That, however, is the price her society expects her to pay. To Goodwood she at first makes Europe seem a mere postponement of decision, but the new possibilities of this larger world will carry new threats as well. “It’s just like a novel,” she says as she steps onto the lawn at Gardencourt, as though her life had been written already, and a new episode in that life opens when she drives over with Ralph and his mother for lunch at Lockleigh, the nearest of Lord Warburton’s half a dozen houses. She meets his brother, the Vicar, and his two unmarried sisters, and when they wander through the park after lunch, Warburton tells her that he hopes she’ll soon pay him a more extended visit. It will be a few chapters yet before he falls to his metaphoric knees, but Isabel has heard such words before and doesn’t like them. She turns the subject as quickly as she can and speaks instead of her desire to improve her mind; a mind that Warburton describes as being already “a most formidable instrument.”
The scene ends with Warburton murmuring that he will come see her at Gardencourt. Isabel’s answer is cold—“Just as you please”—and yet her coldness isn’t that of coquetry. It comes instead “from a certain fear.” James will make us wait for the sequel—or rather he made his first audience wait. The scene falls near the end of the book’s second serial installment, and for readers of the Atlantic the proposal lay a full month in the future. Before moving to it, however, we need to clarify the nature of Isabel’s fear. Today we usually see it in sexual terms, and for decades now there’s been a lively critical conversation about Isabel’s apparent timidity in the face of carnal experience. Some readers have even described her as frigid, and the fact that in 1906 James revised a description of her from “cold and stiff” to “cold and dry” would appear to give them a point. Yet that debate has always seemed to me reductive. Many young women of Isabel’s background and period feared an experience about which testimony was hard to find, and that was often presented as an obligation of marriage. And while most scholars do favor the novel’s later version, an alternate line of criticism has made a strong argument in favor of its first one, its account of Isabel’s hesitation to marry in particular. “Cold and dry” may reflect James’s changing understanding of his character’s situation, but emphasizing Isabel’s sexual reticence makes her desire for independence seem but an aspect of her fear. It turns her into something like a “case.” I see it the other way around, and take that fear as an incipient political position, an aspect of her prior desire for self-sufficiency. This can doubtless be overstated. Nevertheless, James’s account of Isabel’s self-conception does in the book’s early chapters link her to the “woman question” of Gilded Age America, to a time when professional opportunity and higher education for women had begun, however tentatively, to expand.
I say in the “early chapters” advisedly, for even in the 1881 edition James will move away from such social questions and into a concentration on the drama of Isabel’s consciousness. And yet this reading is too broad to stand even there. It may justify her reluctance to marry Caspar Goodwood, whose energy does appear to drain her freedom; but then he if anyone is the source of Isabel’s fear. For Lord Warburton we will need a further layer of explanation.
When Henrietta arrives at Gardencourt, she brings along a bit of news: Goodwood too has come to England, and apparently for the sole purpose of renewing his suit. The reporter makes our heroine recognize that she had indeed encouraged him, but she also sees that Isabel herself has changed. James’s heroine no longer believes in the necessary truth of her own earlier opinions and yet is more confident than ever in her engagement with the larger world around her. She may not yet know just where she fits in, but she has now begun to see beyond both Albany and America itself. So Henrietta’s news gives her a sense of alarm, and sets her to wandering through the park in a funk. Eventually she drops onto a bench, and as she sits there fuming, a servant arrives to hand her a letter. She recognizes the writing as Goodwood’s, and James gives us his letter entire. It’s our first direct impression of him, and we quickly see that the mill owner’s words have force but no logic. They insist, they protest, they assert, and his assertions are all couched in negatives. He does not accept his dismissal, he does not believe he is disagreeable to her, and he now hates America because she isn’t in it. “May I not,” he writes in conclusion, “come and see you for half-an-hour?” Isabel has just folded his letter when she looks up to find Lord Warburton standing before her.
Proposal scenes in fiction are in themselves a genre, and therefore have rules. The successful ones are usually brief, and almost never give the actual words of concord. Maybe there’s a lightning flash, as at the end of Middlemarch; maybe we’re told, as in Austen, that the characters said just what they should. But Isabel will decline this offer and the scene can therefore take up the entirety of the book’s twelfth chapter, ten pages of nervous comedy set on the most splendid of summer afternoons. Lord Warburton doesn’t storm like Austen’s Mr. Darcy. His manners are at their bashfully perfect best, and he even apologizes for coming down on her with “such a thumper.” He recognizes that they have spent barely a full day together, and hopes she won’t object to Lockleigh; “some people don’t like a moat, you know.” But Isabel delights in everything old, and his house—his several houses—are not an issue. Or are they? Lord Warburton has the sweetest voice she has ever heard. She understands that however abrupt his offer there is nothing frivolous about him, and yet doesn’t hesitate in asking him to leave her. She promises to write, but she already knows the burden of her letter, knows in the face of every novel she has ever read that the idea of marrying a viscount doesn’t correspond to her own image of happiness.
