Portrait of a Lady free essay sample

First written in the 1880s and extensively revised in 1908, The Portrait of a Lady is often considered to be Jamess greatest achievement. In it, he explored many of his most characteristic themes, including the conflict between American individualism and European social custom and the situation of Americans in Europe. James proclaimed that â€Å"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent reality. † Plot was for him but the extension of character. The novel must show rather than tell — he was interested in why people did as they did, rather than simply in what they did; motive was more important than deed. assignment help auckland The observer of the dinner table and the drawing room, the country house and the salon, the library and the smoking room, James was driven, Richard Palmer Blackmur asserts, to excesses of substantiation and renunciation and refinement (in experience and morals and style). We will write a custom essay sample on Portrait of a Lady or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page If I put Blackmur’s statement more positively, I would say that James in his endless probing of character pushed the novel from pre-modernism to modernism by turning the novel inward, from an outward perspective to an inward one, and by focusing increasingly on a character’s inner life. This transition begins to take its effect with The Portrait of a Lady. Its formal brilliance makes it the pivotal, unavoidable novel of the late Victorian period, offering us crucial insights into the transition from Victorian to Modernist novel forms. Considered by many as one of the finest novels in the English language, this is Henry Jamess most poised achievement, written at the height of his fame in 1881. It is at once a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in a web of relations she only comes to understand too late. a culmination of Victorian Realism and the beginnings of the emergence of a new Modernist style that explores interior states of consciousness as well as the individuals place in society. -the novel opens up a brilliant sense of capturing the complexity of being human. -critics then and now praise its attention to psychological detail and realistic situations. In The Portrait of a Lady we have first a third-pe rson authorial narrator who tells us about Isabel, but as the narrative goes on, the focus becomes more and more set on Isabel Archer—to the point that when she ponders her situation (chapter 42). Here she ponders her misery, what is she going to do, feeling betrayed by her husband? which alternatives does she have? And that is the first time in Jamesian fiction that the narrator actually moves inward, that is, in a way we no longer have a narrator speaking about a character but it is a narrator rendering the character’s words and thoughts. That chapter in The Portrait of a Lady is really what might be called a milestone in narrative technique, because it is this moving inward, Presenting the character’s, i. . Isabel’s thoughts, emotions as she weighs her situation, what she is going to do, pondering her options. And this is all told from an inner perspective, that is, the narrator receding behind the character. So what we have here is really a step towards Modernism. From pre-Modernism to something like Proto-Modernism. Yet at the end of the chapter, the narrator—we might even say here, James—seems to have been really shocked by the revelati ons opened to him, because he withdraws and lets Isabel again stay out there. He will not return to that kind of inner perspective; rather the narrator writes about her or writes her, it is not that the narrator writes her thoughts but writes her actions. Thus, what we have in the end is a glimpse into Modernism and a hasty withdrawal to traditional techniques, as if James had been scared by the vision of an independent female character. This ending, that Isabel in a way decides to stay within social norms, within the marriage, becomes a classic move of the late 19th century. It is a withdrawal, that is she remains or James keeps her in a way tied in that world from which there is no escape. There would have been a possibility for escape. But the narrative technique did not allow for it. So in the end The portrait of the Lady is finally not a modernist novel. There is no such a thing yet as the autonomy of the character; truly an exploration of a character’s psychological frame or mind, options. In a way Isabel remains emplotted by James. Like most of Jamess fiction of the 1870s, and the majority of his writing for the rest of his career, Portrait focuses on a group of expatriate Americans in England and Europe. Leisured, cultured, but just a bit bored, Daniel Touchett and his son Ralph are idly passing their time at Daniels country estate, Gardencourt, but find themselves reenergized when Daniels all but estranged wife, Lydia, brings with her to England her niece, a beautiful and enthusiastic orphan named Isabel Archer. Isabel is everything these men are not: lively, enthusiastic, and alert, she is a less flirtatious, more thoughtful version of