Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY” by Henry James
(first published in 1881)
I
am sometimes embarrassed by the way I handle classics and other venerated books
in the “Something Old” section of this blog. Often, I give a detailed synopsis
and then feel abashed at the thought that people who read this section are
probably fully aware of the general drift of the book in question anyway; and
that therefore I am probably teaching them to suck eggs. Occasionally I avoid
this process by taking the great book as read and simply making some general
remarks [see my postings on Don Quixote
and War and Peace]. Yet recently,
when reading a selection of the critical writings of an eminent New Zealand
critic, I was heartened to find that his basic method in writing a critique of
a book is simply to synopsise it, add a few critical comments as he goes, and
then produce a couple of paragraphs of verdict.
So here I go
once again serving you up my own synopsis of a classic, which you might know as
well as I do.
Given that this
particular classic is by Henry James (1843-1916), I will forbear from repeating
the sermon I have preached twice before (see postings on Roderick Hudson and WashingtonSquare) about how I like early- and middle-period Henry James, but find
later-period James almost unreadable.
The
Portrait of a Lady is generally regarded as the masterpiece of “early”
James and as inaugurating his “second” period.
As I summarised
it, it goes thus;
Isabel Archer is
the youngest and most intellectually inclined of three American sisters. While
visiting the United States, Isabel’s aunt, Mrs Lydia Touchett takes Isabel up
as her protégée and takes her to Europe to “polish” her. Mrs Touchett is
largely estranged from her wealthy banker husband and spends a small part only
of each year at the English residence Gardencourt, where her husband lives with
their grown, but consumptive and sickly, son Ralph Touchett.
When Isabel
comes to live at Gardencourt, Ralph is impressed with her. So is the
Old Mr Touchett
is dying. Before he dies, Ralph persuades him to leave a large sum of money to
his cousin Isabel. Ralph does not see himself as made for marriage, and his
influence in this matter of the bequest is kept secret from Isabel.
So now Isabel is
a woman of property and independent means.
She travels
through Paris to Florence and Rome. In Italy, Lord Warburton again proposes to
her and again is turned down. Caspar Goodwood makes a second journey and is
again rejected. Partly through the influence of the experienced Madame Serena Merle,
Isabel gets to know the American widower Gilbert Osmond, who has an adolescent
daughter Pansy; and whose sister Amy, Countess Gemini, is married to a
Florentine nobleman and is notorious for her extra-marital affairs.
Isabel is fully
aware that Gilbert Osmond is penniless, but is attracted to him by his apparent
indifference to convention, his artistic (dilettante?) impulses and so forth.
Although everybody warns her that he is much inferior to an English noblemen as
a marital catch, Isabel marries Gilbert anyway. Without fully articulating it,
she believes she is thus rebelling from society’s expectations.
Whereupon the
story (whose total time-range is six or seven years) jumps forward three or
four years, but remains in its Roman setting. Pansy is now an attractive young
woman aged about 19, and clearly becoming eligible for the marriage market.
There is a major
shadow hanging over Isabel’s life. She finds her husband Gilbert is far more
conventional and domineering than she anticipated. He expects her to obey him
and endorse all his opinions. Slowly –
very slowly – she comes to the obvious conclusion that he has married her
mainly for her money; and she is disturbed by his relationship with Madame
Merle. Are they in fact lovers? Is there something about them that she does not
know? Sometimes she has returned home to find them in the type of attitudes
that should be reserved for intimates.
Ned Rosier, a
young and almost impecunious art-collector, wishes to marry Pansy Osmond.
Gilbert disapproves of him. Lord Warburton comes to Rome. He too wishes to
marry Pansy. Gilbert Osmond (and Madame Merle) approve; but for Isabel it is
clear that Lord Warburton would merely use marriage to Pansy as a pretext to be
close to Isabel herself; and that if she approved of such a marriage for her
step-daughter, she would in effect be buying into the type of casually
adulterous arrangement of (for example) her sister-in-law Countess Gemini. Ned
Rosier sells all his art works to have enough money to be acceptable to Gilbert
Osmond as a suitor for Pansy; but Gilbert makes his daughter go into a convent
until she sees things his way.
