Of course, George Eliot wasn’t the first to begin in the middle; her structure has one of the grandest of all pedigrees in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Very few Victorian novels used that gambit, however, and none so successfully. Nevertheless, such breaks in sequence would have an incalculable effect on later fiction, beginning with The Portrait of a Lady itself. Not that James appears, at first, to disrupt chronology as such. The jump that puts young Rosier at Madame Merle’s door is not in itself a violation of narrative order. But it does create a gap. It puts us into a situation we don’t fully understand, and here James found an elective affinity with his predecessor’s experiment in time. George Eliot presents her own retrospective in an omniscient third person that’s indistinguishable from that in the rest of her narrative, fully dramatizing each stage in the process that has brought her main characters to the casino. James’s narratological problem is more complicated. In the preface to The Golden Bowl he described his own inveterate preference for an “oblique view of my presented action”—not an impersonal God-like account of the affair, but rather one “of somebody’s impression of it.” And so it is at this crucial moment in the Portrait. The middle of Isabel’s marriage lies itself in the middle of the novel, and James needs to fill us in, not as George Eliot does on what happens before the book “begins,” but instead on the events of its unwritten center. He closes the gap by breaking chronology, allowing Isabel’s memory to stitch over the tear in the novel that is the moment of her marriage itself: a chapter of interior monologue in which there is no physical action beyond the burning of a candle.
Still, a full understanding of just how this chapter covers—or perhaps recovers—the past will require a closer look, and before proceeding we had better get the taste of it in our mouths:
He had told her that he loved the conventional; but there was a sense in which this seemed a noble declaration. In that sense, the love of harmony, and order, and decency, and all the stately offices of life, she went with him freely, and his warning had contained nothing ominous. But when, as the months elapsed, she followed him further and he led her into the mansion of his own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was. She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind, indeed, seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. Of course it was not physical suffering; for physical suffering there might have been a remedy. She could come and go; she had her liberty; her husband was perfectly polite. He took himself so seriously; it was something appalling.
In some ways there’s nothing particularly difficult about this passage, and its first readers had few problems in comprehending it. It provides an example of the free indirect discourse that most of James’s contemporaries used in depicting their characters’ inner lives. He allows Isabel’s own particular idiom—her vocabulary and biases and ways of understanding—to percolate through his own narration, and the language provides a series of tip-offs that tells us we’ve been put inside the character’s mind: the verb “seemed” in the first sentence, the reiterated “then, then” with which James suggests Isabel’s incredulity, the afterthoughts represented by all those semicolons. We come particularly close to her in the passage’s last words—“something appalling”—which offer a colloquial summation of Osmond’s character. Yet though Isabel’s notes do infiltrate James’s voice, they don’t undermine it. His own tones are muffled, but they remain very much in place, and he maintains the distinction between author and character. So we see through her eyes, and at the same time look at those eyes; we have just enough distance on her to mix our sympathy with judgment.
All this is conventional enough, and yet there is indeed something different about the way Isabel’s mind works here. Her language is intensely visual, and while the imagery in this passage runs to the domestic, in other places it refers to the garden or the seashore or the vista of a “dark, narrow alley.” Those images are, however, all metaphors; the four walls that surround her are not precisely those of the Palazzo Roccanera. Osmond may seem as if he had “deliberately, almost malignantly . . . put the lights out one by one,” and yet the shadow in which she now lives belongs to a moral and not a physical climate. Very little in this chapter points to a particular moment in Isabel’s married life, to the individual events of those missing three years: an account, say, of her first dinner with Osmond after the death of their child; or an argument over his belief that even the best of women all eventually take lovers. That’s not the kind of thing she remembers. Instead, she allows her mind to slip from one generalized moment of perception to another, collapsing those years into a sense of the “everlasting weight upon her heart.” But that sense, like the rest of the chapter’s richly imagistic language, remains untethered to an account of any one incident, and even as James fills the gap in his narrative, the actual events of her life go undramatized.
In this, his account of Isabel’s reverie differs markedly from his predecessors’ accounts of their own characters’ inner lives. One example must serve for many. Near the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke sobs herself to sleep on the floor, believing that her hopes of happiness are now forever gone. When she wakes, however, she forces herself to relive the shattering events of the previous day and to weigh the role of other people in the scene that has so broken her. She thinks consecutively, she asks herself questions and answers them, she comes to a final understanding and determines to act upon it. It takes about a page, and similar moments could be found in Austen or Trollope, Thackeray or Howells. Isabel’s night before the fire occupies a much greater space in the novel, a much longer time in the reader’s experience, and part of its originality lies in the simple fact of duration. Her meditation is long enough to provide its own justification. It doesn’t have to lead to any course of action, and it ends without her having reached a conclusion of any kind. Yet there is a greater originality in what the chapter doesn’t do, in its refusal to fill those missing years with what James called “solidity of specification.” For Isabel’s mind, ordinarily so hampered by Osmond’s mocking egotism, here seems to float free. She roams, she wanders, unconfined by reference to any particular moment, and it is no accident that her mind is most active when she sits most perfectly still, as though consciousness itself were briefly disembodied.
