His exchange with Howells provides a partial exception to all this, and in December 1880 he wrote the editor that his “strictures on [the Portrait] seem . . . well-founded.” Howells thought Isabel overanalyzed and Henrietta overdrawn, and while James believed that the journalist was less of a caricature than she appeared, he also admitted that most American readers wouldn’t see it that way. The problem with Isabel was more complicated. He had drawn her at full length before he had made her do anything, and now could only offer a note of reassurance, writing that after the opening chapters she wouldn’t “turn herself inside out quite so much.” That was a partial truth, and late in the novel Isabel would pull herself to pieces once more. Still, that lay months in the future, and much of the intervening drama is conducted in dialogue.
James could write Mozartean ensembles of three or more characters all talking together, voices that remain clear and distinct even as they step upon one another’s lines. But most of this novel’s crucial scenes are two-handers. Isabel goes up to London soon after she rejects Lord Warburton, taking rooms with Henrietta at a Picadilly hotel, while Ralph, their nominal protector, camps out at his father’s unused London house. And on her last day in the capital, she is made to suffer through three chapters of strenuous talk, in which she doesn’t turn herself inside out so much as watch other people do it for her. First comes Ralph, who knows about Warburton’s proposal and wants to learn her reasons for refusing him. Not that he’s sorry. Her marriage would have finished off the story, but now he can have the same thing that we do: the pleasure of the next installment, the “entertainment of seeing what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton.” Watching Isabel has become his compensation for a spectator’s life, but Ralph also takes a curious satisfaction in characterizing the terms of her actions and tells her that she exacts a great deal from other people simply by seeming to ask so little of them. She withholds herself, she refuses to take what the world offers; and by this he means something more than just Warburton’s hand. She worries too much about “whether this or that is good for you,” but the truth is that she thinks nothing in the world too perfect for her, and the corollary is that this bird of paradox will refuse to take anything less.
That evening she hears a knock at her door, and the hotel’s servant shows in the stern-jawed Caspar Goodwood. Isabel doesn’t expect him—she hasn’t even answered his letter, and his visit is made with Henrietta’s connivance. He knows he displeases her, and yet upbraids her as a way of pleading his cause; his very presence seems a form of assault. Nevertheless, he remains a part of her past and the “stubbornest fact she knows,” a fact that requires an answer. So Isabel puts into speech everything she has told herself in justifying her rejection of Warburton, and ends by saying, with self-conscious grandeur, that if he ever hears a rumor of her marriage, “remember what I have told you . . . and venture to doubt it.” She is agitated, and exhilarated, and once alone she drops to her knees as if in prayer. For Isabel has a sense of victory. James writes in his opening pages that her love of liberty is as yet almost entirely theoretical, but she has now tested it twice by saying no, and the pleasure Isabel takes from it is every bit as important as the end it gains for her. “She had done what she preferred,” and when Henrietta returns, the two of them quarrel.
“You are drifting to some great mistake,” the reporter tells her, and many of the things Isabel’s friends say in these chapters will echo throughout, an encircling web of voices, of partial views that overlap enough to make us question her own sense of herself. For Isabel is all too liable to trip over her own imagination, a young woman who has no sense of what her freedom might be for. She knows what she doesn’t want, not what she does, and has no other plot with which to affront what still seems her inevitable destiny. What she does have, though, is both courage and a sense of adventure, and she replies to Henrietta’s words about drift by defining her own idea of happiness: “a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see.” Risk and speed and an open road into the unknown: the picture is enticing, even if Henrietta thinks it better suited to “an immoral novel,” and in fact it’s a close paraphrase of a line from Madame Bovary. Yet though Isabel sees herself as making her own life, the image she chooses undercuts her desire. For her language suggests that she herself sits inside that coach—and somebody else holds the reins.
In the morning Ralph has news. His father’s health has been precarious for years, and a new attack has put him beyond recovery. Daniel Touchett will linger for weeks, as the autumn defines itself in rain, but he will not get up again. Isabel will take her turn in the Gardencourt sickroom, and so of course does Ralph, who is watching there alone one day when the old man finds the energy to talk. Save your strength, the son says, but Mr. Touchett refuses; “I shall have a long rest. I want to talk about you.” The banker wants his son to find a new interest, something to help keep him alive. He should marry—should marry Isabel. And Ralph does admit that “if certain things were different,” he would indeed be in love with his cousin. But he is dissembling here, and his father catches him. They have “never prevaricated before,” and a deathbed isn’t the place to start.
