The Myth of America in The Portrait of a Lady

The Myth of America in The Portrait of a Lady by Leon Edel, Honolulu Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady had its hundredth birthday in 1981. It starts its second century by being in print around the world—in die United States and Britain in its variant texts—and more widely translated than at any time in its existence. Oxford has included it in its "World Classics" and in American literature it stands beside The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick (which was largely out of print for many years). In recent years, it has acquired a particular distinction as die first major "feminist" work of modern times, an American artistic successor to George Eliot's fictions, which dwelt most often on troubled and worldly heroines. In writing die novel, James sought to place his "portrait" in me great fictional gallery of modern ladies—among portraits of women like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, or the heroines of Jane Austen or die Brontes, or the young women of Thackeray or Trollope. Most of them sought, in a world mat denied them equality, forms of freedom from being simply parties in marriage contracts. James's ironic intention was to lift Isabel Archer out of me marriage market by endowing her widi the largest measure of freedom; he wished to demonstrate also the prohibitions and boundaries that society nevertheless imposed on her. "The idea of me whole thing," he wrote in his notebooks, "is that the poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom and nobleness, who has done, as she believes, a generous, natural, clear-sighted thing, finds herself in reality ground in the very mill of die conventional" (CN 13). James seems to have had another intention as well. This was to paint Isabel within a "mytii" of America. In one of his early letters to W. D. Howells about his prospective novel he remarked, "My novel is to be an Americana—me adventures in Europe of a female Newman, who of course equally triumphs over the insolent foreigner" (HJL II, 72). This conception of Isabel as an "Americana"—a female counterpart to his hero of The American, Christopher Newman—permits us to ask ourselves: In what way did she, in her creator's imagination, become one of his "representative" Americans? His first novel had dealt with die fate of an American sculptor in Rome; his second had been the story of an American businessman who goes to Paris in search of a wife. Christopher Newman had decidedly been enveloped in certain American myths—a teller of "tall tales" (Rourke 238-65), at ease with himself, and carrying his native world witii him into foreign lands. Isabel Archer's personality was modified in the writing of die novel; she became, as James again told Howells, "a great swell, psychologically: a grande nature" (HJL II, 97). He endowed her with many American qualities and many American beliefs. In examining diese, it should be possible for us to discern the American mytii or mydis mat were in the background of her author's mind. The direct use of recorded mydis in a literary work offers no particular problem for criticism. James Joyce made no secret that his Ulysses was an Odyssey in Dublin: and his text amply demonstrated me wanderings of Leopold Bloom. What he kept secret, but leaked to the critics, was his plan for using episodes diat paralleled me adventures of Ulysses. Thomas Mann's Joseph series is drawn directly from die Old Testament story. The indirect or implied use of mytii, such as we find in James's American and in The Portrait of a Lady, calls for a "dissecting out" of die mydiological themes. Mircea Eliade, the eminent authority on myth, suggests mis to us when he speaks of the modern novel taking the place "of the recitation of myths in traditional and popular societies." He adds that in modern fiction there has been "a literary survival of great mythological themes and characters" and these, as he says, need to be "dissected out" (191-92). Such dissection is not easy, and there are many scholars whose delight in the "literal" makes tiiem turn away from what is implied...