At this
juncture, Mrs Touchett telegraphs Isabel with the news that Ralph Touchett
really is dying. Isabel wishes to visit him, but Gilbert Osmond refuses to let
her, saying that this would be a breach of their marriage vows. Now fully aware
of Gilbert’s totally mercenary attitude to marriage (his own; and Pansy’s),
Isabel is extremely distraught. She expresses her anxiety to her sister-in-law
Countess Gemini, who at last lets Isabel in on the true relationship of Gilbert
Osmond and Madame Merle. They were lovers for many years, and Pansy is their
illegitimate daughter, not the daughter of Gilbert’s late wife…
…Isabel feels a
mixture of horror and pity when she meets Madame Merle at the convent
where Pansy has been sent to cool her heels. Pansy has decided to obey her
father’s wishes and marry into wealth…
…Isabel goes to
England despite Gilbert’s wishes. She is present as Ralph’s death-bed, now aware
that he was her true benefactor. Before Ralph dies, they agree that it might
have been better if she had never come into money at all…
…Lord Warburton
is now going to marry an English noblewoman. Although it is not clearly stated,
the implication is that Lord Warburton now knows that marriage to Pansy would
not place him close to Isabel, as the breach in Isabel’s marriage has become
common knowledge.
Caspar Goodwood
is present at Ralph’s funeral. He now presents himself to Isabel as her true
and disinterested lover: somebody she can now turn to after tragedy has struck
her marriage. He embraces her and passionately kisses her.
And Isabel flees
from him back to Rome. End. With us knowing that her life has not ended and
that she still has much experience ahead of her.
Thus did I
summarise the novel in my reading notebook, adding the remark that my synopsis
deliberately omitted the character of Henrietta Stackpole, a rather crass
American journalist and bluestocking who gains entry into Isabel’s social
milieu in order to “expose” it. Henrietta, who eventually marries the
Englishman Mr Bantling and is a beneficiary of Ralph Touchett’s will, seems to
be Henry James’ satire on less perceptive Americans, who trumpet democratic
American values only until they succumb to European comforts. However, like
Harold Skimpole in Dickens’ Bleak House,
she is really detachable from the mechanics of the plot.
Now what are we
to make of this mass of narrative matter? A woman I know well once told me,
forthrightly if a little crudely: “I
hated The Portrait of a Lady when we had to read it in 7th
Form. When Isabel Archer farts, it takes ten pages before anyone smells it.”
There is indeed some of the dreaded Jamesian ponderousness in this novel, although
it is not as bloated as the later James of The
Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors. Indeed,
parts of it are positively sprightly.
The Portrait of a Lady
could provoke me into making the obvious comments about the leisured and
moneyed classes with which James habitually deals. Save for the banker Mr
Touchett (who is mainly a “noise off”) and the journalist Henrietta Stackpole
(who is largely held up to ridicule) nobody works for a living. In an age when
travel (except in steerage) was prohibitively expensive, nobody gives a second
thought to setting off on journeys across the Atlantic, to London, to Paris, to
Florence, to Rome. And (though there is a passing note to say that Isabel’s and
Gilbert’s baby died) nobody seems to have any children. So people have time to
cultivate their fine perceptions and intuitions while somebody else keeps the
social engine running. In passing, I am [not for the first time in reading
James] forced to wonder if it is the social conditions depicted that make
James’ novels congenial to a certain class of modern reader – in an age of
contraception (= no children); labour-saving machines (= no physical labour)
and – at least for middle-class Westerners – unprecedentedly widespread
affluent leisure. What do we now do in our spare time but refine our feelings
and welcome a writer who encourages us in this attitude? Thus much for my
knee-jerk negative reactions – to which I would add the sense of an
hermetically-sealed world of expatriates. Note that most of the novel is set in
Rome, but there are no significant Italian characters.
Of course it
would be very easy to give a feminist reading to the novel. Independent Isabel
Archer, by the conditions of society and the conventions of marriage, is
reduced to being dependent on her husband. Marriage is a commercial transaction
– a transfer of power and money – and hence adultery is taken for granted as a
necessary outlet for the passions. In this sense, then, the novel is about what
it takes to be regarded as a “lady” – it is to have money; to be a marketable
commodity; to give away any ideas of intellectual independence; to shut your
mouth and to play along with conventions. When Isabel reflects on her
unsatisfactory marriage, we are told:
“The real offence, as she ultimately
perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his
[i.e. her husband’s] – attached to his
own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and
water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay. It
would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor…” (Chapter 38)
There would be
much truth to my hypothetical feminist reading. Certainly the novel’s title –
much as we sympathise with Isabel – strikes me as ironic. Isabel Archer is not
a “lady” to begin with. She becomes one only when she is bequeathed money and
marries. In the same way, perhaps, Mrs Touchett is a “lady”, and James seems to
have consciously brought the novel back to its beginning in the final chapters.