Mr. Touchett will not die on this day, but these pages are the last in which we see him. James would write other memorable deathbed scenes, including one later in this novel, but this was his first. No reader forgets it, and yet our interest changes from one reading to the next. Its point of fascination alters as we do ourselves. These pages know heartbreak, but not that of Mr. Touchett’s death per se. What spikes an older reader to his seat is the way that the banker continues to worry about his son. He stays a father still, and attempts to guide and protect his boy even as his own breath fades. He is conscious of all that his son cannot do, and Ralph calls him “Daddy” even yet. He has remained dependent, and says that if his father dies “I shall do nothing but miss you.” That, however, is precisely what Mr. Touchett doesn’t want, and the two of them reach here beyond the temporizing of ordinary life. They speak as if the barriers that divide one person from another were down, and anything, everything, can be said.
What makes that clarity possible is the Touchetts’ focus on this world, and not some possible next one. There are many deathbeds in Victorian fiction, some full of prayer, and others concerned with the dying person’s attempt to make the world still feel his weight. Many of them show us characters sunk in fear, and others hit a high note of hope. But I have read no such scene so entirely untroubled by the hereafter as this one; its originality lies in what James feels himself free to leave out. Neither Ralph nor his father speaks of God, and they do not call a clergyman at the last. Isabel learns that Mr. Touchett has died only when she sees the doctor stand in the doorway and slowly draw on his gloves. In his ghost stories James did entertain the sense of some otherworldly life, but the characters in his major novels all live in a secular world. They may go to church as a social duty, though Isabel herself doesn’t seem to. (In this she is unlike Minny Temple, who took religious questions seriously and enjoyed listening to the day’s popular preachers.) They may go as tourists, as Isabel later will in Rome. But they lack any kind of formal belief, and neither God nor the institution of a church is present here even as something to fight against. That isn’t the only reason why the Spectator described this novel as marked by the “cloven foot” of agnosticism—but it will do as a start.
Nevertheless, these pages are about the future, about money and a will. “I take a great interest in my cousin,” Ralph says, though not the kind his father wishes, and he now tells the dying man that he wants “to put a little wind in her sails.” Isabel is not a dollar princess, not one of the American heiresses who in the decades after the Civil War went hunting for husbands among the often improvident members of Europe’s various aristocracies. The best known is Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose parents in essence sold her to the Duke of Marlborough. James would create such characters in both The Wing
s of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, but Isabel’s father has spent down his own relatively modest fortune, and she has almost no money of her own. Ralph has thought of a way to change that, however, and as he explains, a “veiled acuteness” steals into his father’s face. It is the last business proposition to which he will ever listen. Cut my own inheritance in half, Ralph says. Call it your own idea, let the lawyers think we have argued, and make Isabel rich. Let that money make her free—free to explore the life around her, to reach the limits of her own imagination, free of the need “to marry for a support.” The old man has questions; a banker still, he wants to know if it’s a good investment. What about the fortune hunters? That is indeed a risk, Ralph answers, a risk small but appreciable, and one he is prepared to take. The reply satisfies his father; whether it satisfies us is a different question.
Still, Mr. Touchett is rock-ribbed enough to suspect that this whole procedure is “immoral”; even an Isabel shouldn’t have everything made so easy. But what really makes us pause is another of his judgments. Ralph says that he wants to “see her going before the breeze,” and his father answers that he speaks as though it were all for his own amusement. He speaks, in fact, as if he were a novelist himself; as if, in the words of James’s preface, Isabel “hovered before him . . . interesting him and appealing to him” by the simple virtue of what and who she is. For Ralph sees his own job as that of creating possibilities for her, piecing together the situations that will show her to the best and most brilliant advantage. The more money in her purse, the more wind in her sails; the faster she will fly, the longer she will take to reach her narrative fulfillment. Hers—and his, and James’s own, and ours. For we too want to see what she’ll do in these new circumstances. James criticized his contemporaries for dropping fortunes upon their characters in a book’s last chapters, as though money were the resolution and reward of action. For him it is action’s very cause, and by thrusting fortune upon her in the middle, he has created a new set of conditions against which Isabel might prove herself.
Yet it’s one thing for James to do that for us, and another for Ralph to do it to her. A novel may have many ends in mind, but surely entertainment is one of them. What Ralph does, in contrast, is to use Isabel as a means to fulfill his own desires. I put the case strongly, because we need to see the crooked timber of self-interest in the most altruistic of intentions and the most likable of human subjects. I also put it strongly so that I may qualify it. For Ralph doesn’t envision any particular scene as developing from his gift. He wants—he says he wants—only to “to see what she does with herself”, to intervene just once, and then watch without taking further action. His father has a last question: what good will Ralph himself get from it all? But Ralph’s own good will be precisely the one he wants to give Isabel, that of a fully gratified imagination. He sinks his life in hers; his identification with his character, her character, is complete.
