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Few of James’s novels have generated as much reader frustration as The Portrait of a Lady. While Isabel’s final decision to return to Osmond famously had such supportive contemporary readers as Grace Norton confessing to having thrown the book across the room in vexation, our collective irritation today at what seems like James’s distinctly perverse refusal to allow us a satisfying narrative ending manifests itself only slightly less hysterically in the growing plethora of competing critical interpretations seeking to explain—and thereby in part to mitigate—Isabel’s controversial decision. Leaving aside for the moment certain formal similarities that will be discussed later on, my suggestion will be that it is not so much perversion on James’s part but, rather, his attempt to represent an ethical act that leads him to resolve the novel in this contentious way. Granted, a concern with the ethical dimension of Isabel’s story is nothing new. We find this expressed both thematically—few other James characters, after all, are as fascinated with the unfolding of their ethical development as Isabel Archer,—and in its encircling critical interpretations where the novel has been understood for the most part in terms of a narrative of aesthetic/ethical education: as a female Bildungsroman. For a significant number of critics, Isabel’s final decision to return to Osmond is best comprehended as the result of an ethical widening of perspective produced by her experience of suffering that finally enables her to integrate herself more fully into the communal body and take up a socially responsible role as Pansy’s mother. But even when critics trope Isabel’s 1 1 Portrait of an Act Representation and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady return rather more negatively on the ethical spectrum—Dorothea Krook, for example, for whom Isabel’s return is discovered to result from her sexual fear of Goodwood—the prevailing tendency in the reception of The Portrait of a Lady has been to try to produce a convincing reason for the interminably vexed question of why it is that Isabel returns to the “house of suffocation.”1 Given our ongoing failure to achieve critical consensus through such an approach, I propose that it is time now to head in the opposite direction . Rather than advocating yet another empirical or, as Kant would say, pathological reason for Isabel’s decision, I will suggest that it is only by understanding her choice as intentionally empty—that is, made deliberately without reference to empirical considerations—that we can begin to approach the specifically ethical dimension of her act. Before exploring the ethical implications of her act, however, let us simply note the extent to which the question of ethics has reasserted itself in the past couple of decades. As Lawrence Buell puts it in his introduction to a special PMLA issue on Ethics and Literary Study, ethics is rapidly becoming “the paradigm-defining concept [of the 1990s] that textuality was for the 1970s and historicism for the 1980s.”2 The origins of this “revival of ethics” are many, of course, but we can identify some of the major moments marking this shift that can be loosely grouped as follows: the continuing interrogation of the political and ethical implications of deconstruction, as witnessed by Jacques Derrida’s recent works addressing more overtly “political” concerns, as well as his dialogues on ethics with Emmanuel Levinas; the critical legacy of Michel Foucault, whose examination of the discursive constructions of subjectivity has been invaluable in reorienting criticism toward the critiques of ideology and the construction of the “other” that the studies of gender, class, and race have adopted as their mandate; the politicizing of psychoanalytic concepts by the so-called new Lacanians, such as Slavoj Z+iz=ek and Joan Copjec, and their concomitant focus of attention on Lacan’s Ethics and Encore Seminars in formulating a concept of an “ethics of psychoanalysis.”3 What is common to each of these diverse critical practices is that they are all in one way or another concerned with critiquing what has come to be called the “metaphysics of presence,” whose founding principle is the philosophical concept of identity . Thus Levinas’s philosophical concern to found an ethics of alterity on the Other shares with more deliberately “politically” oriented theory an interest in finding ways of relating to otherness that do not involve the violent subsumption of difference to identity. 2 Acting Beautifully [3.138.34.158] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 14...
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