James's Portrait of Female Skepticism

154 The Henry James Review James Society Meetings, 1990: MLA, Chicago Editor's Note: The 1990 MLA papers below were read at two James Society sessions over which WiUiam R. Macnaughton presided. One of the sessions, titled "The James-Hawthorne Relationship," included die Emily Budick and SheUa Teahan pieces published here, as weU as Gary Scharnhorst's "James, The Aspern Papers, and tiie Ethics of Literary Biography" (slated for publication elsewhere), and the response to aU three papers, also printed below, by Leland S. Person, Jr. The other session, "Cultural Criticism on Henry James," included the last two papers in our special feature, by Beverly Haviland and Bonney MacDonald. -DMF Emily Miller Budick—James's Portrait of Female Skepticism Numerous critics have noted tiie strong affinities linking Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and James's Portrait of a Lady. Many connections are obvious. For example, botii novels present heroines almost unique in nineteenth-century American fiction (especiaUy by men). Not only are Hester Prynne and Isabel Archer protagonists in every sense of the word, but tiiey are unusuaUy strong, dynamic, inteUectual women. In particular, both Hester and Isabel are distinguished by a powerful phüosophical consciousness absent in most nineteenth-century female heroines, even in fiction by women. I have argued elsewhere that The Scarlet Letter is a study in female skepticism, even though, in the process of magnificently ascribing to its heroine a profound philosophical depth, the novel misstates the terms of female doubt. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, I suggested, a particular question generates the action. This is the question of Pearl's paternity. Hawthorne uses the question to expose the sexism of Puritan patriarchy. Patriarchal societies, Hawthorne reveals, would control women in order to attempt to secure for themselves a knowledge men cannot finaUy acquire. This is the knowledge, beyond a shadow of doubt, of who their children are. In attributing to Hester this same doubt of parental connection, and in having her nonetheless enact, with fuU devotion, despite die absence of total knowledge, the role of parent , Hawthorne, I suggested, creates in Hester die kind of moral skeptic who is, for him, the foundation of a moral society. But in having Hester ask a question that mothers, unlike fathers, perhaps need never ask, Hawthorne casts Hester's skepticism in decidedly male terms. The Portrait of a Lady seems to me simultaneously to inherit Hawtiiorne's insight and perpetuate his error. Indeed, it is as if Isabel picks up where Pearl leaves off, to discover for herself, in the old world, what Hester has learned in the new: the impUcations of traditional patriarchal societies. But if Isabel is Pearl's descendant, she is also Hester's double, as Pansy is a substitute for Pearl. And it is in the depiction of the mother-daughter relationship, I think, diat die two novels achieve tiieir most compelting interrelationship. What links Hester and Isabel is not simply that both of them combat die identity-effacing conventions of patriarchal societies. Rather, both of them achieve their briUiant selfhoods Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 155 and phUosophical power because of dieir love for their daughters. In Hester's case, this means the love for her iUegitimate cluld, who is both the cause of her tragic relationship to society and another potential victim of its power. For Isabel this love is for a daughter who is also iUegitimate, through no adultery of her own—though Isabel's feeling that she has "deceived" her husband makes her an adulteress of sorts. This daughter is also only iUegitimately hers, a stepchild and not a biological offspring. Like Pearl, Pansy marks die mystery that, in James's account, as in Hawthorne's, mothers, Uke fathers, can never understand and must, therefore, finaUy be aUowed to remain mysterious. This is the mystery of the child's biological relation to the parent. Ultimately, it is the mystery of love itself, which, as James dramatizes it in the novel, is, for the woman, the mystery of her own sexual being. Though it remains unasked in The Portrait, the question that generates the action here is precisely analogous to the question that generates the action in The Scarlet Letter: whose...