The Incredible Floating Man: Henry James's Lambert Strether

The Incredible Floating Man: Henry James's Lambert Strether by Reginald Abbott, Vanderbilt University Consider the following passage from Henry James's Preface to The Portrait of a Lady. The subject is Isabel Archer: "The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest terms of that formula, and as nearly as possible moreover into all of them" (AN 51, itahcs added). Through the first third of the novel James does keep Isabel Archer hovering. Caspar Goodwood is aware that Isabel has wings and accomplishes "beautiful free movements" (PL 160). Ralph Touche« wants to "put a little wind in her sails" (PL 181) in order to turn Isabel's aerial acrobatics into actual flight. Thus, with Isabel hovering above her admirers, consider the following: But most often, persistently and relentlessly, she [the female figure in Victorian and fin-de-siècle art] floated through the air. She floated, because to walk is to act, and to beckon a form of invitation, a way of taking charge. And to the late nineteenth-century male nothing was as unwelcome as the thought of woman—even woman as the embodiment of nature—taking charge. He wanted to be in charge, it was his right to be in charge. To him, Henry Drummond assured him, had been 'mainly assigned the fulfillment of the first great function—the Struggle for Life' (329). It was woman's appointed role, even as the personification of nature, to float weightlessly in the breeze. To float in the air was the eroticized alternative to Ophelia's watery voyage . Woman's weightlessness was still a sign of her willing—or helpless— submission, still allowed the male to remain uninvolved, still permitted him to maintain his voyeur's distance from this creature of nature, this creature that was nature, who both fascinated and frightened him. (Dijkstra 88-89) This passage is from Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Dijkstra's concept of the "weightless woman" in fin-de-siècle iconography clearly finds a representation in fin-desi ècle fiction in James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in the character of Isabel Archer.1 Along with the examples mentioned above, Isabel is also seen as "drifting away," like Ophelia, and as floating by her friend Henrietta Stackpole (PL 119, 164, 165, 166 [three times in one conversation with Isabel]), and is depicted by Ralph Touchett as dressed in the American flag—a traditionally air-bome symbol: "He drew a caricature of her in which she was represented as a very pretty young woman dressed, on the lines of the prevailing fashion, in the folds of the national banner" (PL 59). Most importantly , Isabel sees herself as floating to and floating in England: "she was, The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 176-88 01990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The Incredible Floating Man 177 as she said to herself, floated" (PL 44; see also 56). Isabel Archer's position early in the novel as a "weightless woman" is further emphasized by the presence of a "weighted woman," Madame Merle: "And yet she had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind; her manner expressed the repose and confidence which come from a large experience" (PL 174). The irony that Madame Merle (Blackbird) does not or cannot fly emphasizes the opposition of her worldly state to that of the unworldly, "weightless" Isabel. The fact that Isabel is "good" and Madame Merle is "wicked" does not have much to do with determining whether the weightless state is in itself good or bad. Indeed, in this novel James does not seem to be interested at all in the merit of the weightless state for young women or older women or in the merit (or lack thereof) of the weighted state for young or older women. What is important in the novel is that Isabel does come to earth through the efforts of Ralph Touchett. By suggesting to his father that he leave her a substantial inheritance, Ralph Touchett appears to play the role outlined by Dijkstra...