Chapter 42 in Henry James’s ThePortrait of a Lady (1880–1881) embodies an important “chapter” in the development of early modernism. In that chapter, Isabel sits by the fire and reflects on her circumstances. Her roving impressions of her feelings for her husband take precedence over her actions, actions so keenly anticipated by the male characters in the beginning of the novel. Chapter 42 focuses entirely on her interior, unfolding consciousness:“She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation”(360). For the first time, Isabel experiences insight, seeing her house of suffocation from various points of view. The chapter is a hallmark of experiments in focalization to come, both by James and later modernists, who would focus on the active minds of characters in trapped conditions. For example, in TS Eliot’s 1915 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock tragically cannot speak or participate in social life, but he compensates with a rich interior, reflective practice on his alienated condition. Prufrock’s question “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?”(lines 45–46) becomes an important intertext in Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, as Roberta Trites observes in the opening of her book Disturbing the Universe. Trites traces a direct line of descent between modernism and novel studies