In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • I Don’t Like Isabel Archer
  • Marc Bousquet

I DON’T LIKE ISABEL ARCHER. I never have liked her, and I’m always surprised when other people admire her. She seems to me selfish, naive, ill-attuned to the feelings of others despite her education, an emblem of caprice and poor judgment—at best emergently admirable at the end of the novel, after the ordeals that transform her into Mrs. Gilbert Osmond.

The on-screen Isabel Archer (she never matures in the Campion film into a Mrs. Gilbert Osmond, retaining in the final shot that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look of injured innocence) also struck me as trivial. “Isabel is strong but she is so vulnerable at the same time,” remarked Nicole Kidman during a publicity interview, “and I love that” (Polygram).

The slightness of this characterization doesn’t argue against the film; like Henry James, Campion puts the emptiness of her leading vessel to good use.

Campion’s Next Movie?

Shortly after the release of Portrait, Nicole Kidman let it be known that she had acquired the rights to Susannah Moore’s In the Cut (1996), which she expected to develop into another film with Campion (Hoge 1). Should it make it to the screen, this “erotic thriller” will produce a role for Kidman markedly reminiscent of her appearance as the femme-fatale schoolteacher of Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. The heroine of this explicit but otherwise unremarkable novel becomes sexually involved with a police officer, leading to some fairly predictable deployments of handcuffs, but—and the novel insists on the heroine’s peculiarity in this regard—doesn’t wish to form a lasting relationship with the fellow. As the cover of the paperback edition breathlessly reports, this is one creative-writing teacher who “likes being on her own just as much as she likes sex, and she makes no bones about it.”

For some viewers, this blurb does a pretty good job of describing Campion’s idea of Isabel Archer (or her sense of Isabel Archer’s unrealized ideal, what Archer [End Page 197] ought to have been free to be in a differently-organized world). The scenes of the film attracting the most attention are those which elaborate the heroine’s erotic life, creating an Isabel who experiences gender oppression largely as sexual repression. Her eruptive fantasies and more-than-cousinly necking tell us that she is unfree in that her desires are restrained: Campion invests ethical value in her male characters to the exact degree that they accept her desire as multiple and mobile. Moral good in this movie means working for erotic liberty, perhaps just the sort articulated postcoitally by Susanna Moore’s heroine. “The desire for separation. I wanted to be alone in my bed, and he wanted to be gone, and neither of us minded, eager now for dissolution, not union” (133). Her Isabel’s restless world-traveling offers an analogy to, and inferior satisfaction of, her errant libido.

The Summer of Love

I personally find this equation of self-determination and wide-ranging desire irritating—probably because I belong to a generation which has been asked to make do with zipless fucking as a substitute for economic rights. We are mobile sexually, and we are also—involuntarily—mobile economically, gypsy labor constantly on the move at the beck of the immense wealth of the baby boom.

James makes Isabel interesting by giving her property. Without her cousin’s bequest, she is just like “millions of presumptuous girls”—the jeune fille or “mere young thing” still “lacking much of the impress that constitutes an identity” (EW 1076–79). The situation is unique. The character, James insists (perhaps a bit too forcefully after all), is not.

Campion’s film has it the other way around. She takes Isabel’s economic independence for granted. (Most Hollywood films do the same, engaging a culture which thinks about class only by using the language of race.) Campion and Kidman collaborate to present Archer as a prototype of Today’s Woman, on her own and liking it a century before her time. They need the period setting. It does the work of fabricating a uniqueness...

Share