The Marriages of Henry James and Henrietta Stackpole

The Marriages of Henry James and Henrietta Stackpole Elise Miller, University of California, Davis I am unlikely ever to marry. . . . One's attitude toward marriage is a fact—the most characteristic part doubtless of one's general attitude toward life. ... If I were to marry I should be guilty in my own eyes of inconsistency—I should pretend to think quite a little better of life than I really do.1 James knew that the institution of marriage mirrors many of the forms and functions of the novel. And if he privately lamented the gap between marital ideals and practices, he certainly, as a novelist, exploited the way the institution embodies conflicts between self and community, romance and realism, freedom and conformity.2 Marriage functions for James as a social and literary structure that, as Richard Poirier has argued, "provides the central dramatic circumstances in response to which every major character in the early novels expresses the degree to which he finds the offerings of daily experience equivalent to his desires and ideals" (253). Nowhere does James betray his ambivalence about marriage more explicitly than in The Portrait of a Lady. One cannot write about marriage without focusing on female characters, so we must turn to Isabel Archer and the other women in the novel to understand James's conflicts about marriage as a cultural and literary convention. Like the American girl of so many of James's novels, Isabel searches for identity and purpose in the context of the sexual, psychological and cultural dimensions of marriage. As Isabel's potential for happiness becomes entangled with her prospects for marriage, James reveals a paradox at the center of a female protagonist 's fate. Within the boundaries of James's text, Isabel creates a self in a process that is bounded by father/family, on the one hand, and husband/children, on the other. Much of the novel is explicitly devoted to Isabel's quest for experience , independence and freedom from the traditions governing a young woman's behavior in the nineteenth century. But this quest, which has been understood by many critics in terms of its Emersonian idealism, can also be seen as taking place in an artificial, arbitrary field of action. James's novel is thus a portrait of a girl becoming a self, and then losing that self in marriage. But it would be inaccurate to see the novel simply as a plot against Isabel, or as a dramatization of the double binds a young woman confronts when she strives to avoid the domestication of self by marriage. James's desire to document the realities of nineteenth-century culture is tempered by his Emersonian ideals 16 The Henry James Review for Isabel, and complicated by a character we usually think of as minor, even irrelevant—Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta not only plays a much larger role than critics and readers have generally assumed, but she also provides an important clue to James's ambivalence about marriage.3 While James observes the way nineteenth-century culture plots against Isabel's Emersonian dreams of identity and freedom, he also provides a counterplot in the foibles and machinations of Henrietta. While he shows how Isabel is ultimately bound by cultural ideals about marriage and feminine identity, he also permits Henrietta to question and disrupt them. Henrietta functions as an important counterpoint to the plots James sets into motion around Isabel. The preface warns us that Henrietta will somehow not fit comfortably within the plan and plot of James's novel.4 Like Madame Merle, Ralph Touchett, and Isabel's many suitors, Henrietta Stackpole belongs "to the group of attendants and entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a party; they represent the contract for carrying the party on." But James's "relation with" Henrietta gives him more than he bargained for. His young American journalist, James confesses in the preface, "exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal." The "extravagance" of Henrietta's "direct appeal to the intelligence" makes James ask, "why then, in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably...