A Woman in The Portrait of a Lady

A Woman in The Portrait of a Lady by Joseph Wiesenfarth, University of Wisconsin-Madison "God has made me better man a lady. He has made me a woman.' —Anthony Trollope, Marion Fay Many things make Middlemarch an important novel. George Eliot's blending of the elements of gothic fiction with those of the novel of manners is not least among diem. She makes a tiioroughly respectable clergyman, Edward Casaubon, by virtue of his starched notions of correct conduct, into a monster who crunches bones in a cavern; she makes a respectable society wife, Rosamond Vincy, by virtue of her ladylike ways, into a basil plant that feeds on a murdered man's brains; she makes a respectable banker, Nicholas Bulstrode, by virtue of his calling as God's instrument, into die Old Nick of die novel. These tiiree prominent characters in Middlemarch dramatize die horror of good manners. They expose the bankruptcy of a myth of social concern founded on nothing more than respectability— that "Damocles sword," as Carlyle called it, tiiat hangs "forever over . . . poor English life"—when it confronts a myth of individual freedom founded on a love of justice. Middlemarch engages to show how a gothic tradition tiiat centers on deatii can become psychologically ghasdy when it appropriates a manners tradition that centers on life. For characteristically the novel of manners centers on what Plato defined as die cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—and die gothic novel centers on what the Apocalypse presents as die last tilings: deatii, judgment, heaven, and hell. Henry James learned a variety of things from his reading and study of George Eliot's fiction; and The Portrait of a Lady shows tiiat what he learned from Middlemarch, especially, was a sense of gothic manners, a sense of the horror of respectability. He saw how ladies and gentlemen, by tiieir insistence on a total adherence to socially accepted norms of conduct, became horrible human beings. The Portrait of a Lady presents a trenchant critique of a culture and civilization that have come to prize formalism over life. As an exposé of gothic manners, die novel makes its finest lady, Madame Merle, a damned soul, and its finest gentieman, Gilbert Osmond, a devil. In his search for alternatives to such a lady and such a gentieman, James hit upon a man and a woman; he hit upon Ralph Touchett and Isabel Archer. But to tell their story differently from the way Eliot told hers of Ladislaw and Dorothea, James chose to emphasize Isabel's consciousness and sensibility more exclusively than Eliot did Dorotiiea's. He had tiierefore to focus his attention and ours on a woman in TAe Portrait of a Lady. That choice made his novel a searching indictment of gotiiic manners at the same time that it made it a telling permutation on die kind of fiction that George Eliot invented in Middlemarch. The Portrait of a Lady presents a case requiring careful study and a nice discrimination. It asks how a woman can give up being a girl to become a lady witiiout giving up being herself. It examines how a woman does justice to her self Divided into two parts, Isabel Archer's story is that of a girl in chapters 1 to 34 and tiiat of a lady in chapters 35 to 55. James almost exclusively calls Isabel a "girl" in the early chapters of the novel, and this is what Isabel calls herself until she becomes Mrs. Osmond. "I've never been so nice to you, as a girl," she tells Ralph Touchett on the eve of her marriage, "that you should have much reason for wishing me to remain one" (PL ch. 34, 342). '"There's nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—person she likes,' said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic" (PL ch. 34, 344). After she marries the person she likes, Ralph visits her in Rome and finds tiiat "the free, keen girl had become quite anodier person; what he saw was the fine lady who was supposed to represent" Gilbert Osmond. "Good heavens, what a function," Ralph woefully exclaims (PL ch. 39, 393). The girl who once upon...