We can get a richer appreciation of James’s work here by looking at something his brother wrote just a few years later. William James spent the 1880s at work on his own first book: a massive project, intended as a college text, which he turned in ten years late and that finally appeared as the Principles of Psychology in 1890. Early versions of some of its chapters did, however, come out along the way, and in 1884 he published an essay called “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” in Mind, then as now one of the most important of all journals in the academic study of philosophy. There he coined a phrase that has, for better or worse, become central to our understanding of modern fiction. William James argued that what first strikes us about what he called the stream of consciousness is its absence of uniformity, “the different pace of its different portions.” It pools and it flows, spreads wide and runs deep, but its activity never ceases and there is no part of our mental life that does not belong to it. In putting it that way he underlined his difference from earlier thinkers, who conceived of consciousness “like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. [Yet] Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow.” That, in fact, is what George Eliot had done with Dorothea—she had drawn out a few buckets of interiority, and stood them in a row. But for William James consciousness wasn’t a set of proposit
ions or conclusions. It was a process, unbounded, and his essay provides an exceptionally rigorous account of how, in the years to come, the novel would describe that inner life. It is a kind of crib sheet for modernism itself.
Except that Henry had gotten there first. His 1906 preface to the Portrait is the product of memory, and maybe we should be skeptical when he depicts his younger self as saying that he wanted to focus upon “the young woman’s own consiousness,” that he would make the story one of “her relation to herself.” But if any single chapter of the Portrait does embody those ambitions, it is this one, and it stands as an ever more central part of his oeuvre. He wrote to William in the spring of 1884 that the essay in Mind had “defeated” him, and yet some lines in that year’s “Art of Fiction” do seem to echo it. For him consciousness isn’t a stream but a “chamber,” and our sensibilities are like a spider’s web suspended within it, capturing everything that comes within reach of its filaments. Forty years later Virginia Woolf—he had known her from birth, he had dined with her parents—would describe that consciousness as a “luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope.” The metaphor changes but the phenomenon remains, and what James does in this chapter is much closer to Woolf’s own achievement in To the Lighthouse than it is to Eliot’s Middlemarch. Of course, Woolf’s very sentences gave her contemporaries trouble, as at this period James’s own did not. In some ways the Portrait’s might seem but to extend what other writers had already done, to differ from them only in degree. Yet in his avoidance of buckets, in the inconclusive and associative flow of Isabel’s thoughts, and even in his sheer ability to sustain his account of those thoughts, James here goes so much further than his predecessors that it amounts to a difference in kind. No writer in English had yet offered so full an account of the inner life, and in remembering this chapter for his preface he allowed himself, for once, to make an unqualified judgement—“It is obviously the best thing in the book.”
Probably it is; but best or not, it is clearly the most important. Yet nothing in James’s plans for the novel seemed to anticipate it. The notes in which he blocked out the book’s last stages make no mention of Isabel’s motionless vigil, and though he does write of needing to characterize her estrangement from Osmond, he gives himself no suggestions as to how he might do it. I suspect that the idea for this chapter came to him late. Only when he was at last upon it did he discover the technique that would allow him to handle her revulsion. Only then did James find a method, at once expansive and abbreviated, with which to define Isabel’s marriage. Whatever the history of its composition, however, there is no doubt that this chapter marks a turning point. James’s earlier work had often substituted a character’s impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more—they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well. James would write many kinds of fiction over the next twenty-five years, but from this point on the central events of his characters’ lives increasingly take place, not in the social world, but within; interior acts of interpretation or understanding. Chapter 42 marks the point at which James stopped being just an important American writer with a special knowledge of Europe on the one hand and the predicament of young women on the other. It marks the point at which his own work became Jamesian: the point at which he began to shape the future, a writer whose books made other books possible, a central figure in the history of the novel itself.
James closes the gap in his story only when it becomes dramatically necessary to do so. Osmond has left the Warburton business in Isabel’s hands, and at this point we can’t fully understand either that request or her reaction to it without some fuller understanding of their marriage. So the requirements of the present produce a return to the past, a break in sequence in which both Isabel’s mind and the novel itself rove back in time, working to fill the hole in our knowledge. Later writers would take this further, would violate chronology with a recklessness that James himself could not imagine. Conrad would make a career out of retrospection; Faulkner would seem to freeze time itself in its place. In some ways James remained a Victorian, and when in The Golden Bowl Maggie Verver brings Isabel’s kind of freely moving intelligence to bear on her own marriage, she directs it toward the present and not the past. She thinks her way through a situation that she wants not simply to understand but to shape. By that time James was willing and able to write about the inner life of a marriage, indeed about passion itself. And perhaps both the Portrait’s great ellipsis and the idea of consciousness that he developed to deal with it did indeed allow him to evade a difficulty.