At Lockleigh, Isabel had been afraid of his proposal even before she knew that Caspar Goodwood was in England. The letter she has just received doesn’t affect her decision, but it does affect the story she tells about that decision, the explanation she gives herself about just why she cannot marry Lord Warburton. She wonders that “it cost her so little to refuse a great opportunity,” and it’s true her passions do not seem engaged. The light has not shone, yet though she tells her aunt that she doesn’t love the man, she admits to her more congenial uncle that she likes him well enough. So let’s bracket emotion, and take seriously something that Warburton himself says: “I’m afraid it’s my being an Englishman.” Or at least a particular kind of Englishman. Isabel may delight in a moat, but she doesn’t want to marry one. She feels no threat from him personally, as she does from Goodwood, but she also has an idea that as “Lord Warburton” he isn’t so much a person as a “personage.” She has never known a personage, and until now has thought of individual eminence in terms of character, of “what one liked in a gentleman’s mind and in his talk.” Isabel likes Warburton’s mind—and yet he also looms as a set of possessions and powers that can’t be measured in such familiar terms. She can’t forget that he has a seat in Parliament as Mr. Touchett has one at his own table, she feels his hereditary force and his 50,000 acres, and she resists the idea of being pulled into his orbit. The very splendor of his offer seems a confinement, and in refusing him she stakes a claim to her own autonomous existence. Or as she says to her uncle, “Imagine one’s belonging to an English class”; the whole point of being an American is that one doesn’t.
Three years after finishing The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote a piece called “The Art of Fiction” that both synthesizes and corrects a series of Victorian assumptions about the nature and purpose of the novel. The essay makes no single argument but stands rather as a manifesto, a claim that fiction has the same importance as poetry or painting; a claim that now seems commonplace but that in James’s own day struck some readers as presumptuous. Fiction was popular but no more than an amusement; not serious, not improving, and too worldly. So its sterner critics felt, and in many ways James agreed with them. For the novel—the English novel in particular—had too often failed to take itself seriously, and in defining just how it might James produced an
essay that has the same high place in the history of criticism as Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” or Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads. In his prefaces to the New York Edition, James would write with greater rigor about some central issues in his own oeuvre. But he never matched the breadth and wit of these early observations about the form as a whole.
“The Art of Fiction” is endlessly quotable, and I’ll return to it in later chapters, in particular to James’s account of Victorian self-censorship. At this point, however, its most relevant passages are those that touch upon the “old-fashioned distinction” that some critics of the period made between “the novel of character and the novel of incident.” Yet character itself determines incident, James argues, and every incident serves in turn to illustrate character. His choice of such an illustration is a woman standing with her hand upon a table and looking “at you in a certain way.” That example does admittedly betray his own predilections; he finds his character-revealing incident in a glance, not a courtroom or a sword fight. Still, it allows him to deny that there is any way to separate story from character, and either from what he calls their “treatment,” a term we may equate with “form.” And he then begins to toy with a reviewer who has used a work of derring-do as a stick with which to beat the kinds of stories in which girls from Boston turn down English dukes for “psychological reasons”—tales that are of course his own.
James’s argument here anticipates his exploration, in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, of the particular adventures open to women. He suggests that psychological reasons may stand as subjects in themselves, that the life within has a drama of its own—but then few of us today need to be convinced of that. We have read our Freud, and we have also read our James, and we’ve learned to take pleasure in following the logic of a character’s ever-shifting mood and motivations. Indeed, our whole experience of nineteenth-century fiction, from Austen through George Eliot and beyond, has taught us that there are “few things more exciting than a psychological reason.” James knows that Isabel looks both finicky and precipitate, and he asks us not to smile at this American girl, who on receiving an offer from an English peer was inclined to think “she could do better.” Not that she has a vision of what that “better” might be. She seems precipitate even to herself, and knows that most women would have accepted Warburton immediately. It even makes her afraid, makes her wonder “Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?”
And perhaps for the first time in her young life, Isabel lacks an answer, lacks a clear conception of her fate or future happiness. She only knows that this isn’t it. Nor is a marriage to Goodwood, though she does believe there’s something unfinished between them, an account that must someday be settled. Many readers feel exasperated with Isabel at this point, an exasperation couched in a form that echoes her own question: just who does she think she is? They find her unaccountably arrogant, and yet refusing Lord Warburton does serve to pique our curiosity. We want to know—she wants to know—what effect her choice will have. We want to know what such a girl will do for an encore, and agree with her when she tells herself that if she doesn’t marry Warburton, then she must do something even greater. Her independence will have to find some more enlightened end. But what?
