, and their fictions...are Feminine, for they derive from absence, or nothing" (124). And in a similar vein, for Walton The Golden Bowl is a study of "Feminine Revision," the process of knowing and unknowing, like that of writing and revising, the chief activity of the central characters. Intricate as some of Walton's arguments are, and phrased somewhat exclusively in her mode of critical language, her book contains many valuable new readings of James's oeuvre. The only real objection I have to the book is the British bibliographic form, and the absence of punctuation—after Mrs, for example— where American readers would anticipate it. Joel Porte, ed. New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1990. 166 pp. $24.95; pb $9.95. By David McWhirter, Texas A & M University His first and probably most widely acclaimed masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady has consistently been among the most taught and even "loved" of James's novels. Prominent in Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition, The Portrait is also central to the canon of English fiction proclaimed by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition. In his comprehensive, gracefully written introduction to the volume under review, Joel Porte similarly positions The Portrait as a classic among such classics as Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, A Modern Instance, and Middlemarch. But as Porte recognizes, the secure canonical status of The Portrait has in some sense depended on "a traditional humanistic reading" that, "while clearly justified, is probably also inadequate." Reading the American Isabel Archer's encounter with Europe as a fortunate fall from innocence to experience—a story of redeemed and redemptive suffering to which Porte's own interpretation adheres—traditional criticism has enshrined The Portrait as a great tragic novel; it has also bequeathed us a text that is arguably less dangerous and disturbing, and surely more comforting, than the one James actually wrote. In three extraordinarily challenging essays—the fourth contribution, by Donatella Izzo, strikes this reader mainly as oddly anachronistic in its formalist insistence on the antimimetic, self-reflexive autonomy of the novel—Alfred Habegger, William Veeder, and Beth Sharon Ash draw on contemporary feminist/ gender criticism and psychoanalytic theory to explore this other Portrait. The results more than confirm Porte's intuition that, for all the novel's "Miltonic Book Reviews 317 echoes...suggesting an archetypal 'fall' from grace and expulsion from the 'garden,'" "there is still something left over that baffles interpretation." The conclusion of The Portrait—Isabel's frightened recoil from Caspar Goodwood's sexual advances; her numbed, passive state as she returns, inexplicably, many would say, to Osmond—has never wholly satisfied even those readers most committed to recuperating it as a tragic recognition of reality's limits, or as a necessary acceptance of what Porte calls "an uncertain world of 'choice.'" For all their varied concerns, Habegger, Veeder, and Ash are alike in resisting the redemptive tragic teleology traditionally attributed to James's text. Each isolates and foregrounds highly cathected scenes—Isabel's troubled response to her first glimpse of Osmond and Pansy together (Habegger); her "timeless suspension" as she sits, "half in love with easeful death," in the train carrying her back to Rome (Veeder); the disturbing final encounter between Isabel and Madame Merle (Ash)—that uncannily exceed the humanist/tragic paradigm; each scrutinizes apparently "secondary" relationships—Isabel and her father; Ralph and Daniel Touchett; Isabel and Madame Merle—that expose psychological aporias, in the characters and in James himself, that traditional readings have glossed over. Habegger's provocative essay, an effective distillation of his argument in Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (Cambridge U P, 1989), explores the most glaring incongruity of The Portrait: the disjunction between James's sympathetic identification with Isabel and the harsh fate—Habegger calls it a "betrayal "—to which...