That indirection is inseparable from the fact that he asks us to see the failure of that marriage in broadly sexual terms: to remember Isabel’s earlier fears of surrendering her very self, and to think of them now as realized. Not in any crude or even precisely physical way. James made few substantive revisions to this chapter for the New York Edition, but one of them does suggest the nature and presence of Isabel’s own desire. There may indeed be things she doesn’t want to hear, forms of knowledge from which she wants to protect herself, but where in 1881 she had merely “loved” Osmond, in the later version she “anxiously and yet ardently” gave herself to him. That shift clarifies; it lets us know that what’s gone wrong isn’t some insurmountable reticence or dysfunction. James also tells us—and in the first edition—that Isabel “was not a daughter of the Puritans” and writes too that Osmond has committed no crime, no moment of violence or cruelty. What’s gone wrong isn’t a question of some particular action, and perhaps it isn’t even sex itself but rather some aspect of Osmond’s being for which James finds a sexual language. For we cannot miss the charge with which he writes that at a certain point the man’s “personality, touched as it never had been, stepped forth and stood erect.” It stands up, makes itself visible, its presence felt. The image is there in 1881 and unchanged in the later edition, and though the metaphor could if necessary be disowned, it does define Osmond’s threat, the force with which he assaults her very sense of self. Her “real offence . . . was her having a mind of her own at all,” and he wants to knock it out of her. He wants to treat her mind as an annex of his, and furnished only with his tastes and opinions. He has not counted on her resistance, however, and at every obstacle his hatred grows.
Isabel resists both because she must and because she finds Osmond’s own beliefs so entirely repugnant; above all, his claim that life is a matter of prescribed forms and not freedoms. We will learn much more as she thinks through the night, will learn everything we need to know. She will meditate on Osmond’s contempt for everyone in the world except the handful of people he envies instead, and of his desire to extract from the world some acknowledgment of his own superiority. She will contemplate his claim that it’s somehow “indecent” for her to visit Ralph at his hotel. And in thinking about Ralph’s invalid life Isabel will at last understand his attempt to warn her off this marriage. She will recognize that his generosity is in itself a form of intelligence and one her husband lacks. So she sits quietly on as the candles burn down, her mind a cauldron of activity. But at last she rises, and then stops, her memory caught, in the chapter’s last words, by that afternoon’s impression of “her husband and Madame Merle, grouped unconsciously and familiarly.”
19.
THE ART OF FICTION
MACMILLAN RELEASED THE first book edition of The Portrait of a Lady at the start of November 1881, immediately after it finished its serial run. Houghton, Mifflin followed two weeks later with the first American issue, and anyone looking at them together will find it hard to resist an obvious joke: their difference says volumes about the differences between the British and the American book trade. The English edition appeared as a standard triple-decker, albeit one whose 750 pages were more closely printed than the norm. In America it came out as a single volume, and its 520 pages were even more tightly packed. Macmill
an observed the standard pricing as well—retail customers paid 31s.6d. or 10s.6d a volume. The Boston firm sold the book for $2, or just a bit more than the 6s. the English one-volume cheap edition would fetch the next year. And that difference in price forecasts a difference in sales as well. The first English edition of 750 copies did sell out, and Macmillan ordered a small second printing in the new year, before releasing their cheap edition that summer. But Houghton, Mifflin ran through six printings by August 1882, after an initial impression of 1,500 copies, for total sales of just over 6,000. These figures are small in comparison to those of Twain or even Howells, and yet for James it was a major success; indeed, the Portrait would prove both the most popular and the most lucrative of his full-length novels.
That difference in sales is worth noting, and can’t be explained by assuming that even an expatriated American would inevitably sell better at home. Most novels published in London had even smaller runs, and what matters here is the structure of the industry itself. English publishers could produce cheap books. They chose not to. Prices remained what they were in the days of Walter Scott, and ignored the technological developments in both printing and papermaking that had brought the real costs of publishing down. What kept those prices artificially high was the existence of such commercial libraries as Mudie’s; Macmillan’s ads for the Portrait announced not that the book was in the shops, but rather that it was “now ready, at all the Libraries.” I’ve already described how such businesses worked from a customer’s point of view. An annual fee—Mudie’s standard was a guinea, or 21s.—allowed subscribers to take out the first volume of as many works as they chose, with subsequent volumes costing a shilling a throw. That wasn’t cheap; a subscriber’s ticket was itself a mark of middle-class respectability. But it was economical, and the system accustomed the public to borrowing instead of buying. The libraries needed the three-volume novel to make their money, and because they invariably took a large percentage of any first edition, albeit at a steeply discounted price, the publishers gave them what they wanted. That collusion ensured both that the libraries remained lucrative and publishing had few risks, but its consequence was to keep the retail price of new books so high as to discourage purchase. American libraries didn’t exercise the same power in the marketplace; for one thing, they tended to be free. Prices therefore remained closer to the actual cost of manufacture, reflecting what a buying public was willing to pay, and there was no incentive to spread a book over several volumes.
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