"The Candlestick and the Snuffers": Some Thoughts on The Portrait of a Lady

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive;

(Browning, “My Last Duchess” ll. 1–2)

Candlestick and Snuffers

Toward the end of The Portrait of a Lady, a curious conversation takes place between Gilbert Osmond and Caspar Goodwood in the “warm rich-looking reception room” of Palazzo Roccanera. Osmond (who despises Ralph Touchett and desperately envies Lord Warburton) has decided to patronize Caspar Goodwood. He unfolds to the stiff American his own version of the “conjugal harmony” of the Osmond family, presumably to paint a trompe l’oeil of marital bliss; Osmond is an expert at this art. In the midst of his patent, treacly lies about his relationship with Isabel he makes an unconsciously revelatory comment: “We’re as united,” he remarks, “as the candlestick and the snuffers” (PL II, 309). The image jumps off the page (despite Osmond’s attempted obfuscation) as a clear symbol of the Osmond marriage. What could be more obvious, in this “house of darkness” into which Isabel Archer, “the child of light,” has fallen: Isabel is the bright candle that Osmond has snuffed. And yet, once the symbol has established itself in the reader’s mind, the Jamesian ambiguity of the image raises a host of questions. Does the phallic candle/candlestick really represent Isabel, or does Osmond see himself as the snuffed one in this relationship? Are the symbols of light and darkness that provide the milieu for the candlestick and the snuffers that cut and dried; in other words, is Isabel the light and Osmond the darkness? Or does the image express a much more complex situation and relationship?

The answers to some of these questions lead us back through the novel, back through the images of light and darkness to a reevaluation of the characters and the relationship of Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond. We need to see how Isabel is deceived by Osmond’s mask, a mask that everyone else (more or less) sees through, and how that mask is threatened by Isabel. Finally, we must see how the final portrait of a lady is bifurcated in the Osmond marriage.

Child of Light

The dropping of the daylight in the West, (Browning, “My Last Duchess” l. 26)

Isabel is presented initially as a creature of sunshine whose perception is “clear” (Chap. 2) and who believes that one “should move in a realm of light” and of “happy impulse” (Chap. 6).... This fine American girl, so hopeful-seeming and expansive, determined to “regard the world as a place of brightness” (Chap. 6) nevertheless finds herself attracted to the equivocal golden air of Gilbert Osmond’s “early autumn” (Chap. 29)....Isabel Archer—perversely, as it would seem—turns away from the light (as she will do on the last page of the novel) and walks steadily into the dusk

(Porte 5).

This is a fairly representative example of how the images of light and darkness have been seen in The Portrait of a Lady. James himself helped along this perception of the novel with his description of Isabel Archer in the preface: “the girl hovers, inextinguishable” (PL I, xvi). In fact, a careful reading of the novel reveals this neat symbolic structure to be an illusion. From the beginning, Isabel’s association with light is, at best, ambiguous. In the house in Albany where we meet her first, we find that “left to herself for the evening she sat a while under the lamp, her hands empty, her usual avocations unheeded. Then she rose and moved about the room, and from one room to another, preferring the places where the vague lamplight expired” (PL I, 41). What is suggested here (and elsewhere in the novel) is a fascination with the darkness as much as, if not more than, an association with light.

Charles Anderson has pointed out that all (or most) of the “vistas”—significant pictorial images—of the novel take place in the waning afternoon or twilight, a curious discovery in a novel examining the future possibilities of a beautiful young lady at the beginning...