Mrs Touchett, as we knew to begin with, was estranged from her husband and
attempting to influence a younger woman (Isabel); just as Isabel at the end is
estranged from her husband and attempting to influence a younger woman (Pansy).
OR is the title
NOT ironic? Is Isabel Archer genuinely a lady, in the sense of a moral and compassionate
person? She does not play the social game of adultery and deceit, and chiefly
feels pity, rather than anger, for the woman (Madame Merle) who has most
systematically deceived her.
Or am I deluded
in both readings? The fine stirrings of taste and conscience among people who
aren’t willing to address the basic injustices of the society they inhabit? How
much is James conscious of this as a theme? Surely, when we first learn
that Isabel regards Gilbert as “unconventional” we are allowed to chuckle,
knowing that it is the people most immured in convention who can play at being
unconventional in those matters that don’t touch their bank balances.
Most
essentially, I read The Portrait of a
Lady as the tale of a young woman’s education through systematic
disillusion. Isabel begins with the illusion that she is independent and has
free choice when she is in fact consistently manipulated by “players” who are
more experienced at the social game than she is. Then there is her long
disillusion with her married state. [Insert here, if you will, the inevitable
reflexions one gets at this point on Henry James’ perspective as a closeted
homosexual looking at the married state with a jaded eye as an outsider.] Even
without the discovery of Pansy’s parentage and Madame Merle’s relationship with
Gilbert, this long disillusion would have been conveyed by the second half of
the novel.
Regarding the
process of actually reading this novel, the worst of James continues to be what
is under-dramatised and left as interior musings and monologues. Twelve pages
of intellectualisation might divert when one is reading them, but they are
never as memorable as a single dramatic action. For this reason I find the
second half of the novel, when Isabel moves from her tentative state into a
state of discovery, to be much the stronger and more readable. I admit, too,
that some things which I at first took to be weaknesses in style prove on
reflexion to be strengths. For example, we are often told that Isabel Archer is
intellectual and reads very much; but we hardly ever hear what she either reads
or thinks… but then had we been told, the novel might now seem much more dated,
like the novels of George Meredith. Though Isabel marries Gilbert, there is no
wedding scene – but then this is a deliberate artistic elision, so that the
novel’s psychological focus does not blur. In this respect it reminds me of the
masterly way Theodor Fontane leaves offstage the crucial duel scene in Effi Briest.
Having picked
tentatively at the novel and its meaning, how do I evaluate it?
When I last read
The Portrait of a Lady, I filled by
reading notebook with deft and ironic and witty quotations from Henry James’
text – often as funny as could be devised by Jane Austen. I have been tempted
to quote some of them in this notice, but my conclusion would be an obvious
one. The Portrait of a Lady was
written before James’ style ossified – before he became the “hippopotamus rolling a pea” that H. G.
Wells cruelly called him. Along with The
Bostonians, I would simply call The
Portrait of a Lady the best long novel by Henry James that I have been able
to finish.
Cinematic footnote: As far
as I know, there has only ever been one film version made of The Portrait of a Lady, and despite the
cold admiration that it received in some quarters, it was not the greatest of
successes. This was Jane Campion’s The
Portrait of a Lady, released in 1996-97. Campion had already made her three
best films, Sweetie, An Angel at My Table
and The Piano, the last of which had
earned Academy Awards and briefly made her a hot property as a director. So she
was given Hollywood’s blessing to film a respectable literary classic. She also
had a big-name cast. Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, John Malkovich as Gilbert
Osmond, John Geilgud as Mr Touchett etc. Campion said she and her fellow
scriptwriter were giving the film a “feminist sensibility”, but alas – this
caused problems. Perhaps the film-makers didn’t notice that, in his elusive
way, Henry James had already given the novel a feminist sensibility. As
presented in the film, Isabel Archer is already a knowing and assertive modern
woman when the story begins, which renders much of the story nonsensical on an
emotional level. Why should this aware woman marry Gilbert Osmond when, as
played by Malkovich, he is clearly a conniving poseur from the start, with none
of the charm and culture that the novel’s Isabel initially sees in Gilbert? The
film has its moments and is faithful to the novel’s storyline, but it fizzles
badly on every dramatic level and was a box-office flop. To be cruelly
accurate, it was really the end of the golden weather for Campion’s directing
career, which has been less than stellar ever since.
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