Daisy Miller. But this American Girl, too, has the resistance to convention that both marks the type and makes its fate so problematic; when her Aunt Lydia reproaches her for staying up late to talk to Ralph and his friend, Lord Warburton, Isabel thanks her for informing her of the social prohibition but claims that she wants this knowledge only so as to choose whether to follow it. Despite, or perhaps because of, this very American insistence on freedom of choice, Isabel attracts one suitor after another: first Lord Warburton; then her American swain, the practical-minded Caspar Goodwood; then, ambivalently and perhaps unknown to himself, the invalid Ralph. The last of these, immured in the characteristically Jamesian position of detached watching, nevertheless actively intervenes in Isabels life, convincing his father to leave her a considerable fortune in his will, so as, in his own words, to meet the requirements of her imagination—and his own. This fairy-tale–like bequest, however, leads to disaster. Falling under the influence of yet another expatriate American, Madame Merle, Isabel is maneuvered into marrying an indolent aesthete, Gilbert Osmond, a widower raising his charming young daughter, Pansy, in Florence. Isabel soon is forced to realize her mistake: Osmond, far from being the man with the best taste in the world, is a thinly disguised fortune hunter, one who seeks dominion over Isabels life and Pansys even as he uses his fortune to achieve the worldly status that he has always craved. And worse: Isabel learns that her best friend, Madame Merle, had been his lover in the distant past and is the mother of Pansy. Shocked at the duplicity with which she has been surrounded, the no longer innocent Isabel defies her husbands hypocritical invocation of Old World proprieties (Im not conventional, Im convention itself, he tells her) and visits Ralph on his deathbed. Her rejected suitor, Caspar Goodwood, visits her after Ralphs funeral and urges her to flee with him from her dead marriage, but—in one of American literatures most famous and most vexing conclusions—she flees from his passionate kiss, back to Rome, presumably to keep her promise to aid Pansys efforts not to be crushed by the iron will of her father. The novel ends without any definitive conclusion—with Isabels friend, Henrietta Stackpole, urging Caspar to follow her yet again. More important, it engages in remarkable experimentation with time and perspective. Not only does it end with a famously open conclusion, but the ovels plot contains a gaping hole about two-thirds of the way through the volume. The reader witnesses, in sequential order, the events leading from Isabels arrival in England to just before her fateful marriage to Osmond, but then James skips eventful years of her life before resuming the story, in medias res for a second time. Long passages in the novel, moreover, are placed within the perspective of individual characters, none more striking than in chapter 42, in which a married Isabel, having witnessed her husband and Madame Merle in a position of silent communion betokening an unexpected intimacy, muses all night in front of a fire. Giving us for the first time Isabels own account of her marriage as she reviews, reassesses, and revises her own attitudes toward it, the passage is a bravura performance, dense with brilliant figurations as it performs the remarkably complicated task of showing a character mentally reworking the process by which she came to be deceived—in part by her husband, in part by her own idealizations and illusions. Jamess work becomes, in this period, strikingly speculative with respect to the questions of gender. As its title indicates, for example, The Portrait of a Lady centers on the representation of female identity under rapidly changing social circumstances: it foregrounds the process by which Isabel is framed, in all senses of that word, not only by those who seek to constrict her, like the pestiferous aesthete Osmond, but also by the benign Ralph, who imagines her, in a crucial passage, as a fine Titian or a beautiful building, or by the author himself. The open ending of the novel, however, suggests that James wishes to grant her the possibilities of escaping from those aestheticizing constructions, even if it means returning to her oppressive marriage, albeit as an advocate for her stepdaughter Pansy. Isabel Archer  Ã‚   The novels protagonist, the Lady of the title. Isabel is a young woman from Albany, New York, who travels to Europe with her aunt, Mrs. Touchett. Isabels experiences in Europe—she is wooed by an English lord, inherits a fortune, and falls prey to a villainous scheme to marry her to the sinister Gilbert Osmond—force her to confront the conflict between her desire for personal independence and her commitment to social propriety. Isabel is the main focus of Portrait of a Lady, and most of the thematic exploration of the novel occurs through her actions, thoughts, and experiences. Ultimately, Isabel chooses to remain in her miserable marriage to Osmond rather than to violate custom by leaving him and searching for a happier life.