When Warburton proposes, Isabel recognizes that she has stepped into a scene she has read too many times before. She may not yet understand just what she wants, but she does recognize that this scene’s very familiarity stands in itself as a reason to say no. She rejects the plot that other people might write for her, and insists instead that she must be free to choose, free to make her own mistakes. Her choice here may even be the right one, though that doesn’t mean it will lead to happiness. For Isabel cannot escape the fate she seems to crave, the fate that waits to test her in the book’s 500 remaining pages. Nor can we. However much we may want to live on in that world of green lawns, we have to recognize that James has made a different and less comfortable plot around this particular woman. When after receiving his proposal Isabel asks Lord Warburton for a moment in which to collect her mind, he gives a little sigh and says, “Do you know I am very much afraid of it—of that mind of yours.” His words make her blush, and then, with a note in her voice that seems to ask for compassion, she answers. “So am I, my lord!”
7.
AN UNMARRIED MAN
ISABEL ARCHER WAS not the only figure in James��s world who needed to explain a reluctance to marry. Her creator found himself in that situation as well, and in the very months he devoted to her story. By the time he finished The Portrait of a Lady, James had faced three consequential choices. The first of them was the young man’s choice of inaction, his standing aside from the Civil War. The second was his election of a London life, a life abroad. And the third was his decision to remain unmarried, a decision codified in a series of letters he wrote in the fall of 1880, as he worked through the complications of Isabel’s own alternatives. Scholars have usually seen those last two decisions in isolation from one another, and in the past they usually concentrated on James’s choice of Europe, an interest we can summarize by a glance along the library shelves. The Pilgrimage of Henry James, The Complex Fate, The Conquest of London—these are some representative titles from earlier generations of scholarship. Such critics did not see his expatriation in any single way. Some presented it as a sacrifice and perhaps a mistake, a loss of his American subject and identity. Others saw his cosmopolitan experience as being at one with the modernism of his late work. These positions each have their adherents today, but they are now complicated by an awareness of the novelist’s other choice, the one previous eras preferred to elide. Middle-aged bachelors were not rare in James’s time. The term wasn’t yet a bit of code, and the fact that this one seemed to trail no liaisons behind him allowed our predecessors to present him as wed to the page. They were helped in this by James’s own tale of his “obscure hurt,” and also by the many spectators in his work, Ralph Touchett included, characters who hold back from an active life. That emphasis suited the still-decorous nature of mid-twentieth-century biography, and it suited too the preferences of the James family, of William’s widow and their children, who controlled access to the writer’s papers. Oscar Wilde’s sex life might be unavoidable, and Flaubert’s too. With more reticent subjects much could remain unsaid.
In my prologue I wrote that while we cannot know if James ever acted upon a physical desire, nobody today doubts the shape of his erotic longings. A Venetian travel essay of 1873 speaks of a boy’s beauty in terms that James never uses of girls—one urchin has “a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave. . . . [a] little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand.” The most powerful moments in his early novel, Roderick Hudson, describe the fascination that Roderick’s patron Rowland Mallet feels for his protégé, with his attempts to guide and indeed live through the young artist. James’s biographer Fred Kaplan argues that the novelist came to a “dim sense” of his own homoerotic desire during his 1875–76 residence in Paris. Yet how dim? He wrote then to his sister that he had developed “a most tender affection” for a new friend, the monied Russian émigré Paul Zhukovsky. “He is much to my taste,” James added, “and we have sworn an eternal friendship”—a friendship that nevertheless cooled in ways I’ll describe below. Twenty years later he began to fall in love with a series of younger men. The letters he sent them are extravagant not only in their professions of devotion but also in the physicality of their language, their pages of hugs and holding close; and Howells, in an essay left unfinished at his death, referred to them as a “strange exhibition.” They confirmed his sense of James’s “oddity,” an oddity he lacked terms to describe. Still, such “verbal passion,” in Kaplan’s terms, did not in itself require any physical expression, and the most interesting details remain those of consciousness, the slow dawn of what one had already half-known.
Given that sexual preference, it’s crucial to stress that James’s decision to remain un
married was nevertheless a decision, and one that was by no means inevitable. It was a choice, and we can view that choice as inseparable from his decision to live abroad, as different aspects of the same thing. Certainly they were seen that way in his lifetime, albeit in negative form. In 1894, Theodore Roosevelt wrote an essay in which he attacked the “Europeanized” American, whom he defined, with unmistakable reference, as an “undersized . . . man of letters, who flees his country because he . . . cannot play a man’s part among men.” His private comments were even more brutal, though the two men got on well enough when they shared a table at a White House dinner in 1905. But let me put it in other terms. Don’t think of marriage, or of James’s apparent lifelong celibacy, or even perhaps of desire. Think rather of the young man’s sense that something held fast within him had made him a stranger to much of the world around him. In his 1955 poem “The Importance of Elsewhere,” Philip Larkin describes how when living abroad, and lonely, his own oddity had made sense. The different accents around him served to mark out his difference, and paradoxically made him feel welcome. Larkin’s peculiarities were those of misanthropy, not sexual identity, but still his lines are relevant. Living elsewhere makes him look merely “separate, not unworkable.” The danger lies in going home, where he has no such excuse.
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