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"Unseen Place[s]," Unlifted Corners: Portrait's Narrative Gaps
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 42, Number 2, Spring 2021
- pp. 98-111
- 10.1353/hjr.2021.0012
- Article
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Abstract:
James skips two significant temporal intervals of Isabel Archer's story: her formative year of travel, and the first three years of her marriage—the more studied ellipsis of The Portrait of a Lady. This essay takes the earlier ellipsis, James's sidestepping Isabel's year of travel—including her acceptance of Gilbert Osmond's proposal—as a case study for examining the novelist's use of both temporal and non-temporal narrative gaps, or ellipses and paralipses, to borrow the terms of Gérard Genette's narratology. James, I argue by reading (and re-reading) chapter 31 of Portrait, realizes his idea for the novel through its gaps.