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  • Substantive Sexuality: Henry James Constructs Isabel Archer as a Complete Woman in His Revised Version of The Portrait of a Lady
  • Bonnie L. Herron

“Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile” is Mr. James’ description of his heroine; and it is about the clearest view we get of the young lady. (Oliphant 657)

Individual as Isabel is in the painting, one may fairly take her as representative of womanly life today.

(Scudder 652)

Critical responses in England and America to Henry James’s The Portrait Of A Lady, which first appeared in serialized form from October 1880 to November 1881 in MacMillan’s Magazine and from November 1880 to December 1881 in the Atlantic Monthly, reflect the success of James’s uniquely ambiguous gender construction of Isabel Archer; she barely acknowledges her submerged sexuality. James brushes over Isabel’s sexuality in these first characterizations of her; he forgoes centering on her physical description in order to concentrate almost solely on her mind. Horace Scudder feels that Isabel’s “subtle weakness” and “the apparent helplessness of her ultimate position” represent women’s lives “under current conditions” (652). He accepts James’s portrait of Isabel as complete. Margaret Oliphant, however, objects to James’s characterization, which is not body-centered in the way she would like. She calls for an explanation of Isabel’s ability to reduce “gentlemen who meet her into instant subjection in the course of half an hour” (657). Oliphant feels that the scanty physical descriptions of Isabel are not sufficient to transmit to readers the womanly traits that evoke such [End Page 131] devotion from the males who surround her. For Oliphant, Isabel’s portrait is incomplete because Isabel’s physicality is not representative of a complete woman.

From these two responses to the early Portrait, we see that these critics differ in a way that must have pleased James. The European critic calls for a heightened impression of Isabel whereas the American critic is satisfied with James’s surface view of Isabel, with her “missing” physical characteristics and sexual thoughts. We will see in this paper that James considers the spirit of criticism such as Oliphant’s when he revises Isabel’s character to construct a much more sensual, womanly Isabel in the 1908 New York Edition of this work. Rather than providing a greater degree of physical detail, however, James manipulates narrative mode and language to depict Isabel’s increased sexual awareness through her consciousness. In this way, he rounds out her characterization to provide a more complete portrait while he maintains his aim of focusing on her consciousness.

In spite of these enhancements to Isabel’s character in 1908, F. R. Leavis aligns himself with Oliphant’s argument when he observes that James creates an incomplete portrait of Isabel as compared to George Eliot’s characterization of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda. Without differentiating between the original and the revised versions of Isabel, Leavis faults James’s gender and culture, whereas he says that Eliot is able, “unlimited by masculine partiality of vision and only the more perceptive because a woman, to achieve a much completer presentment of her subject than James of his” (87). Leavis also implies that James’s delicacy—“James is a gentleman”—would excuse him from discussing explicitly Isabel’s sexual appeal or her sexual awareness (93). Leavis fails to entertain the possibility that James intentionally omits many of her physical characteristics in order to position readers within Isabel’s mind. Thus, readers are able to avoid the fate of the males in the novel, who are “subjugated” by her physical charms.

In this paper, by comparing James’s substantive textual variants within significant passages of the 1880 MacMillan’s Portrait and the 1908 New York Edition, I examine Isabel Archer’s characterization with two aims. First, I illustrate that while James revises his characterization in keeping with his original intention to center the reader’s attention on her mind, this does not prevent him from presenting to readers, through the rhetorical device of free indirect discourse, a sexually charged depiction of the 1908 Isabel. 1 Second, I show that James changes his use...

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