Verbal Clues in The Portrait of a Lady: A Note in Defense of Isabel Archer

VERBAL CLUES IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY: A NOTE IN DEFENSE OF ISABEL ARCHER Harriet Blodgett* Henry James's Portrait seems increasingly to attract unmerited attacks on Isabel's shortcomings and confident assertions of James's distaste for his heroine. To Robert W. Stallman, for example, Isabel is but "a pretentious and shallow creature duped by her own presumptuous ideas"; to William Bysshe Stein, an intentional object lesson in the frigidity of American women; to Lisa Appignanesi, a figure of limited consciousness who becomes as inflexible as a portrait. Yet it used to be claimed more defensibly, by Dorothy Van Ghent, that Isabel illustrates the spiritual principle which makes losing one's life the way to find it. Cornelia Pulsifer Kelly similarly saw Isabel achieving a moral victory in defeat, and David Daiches was certain that she justified and redeemed herself in the course of the book.1 The text of the first American edition (1881), with its provocatively abrupt ending , is laced with paired verbal clues to James's intentions which sustain these more traditional assumptions of Isabel's worth. That James considered verbal clues valuable is evident in his wellknown manipulation of persons and places in the Portrait. He even duplicates phrases, sometimes in a barefaced manner, to guide his readers. Thus, for example, he arranges matters so that Pansy, upon first appearance in the novel, like Serena Merle upon her entry, "has no faults,"2 in order to alert one to some special connection between the two. (More subtly, in the New York edition of 1908, Serena "hasn't a fault" [III, 277].) One is furthermore conscious throughout of the manifold permutations James effects on the terms freedom and lady because his book is to test the validity of Isabel's notions of freedom and to try her capacity to behave like an aristocrat of the spirit. His verbal dexterity results in a tightly woven fabric bearing a single design, and some of the strongest threads in this design are James's verbal parallelisms: thematic repetitions of the same or similar phrases or images to portray Isabel as she slowly develops into the lady that the 'Harriet Blodgett is a Lecturer in English end Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her publications include Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bowen's Noveh (1975) and several articles on British novelists. This essay is her first venture into American literature. 28Harriet Blodgett book's title promises. Although James was to make extensive verbal changes in his text for the New York edition, exerting himself to make more evident, more detailed, or more subtle what he had composed in 1881, he considered these repetitions significant enough to retain them with their substance, and usually their very phrasing, unchanged.3 James uses parallel images to externalize, at times obviously enough, the state of Isabel's mind. When Isabel is being wooed by Gilbert Osmond in her ugly hotel in Rome, she sits by a lamp covered with pink tissue-paper which "diffused a strange pale rosiness over the scene" (p. 269). There follows the romanticized scene in which Isabel, appropriately to this period in her life, views Osmond through the rosecolored lenses James has predicted. That Isabel is simultaneously holding a volume of M. Ampere given her by Ralph, Stallman sees as a circumstance "having to do presumably with electric current" which both Ralph and Isabel lack.4 But actually, Jean-Jacques Ampere simply wrote a history of Rome (L'Histoire romaine a Rome, published 1861-64) which was an eminently suitable book for Ralph to present to his intellectual-tourist cousin. It is the rosy light, rather, which is significant. For the reader is to see that light again (always in the same words in both editions), even after Isabel's somber reflections in Chapter 42, because some of her sentimental illusions do remain temporarily intact. Chapter 43 brings her tete-a-tete with Lord Warburton at the German ball, where the two have retired to a "sort of boudoir pervaded by a subdued, rose-coloured light" (p. 388). Here Isabel yields to her own romantic hopes for Edward Rosier (himself inclined to see love in rose-colored terms...