The Reluctant Patriarch: A Study of The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Awkward Age

The Reluctant Patriarch: A Study of The Portrait of a Lady^ The Bostonians, and The Awkward Age by M. Giulia Fabi, University of California, Berkeley We hear much of the jealousy and scorn of women among themselves. It is not often that we are reminded of the quickly-flashing capacity for passionate attraction and generous devotion which renders the relation of woman to woman one of the most subtle in the world, and one exposed most to the chance of what we call romantic episodes. (Phelps 164) Female rituals of manipulation and betrayal resulting in patterns of disempowerment and enclosure characterize Henry James's fictional treatment of his heroines in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Awkward Age (1899). While the first two novels belong to what Nina Baym describes as James's "early phase, when his fiction often dealt with current social material" (195), the third can be considered in many respects a technically "experimental" revision of The Portrait of a Lady (Perosa 5).1 Through these three novels, all portraying ostensibly supportive female friendships, I will trace the development of James's critique of the new woman, which is indicative of his participation in the cultural attempt to contain the social upheaval of the post-Civil War era she emblematizes, as well as symptomatic of what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call "a complex of late Victorian anxieties that were exacerbated not just by the battle of the sexes... but also by a series of other key cultural changes" (Sexchanges 7). In particular, I will focus on the relationships that Isabel, Olive, and Nanda establish with other women (Pansy, Verena, Aggie) who function as their alter egos, as the embodiments of those very qualities the heroines have rebelled against but that they still recognize as prototypically feminine. The creation of increasingly morally complex female-dominated environments is instrumental in what Mark Seltzer terms "the double The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 1-18 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The Henry James Review discourse" of James "by which power is at once exercised and screened" (18). The novelist both underwrites patriarchal domination and exercises it on a narrative level by reinscribing power in the "nominally nonpolitical" networks of interpersonal relationships (Seltzer 156), as well as by focusing on female betrayal as the cause of the failed quests for self-fulfillment of Isabel, Olive, and Nanda. James thus mystifies the sociopolitical reasons for such failure, namely the generalized female condition of institutional powerlessness and the effects of the patriarchal socialization of women. These are the fatal, albeit unexposed flaws that neutralize the heroines' exceptionally fortunate circumstances (combining achieved or promised economic independence and the lack of direct parental control) and that make their defeat inevitable. The three novels enact their heroines' process of psychological education and acquisition of what Nancy Miller has termed "worldliness" through direct interpersonal confrontations that do not result in a heightened awareness of the larger societal mechanisms of patriarchal control.2 Rather, experience leads them to a rather contradictory blend of fatalistic renunciation, acceptance of their ghettoization in the private sphere, and practical exercise of covert influence for personal gain that leaves institutional male domination largely unchallenged. While Seltzer's identification of James's double discourse helps explain the perplexing fate of his heroines and provides a more efficacious interpretive tool than the traditional glorification of the novelist's "fundamental ambiguities" (Ward 39), it still does not totally account for the baffling contrast between the unreserved analysis of recondite human motivations and the ensuing claustrophobic, though technically open-ended, conclusions of James's novels.3 The disturbing quality of the endings of The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Awkward Age, I will argue, grows in the interstice between the imagination and the ideology of the writer. This space is not so much a locus for infinite alternative ambiguous readings (if not in terms of speculations about the future, extra-textual life of the characters) as for the critical self-awareness of the writer who resents the necessity as well as the limitations of any ideological stance. Goodwood's last reflections, Verena 's final tears, and Mr...