Framing James's Portrait: An Introduction

Framing James's Portrait: An Introduction by Daniel Mark Fogel, Louisiana State University In many respects the reader duplicates Isabel Archer's experience, but always with the difference that the reader is conscious of the ways in which others, including the narrator, manipulate Isabel, and always with the forevision, so long in coming to her, that Isabel's career will not be happy. We learn early on that Isabel "became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly that will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity" (PL 95). Even so, James's narrator intends his presentation of Isabel to disarm "scientific criticism" and "to awaken on the reader's part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant" (PL 54). The very "appeal to charity" is the narrator's, and he succeeds insofar as many readers identify with Isabel in her innocence and savor the bitterness of its loss. Henry James's preface to the New York Edition of the novel suggests that, when he revised the novel in 1906-1907, he, too, in the process of rereading duplicated Isabel's adventure. Even for first readers of The Portrait of a Lady, the question of how to regard Isabel Archer becomes increasingly tangled as the novel unfolds, disclosing more and more the complex ambivalence of the narrator's view of her and, even more, of the author's. We might conjecture that the problem arises from the identity of author and heroine, so that his criticism of her and his commitment to her are intimately tied up in his sense of himself. I do not mean that Henry James and Isabel Archer are identifiable in any crude sense. We have long known, however, that there are some points of identity, particularly that James drew closely on autobiographical materials for his description of Isabel's Albany childhood. Something of James is no doubt in many of his characters, including also, in this novel, Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond. But that his own readerly experience of the novel was one of sympathy with Isabel above all seems clear from the preface of 1905, in which the traces of his participation in Isabel's experience are unmistakable. The preface is to be sure many things: an autobiographical reminiscence of the circumstances of James's composition of the novel; a reminiscence also of the "beautiful genius" of Turgenev; a plea for James's method of treating his subject in The Portrait of a Lady; and a plea also for critical discrimination. But above all it is a record of the novelist's experience in rereading and reseeing his novel, a retrospective record set down after he finished the revision that the preface introduces. Read as such, the preface strikes me as remarkable for the way in which James's commentary suggests his imaginative collaboration in Isabel Archer's way of seeing and in her sense of value. The language of his preface is complicitous with the very conceptions and predilections that constitute his heroine's most severe liabilities. Isabel's tragedy arises from her blindness and her pride—the blindness and pride of youth, of innocence , and of inexperience, but also, more precisely, the blind, presumptuous side of an Emersonianism that cannot conceive of any limitation to the transcendental self, any more than it can imagine genuine evil. Thus, "she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action" (PL 54). "Her nature," moreover, "had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses" (PL 56). Keeping these phrases in mind, ought one not to hear an echo of them in James's visit to the recesses of his own imagination in the preface? Quite as interesting as the young woman herself, at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter...