Henry James as Adapter: The Portrait of a Lady and Can You Forgive Her

Henry James as Adapter: The Portrait of a Lady and Can You Forgive Her Susan E. Hendricks Idaho State University Henry James argues at length in his preface to The Portrait ofa Lady that the original inspiration for a literary work of art may be impossible to trace. That, however, has certainly not deterred critics from speculating on James's source for The Portrait of a Lady's heroine, Isabel Archer, and her dilemma. Some suggest that Isabel grew from real life models. Leon Edel traces Isabel to James's cousin, Mary (Minny) Temple; Ernest Sandeen argues that Isabel is partly Henry James himself. Others suggest literary sources. F.R. Leavis and Joseph Warren Beach have nominated George Eliot's Daniel Deronda; Oscar Cargill adds Eliot's Middlemarch and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd to the list.1 The sensible conclusion to all of this speculation is that The Portrait of a Lady represents a synthesis ofsources, and I would like to propose one additional source that has been overlooked in critical discussion to date — Anthony Trollope's novel, Can You Forgive Her. Though the field is crowded already, I believe that this is an important oversight. We can learn one sort of thing by speculating on James's use of real life, another by the way that he adapts polished works of literary art. But I think that we can appreciate James's sophistication as a craftsman and as an observer of the human heart perhaps most clearly of all by considering the uses that he makes of Trollope's flawed novel. James reviewed Can You Forgive Her in The Nation in 1865, fifteen years before The Portrait ofa Lady began appearing serially in 1880, and Trollope's work appears to have stayed in his memory, for abundant parallels in situation and character exist in the two 1. Leon Edel, "Introduction," The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Ernest Sandeen, "The Wings of the Dore and The Portrait ofa Lady: A Study of Henry James's Later Phase," PMLA, 69 (December, 1954), 1060-1075; F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1950); Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918); Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961 ). A useful survey of these and other sources appears in Cargill, The Novels of Henry James, pp. 78-119. 36ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW novels. Can You Forgive Her tells the story of Alice Vavasor, who, after vacilating between engagements to her exciting, disreputable cousin George Vavasor and the upstanding John Grey, finally marries the ever-forgiving Grey. In a parallel plot, Glencora Palliser, Alice's aristocratic relative, is forgiven by her solidly respectable husband Plantagenet after she nearly runs away with one of her former suitors, the dissolute, charming Burgo Fitzgerald. Trollope's novel thus offers two versions of the same situation: a young woman makes errors of judgment because she desires selfdetermination . This, of course, is also the subject of The Portrait ofa Lady, which depicts Isabel Archer's attempt to form her own destiny, and the unfortunate results of that attempt. Isabel Archer's character, as well as her situation, is reminiscent of Alice's and Glencora's. All three are intelligent, selfpossessed , attractive young women with some money of their own, devoid of parental guidance but advised by high-handed relatives. All three are sharp-witted and often shockingly blunt; all three fantasize about unconventional lives. They share a fierce independence which their creators emphasize — Alice is termed "the most self-willed young woman I've ever met in my life," while Isabel announces, "I'm very fond of my liberty."2 All three are frightened of marriage to a good conventional man, and James and Trollope use similar language to describe their heroine's feelings toward such a marriage — military metaphors, for instance. James uses "positive possession" and "conquest;" Trollope uses "vanquished." Both make their heroines explicitly associate their suitors with "fate" (I, 361; I, 162). All three heroines fall in love with dangerous men whom they associate with freedom and romance, and these men have similar traits in the two novels. George...