Kathryn Southworth revisits The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The nearest I came to wanting to murder my parents was on February 10th 1968 at about 9.40 in the evening. I know this because I found the date on Google: the date, that is, of the final episode of the BBC dramatisation of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady. It was for me an intensely private experience and, at that time, I had no idea what the fate would be of the protagonist Isabel Archer. When my parents came back from their night out and disturbed me whilst I was hanging on every moment of the dénouement, I hated them with a vengeance.
I cannot say when I actually read the book, but I do know that re-reading for this article I found I remembered it almost word for word. I can also recall the Signet edition I read it from – who knows how many times – a rather nasty American paperback whose spine was inclined to split and spill out its pages. (That never happens with Kindle!) This edition was probably bought at university which was sympathetic to students’ modest means and Signet, for all its shortcomings, was inexpensive. Not that Portrait of a Lady was actually on the syllabus (but neither, disappointingly, was Dante and much of what I remember reading during my course).
Henry James was presented to us first via his slighter work, Washington Square, and then the daunting The Ambassadors through our star lecturer, novelist and resident Catholic, David Lodge, whose own novelistic practice was suffused with the Higher Criticism of literary theory and stylistics. James himself in the prefaces to his novels, collected as The House of Fiction, began the practice of self-conscious analysis of narrative. His work embodies the shift from the detailed realism of the Victorians, via Turgenev, to the highly structured, filtered impressionism of modernist fiction. He anticipated modernism in his elliptical technique, his reticence, an approach to portraiture which respected the unknowable or unrealisable. What he carried over from writers like George Eliot was his sense that his characters really mattered: that a young woman choosing among her suitors can embody the identifications and life choices that define us as human beings. I spent my undergraduate career assuming that I belonged to the Victorian camp and have never lost the pleasure of immersing yourself in a long novel. (Trollope was my preferred lock-down reading.) However, as an academic it was modernism and its challenge to empiricism that most engaged me.
It was only days after that final episode on the BBC that I hit sixteen and my sister joked about when I would be getting married. Not any time yet, but 1968 was in other ways an annus mirabilis, a year of choices and intense experiences. How could a young woman not identify with Isabel Archer’s sense of herself as ‘someone in particular’, a work in progress, and with her zest to explore the world and all its possibilities?
I did not go to Italy, though I had already felt its lure, but I did go to the USSR, didn’t get marriage proposals but did have a romantic encounter with a young man who seemed to have the virtues of all Isabel’s suitors: intelligence, passion, easy manners and impeccable taste (not least in liking me). Yet, even this heady excitement was not enough, this immersion in the Paterian gem-like flame of intensity, the will to mould one’s life as though it was a work of art. Already there lurked in me Isabel’s reservations about absolute independence, her sense that one ought to choose, committing to some corner of the universe as a deliberate act. I was already planning to join the Catholic church.
In Isabel’s case the reader intuits that her act is dangerous and tragically misguided, indeed that she has been duped into marriage with the cold, manipulating Osmond who will seek to quell her life-force in what we would now see as an act of coercive control. The dead hand of Europe triumphs over the youthful idealism of Isabel’s native new world. Even her comic foil, Henrietta Stackpole, eventually falls into marriage with an Englishman, a compromise position adopted by James himself who made his home in Rye.
The quiet Eden of the novel is Garden Court, the English home of her cousin Ralph Touchett, played in the serialisation by everyone’s heart-throb Richard Chamberlain. Ralph, the unwitting facilitator for the fortune-hunter, Osmond and his side-kick Mme Merle, is a helpless observer of an unfolding tragedy of Shakespearian dimensions. Indeed, despite the subjectivity of the novel, James’s own pretensions to the theatre are amply displayed.
For instance, there is the beautifully realised scene when Isabel, going to make her farewell at the convent where her step-daughter is being detained by her father’s gothic manipulations, is met by Mme Merle on the same errand. The confrontation ends with each of the former friends encountering the depths of their own, and the other’s, pain and failure as they part for ever. For all James’s sense of theatre, however, his own attempts to be a playwright ended in humiliating failure.
This is a traditional coming-of-age novel in some respects, except that it does not end with the traditional resolution of marriage. Written against the background of the Married Women’s Property Act, which was passed in 1882, the year following the novel’s serialisation, it explores the position of women but without endorsing or critiquing proto-feminism. It is famously a novel of culture wars familiar from our own decades of debate about the European Union. Arguably, though, its resonance is more profound and universal.
Isabel is betrayed but her generous spirit is not quite quenched. Her marriage was undertaken ‘to do some good’, not least for Osmond’s child and she promises her step-daughter, with Christ-like echoes, ‘I will not desert you’. There is little doubt, despite the open-ended conclusion to the novel, that Isabel will not seek redemption in escaping the decisions she has made, but will face all the hardships that lie before her. She makes the difficult admission that she has been wrong but still has, to quote another American writer, ‘promises to keep’: not just to an unworthy empty aesthete but to an innocent girl – and to herself.
Isabel says drily of her husband, ‘He has a talent for upholstery’. This is all, in the end, that aestheticism alone amounts to, and the lessons of history do not suggest that the appreciation of beauty necessarily goes along with moral behaviour – or vice-versa. As for my own commitment, sufficient to say that the prevailing art and music of 1960s Catholicism was not its greatest attraction. However, I have kept true to my promises, in my fashion, for more than fifty years. As for that other question – marriage – well that was another decade away and a different book to re-read.
Kathryn Southworth is the former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Her most recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlets No Man’s Land (Dempsey and Windle, Guildford, 2020) and A Pure Bead, a sequence on Virginia Woolf (Paekakariki Press, London 2021).