Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

10. Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price

10 · Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price n The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James compares Gilbert Osmond's daughter Pansy to a "sheet of blank paper-the ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction." 1 Having recently published his study of Hawthorne in the English Men of Letters series, he would use Pansy much in the way Hawthorne had used Pearl in The Scarlet Letter-as a "living symbol" ofthe failed American quest of becoming reborn through the power of love, and sex. Indeed, in his remarks on the novel in the 1879 study, James calls it the "sequel" to the history of "passion." 2 Like Pearl, Pansy is what remains of the female American quest that characterizes what I am calling the "second" American Renaissance, or its logical extension of male authorship in the nineteenth century. If not the author in most cases of canonized American literature of the nineteenth century, the woman clearly becomes the object of this authorship -the Eve-figure who succeeds the male protagonists of Irving, Poe, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau in their quests for a "new world." This is Isabel Archer, whose precursors are probably Hester Prynne, the intellectual (ex-) virgin, and Whitman's athletic and active mother(-to-be), two figures who accept the limitations of their female status but nevertheless have the capacity to rebel against it. Dickinson's "supposed person" may also possess the energy of the "New Woman," but she fails to "publish" it; rather, her encounters with experience remain personal. James's [ 1 60] Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price characterization of Isabel is also personal to the extent that she is based in part on the memory of his late cousin Minnie Temple, but the portrait is not, as I have argued for The Scarlet Letter, a self-portrait of the writer's desire as much as it is a celibate's empathic portrait of the heterosexual in the fashion of The American (1877). Like Christopher Newman, the inverted Columbus who returns to the Old World in search of the psychological freedom and fulfillment the New World had promised, Isabel is the prototypical postwar heroine that launches the female conclusion to this American drama of the nineteenth century. Whereas Christopher seeks a "queen" in his pursuit of Claire de Cintre, Isabel seeks a "subject" in her marriage to Osmond . Anticipating such representative literary women as Kate Chopin 's Edna and Theodore Dreiser's Carrie, each of whom carries female independence increasingly farther than Isabel, she represents the first of three stages of American womanhood that will be acted out in the second part of the American Renaissance, in which the literary quester wakes up, like her earlier male counterparts, in the New World of nothingness instead of something. In this regard, Pansy's situation is almost a parody of what happens to Isabel once she marries Osmond. The product of the same double moral negative as Pearl-both are the illegitimate children of illicit relationships-Pansy will also be the only "issue" of the marriage when Isabel discovers that Madame Merle has made a "convenience" of her. Like Pearl's beginnings, hers are also in medias res. Pansy, James tells us, was already "formed and finished for her tiny place in the world" (p. 238), and Isabel, who, unlike Hester, never even participates in what Hawthorne's heroine will remember as a passion that had "a consecration of its own," is eventually expected to fill Serena Merle's motherly role with regard to the daughter she never had. She is asked to assist Osmond in arranging (as Merle had for Osmond) another marriage of money, in this case between Pansy and Lord Warburton. That Pansy obviously has not only no chance at happiness , but much less of a chance than Isabel herself had of fulfilling a romantic sense of destiny, merely underscores her function as a haunting symbol of female failure in an American world in which neither gender ever succeeds in the romantic quest of rebegetting the self, of starting over endlessly. Warburton is never seriously interested in her, and Ned Rosier, who cannot possibly win Pansy anyway be- [ 1 6 1 ] Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price cause of Osmond's objections, is as much of an art collector as the man who "collects" Isabel. In fact, everybody in this next-generational telling of The Scarlet Letter...