East Angels : Constance Fenimore Woolson's Revision of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

Although she positioned herself playfully as an "admiring aunt" in late nineteenth-century literary society, Constance Fenimore Woolson was a deeply involved member of that society, interacting with and openly critiquing the writing of her male and female peers.¹ Of Woolson's relationship to her male literary counterparts, Joan Myers Weimer observes, "Her response to Cooper, James, and other male literary giants was as critical and analytical as it was admiring; by appropriating and transforming some of their key images and themes, she critiqued and revised their work" (x). Woolson's relationship to James, however, draws the most interest and has been the most difficult to characterize adequately. While Cheryl B. Torsney recognizes the unfortunate fact that "Woolson's works have been read, even by her champions, as the ash from which the Jamesian phoenix rises" (20), she corrects this appraisal of James's female peer, suggesting that Woolson and James should be regarded instead as "part of the same textual fabric" (35). Regarding one's ability to inspire the other, a more reciprocal relationship seems to have existed between Woolson and James than was once supposed.

In terms of the former's writing, perhaps the most important aspect of the relationship they maintained at the end of the nineteenth century was Woolson's incorporation of her critiques and revisions of James's fiction into her own. Joanne F. Vickers, for instance, has located in Woolson's "The Street of the Hyacinth" a vindication of the American heroine whom she finds indicted in James's Daisy Miller. Similarly, Torsney reads Woolson's Anne for its relation to James's The Portrait of a Lady, discovering that "they focus on similar themes yet produce gender-inflected results" (35). Published concurrently, Anne and Portrait may be examined for evidence of concerns that were common to two writers composing at about the same time.

In 1886, five years after Portrait appeared, though, Woolson published East Angels, a novel that also bears several similarities to James's masterpiece. My purpose here is to examine these similarities in order to discover the retrospective critique of James's Portrait that underlies Woolson's text. One might argue that the two novels portray late-century women in essentially identical predicaments; a reader cannot miss the similarities between the marriages of James's Isabel Archer and Woolson's Margaret Harold. I would suggest, however, that East Angels embodies Woolson's efforts to critique James's portrayal of his heroine's struggle to cope with a patriarchal social order. Specifically, Woolson creates a female character who demonstrates a femininity that includes power, self-control, and the ability to exercise authority when faced with a dilemma to which James's corresponding character seems to succumb. Further, I argue that Woolson purposefully spells out particulars that James left untreated concerning women's perplexed position in society, thereby amending to some degree James's portrayal of an American heroine.

Admittedly, Portrait and East Angels arise from very different milieus: James's novel is set in the comparatively stable social fabric of the Old World; Woolson's in a declining, postbellum society in Florida. Additionally, Woolson's development of several ethnically "other" characters contrasts markedly with James's concentration on Anglo-Saxon nobles and the near-noble bourgeoisie. Still, similarities abound. Both novels portray an encounter between two ideologically different cultures. James sends his representative American heroine to the Old World on an Emersonian quest for a direct experience (45); Woolson transplants her post-Puritan New Englanders Evert Winthrop and Margaret Harold into a Spanish-inflected remnant of the Old South. Both novels reveal a preoccupation with marriage bonds that is typical of the late-century genre. Both portray a woman vexed by an unhappy marriage, and both concentrate on her responses to her unfortunate situation. In Portrait, Isabel Archer fully realizes her marital blunder only after it is pointed out to her directly; then she maneuvers quickly at the end of the novel to cope with her circumstances. In East Angels, Margaret Harold suffers silently within her unfortunate bond, leading...