James worked on this scene with the most confident of hands, and barely touched its dialogue in his 1906 revision. Isabel will inherit £70,000. It’s impossible to say with any certainty just how large an income that gives her, but James tells us that the money will remain in the affairs of the bank, and bank stock in that period often returned upward of 8 percent. Let’s say, conservatively, that she can spend £5,000 a year. The decision the Touchetts make about her will shape her life far more profoundly than any choice she has yet made for herself, and what Isabel calls her liberty is increasingly defined by what, in Ralph’s words to his mother, other people want to “do with her.” The girl is left alone when they first return from London, and in searching through the house she hears an unexpected ripple of music from Gardencourt’s vast drawing room. She recognizes Beethoven, though in the New York Edition James would change it to Schubert: to nineteenth-century ears a figure not of stormy passion but of the social arts, and a better choice for this particular pianist. She plays with unusual skill, and Isabel is immediately intrigued by the fact that this new guest, though an American, “should so strongly resemble a foreign woman.” And in fact her name is foreign. “I am Madame Merle,” she says, as though “referring to a person of tolerably distinct identity.”
James himself provides the best account of this moment, writing in his preface of how, as she enters the drawing room, Isabel “deeply recognizes . . . in the presence there, among the gathering shades, of this personage . . . a turning point in her life.” The two women spend the next weeks in each other’s company, as the house prepares for Mr. Touchett’s death, and Isabel’s admiration of her new friend grows by the day. Madame Merle is tall and fair and widowed, and something over forty. She works elaborate morsels of embroidery, she plays and paints, and though Gardencourt is hushed by sickness, she stays on because Mrs. Touchett wants her to; a welcome guest who also knows just when to leave and where to go next. Isabel thinks her a “woman of ardent impulses, kept in admirable order,” and soon recognizes that she’s under the older woman’s influence; that at moments, indeed, she wants to be like her.
If Madame Merle has a fault it’s that she seems “too perfectly the social animal.” Even her new protégé admits that she cannot conceive of this supple creature in isolation, cannot imagine her inner life, and Isabel is troubled by the fact that Ralph doesn’t like her. He says that he was once in love with her; but he does not like her, and Madame Merle knows it. They do, however, agree about one thing, for she too has an interest in our heroine’s future. Yet their interest takes a different form. Ralph’s generosity may be stained by his own longings, but he nonetheless wants to see what Isabel does with herself, to see the kind of life she will fashion. Madame Merle says, in contrast, that she wants “to see what life makes” of Isabel, and emphasizes the shaping force of the world around her. The difference is crucial, and points to a talk the two woman have shortly before Mr. Touchett’s death.
The older woman admits to being ambitious, but she calls her own unrealized dreams “preposterous.” Isabel answers that she herself has known success already. She has seen a childhood fantasy come true, and then blushes at the accuracy with which her friend defines and discounts it. A young man on his knees? We have all had that, and if “yours was a paragon . . . why didn’t you fly with him to his castle in the Apennines?” The location is nicely chosen. Hawthorne gave his readers such a mountain refuge in The Marble Faun, and Anne Radcliffe had earlier used that setting in her 1794 Gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Madame Merle’s words suggest that Isabel’s dream is above all a literary one, and tired. They remind the girl of the plot she’s rejected, and they also suggest her lingering naïveté, in a way that makes her prickly. He has no such castle, she says, and besides, “I don’t care anything about his house.”
Madame Merle finds that sentiment crude, and the conversation that follows stands as one of the most probing moments in all James’s work. He gives us here an understated examination of the very nature of the self, of the American self in particular, and the passage needs to be quoted at length. “When you have lived as long as I,” the older woman says,
“. . . you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things! One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”
A great respect for things. The phrase links her to Balzac, in whose world sexual desire is but a shadow of the lust for material goods, and whose great hero, as James himself wrote, is the 20-franc piece. And Isabel replies:
“I think
just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should! . . . My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me.”
For one thing, it’s not her choice to wear them—though Madame Merle puts a stop to that line of reasoning by asking if she’d prefer to go naked.
Early in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes that his heroine’s beauty lies in the way that she seems to stand apart from her clothes. “What she wore was never seen on her,” and even the most luxurious dress becomes an unnoticeable frame for the self. So it is for Isabel—or rather that’s how she wants it to be. This passage comes a few pages after Ralph’s conversation with his father, and we read her words with a certain irony, knowing what she doesn’t: that whether or not her clothes express her, she’s soon going to have a lot more of them. Still, this argument looks like a fair fight. We can’t easily reject either woman’s position, and while the balance does finally tip, we’re not happy about it. We’d prefer to side with Isabel—with youth—and her ideal remains necessary, the ideal of some unified and autonomous self, independent of and anterior to its social circumstances. Madame Merle, in contrast, suggests that the self is socially determined, and not entirely separable from the world around it. The things around us may express that self, but they also serve to shape it. Our possessions represent us—they provide the shell within which the self is bound and through which other people come to know it.
Portrait of A Novel Page 14
