Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  For while the comedy may divert and distract us, we can’t help but remember that it stands upon the fact of Isabel’s sadness, the sadness this “visibly happy” woman so tries to keep her friends from seeing. Isabel knows that Osmond wants to put out the lights of her mind, but she has not yet begun to act in “direct opposition” to his wishes. Before her marriage this principled girl from Albany had thought she could give herself entirely; it’s a part of what James calls her great good faith. Even now she cannot forget what she calls the “traditionary decencies and sanctities of marriage,” sanctities that include the injunction not only to love and honor her husband, but also to obey him. She shrinks from any rupture, telling herself that to break with Osmond on even a single question would be to break with him forever. “I can’t publish my mistake,” she says to Henrietta, for doing so would amount to a repudiation of her life’s most serious act. Isabel believes that she should accept the consequences of her deeds, of anything she has freely chosen to do, and it is therefore with a sense of shame and dread that she begins to see that she might one day “have to take back something that she had solemnly given.” She might have to take back her word and her promise; she might have to reclaim her very self.

  But she hasn’t yet reached for that remedy, and in the meantime the only thing that makes her trouble bearable is the city of Rome itself. One of the novel’s richest passages describes Isabel’s habit of driving through the city, descending from her carriage to visit the emptiest of old churches or to seat herself upon blocks of stone “that had once had a use.” She grows especially fond of a spot from which she can look across the Campagna, where emptiness itself has both shape and substance, and each field seems the ghost of a vanished world. James writes that Isabel has taken “old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.” She can confess to it, can admit her misery—the place has seen everything and doesn’t expect one always to smile. It has been crumbling for centuries and yet so much of it remains upright; its very age makes her realize the smallness of her own troubles, so small in the city’s long record that at times she can almost laugh at them. What she finds there is a sense, at once haunting and exhilarating, of the continuity of human experience; what she finds is what James found there himself.

  Nothing in the whole of the Portrait brings Isabel closer to her creator—nothing makes the identity between character and author more complete—than this evocation of the help she gets from the stones of the ancient city. Rome may stand in her mind as a “place where people had suffered,” but that in itself works to normalize her own trouble in a way that a setting in New York’s bustling modernity would not. It gives her a language with which to understand her experience, a set of images that nothing in her own past can match; it suggests that her condition isn’t some odd individual exception, but the ordinary lot of human kind. The young James had often used a European setting to intensify his characters’ situation, but he had grown beyond that by the time he wrote this novel, and here that setting works to subsume his people instead. So in a passage that recalls the “Roman Rides” of the previous decade, Isabel looks “through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene—at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes.” It’s scenery, true, and psychology as well, the warm confused mind of the character herself. But it is also a passage of history, and one that throws Isabel’s American newness into the shade. She inserts herself, as James did, into the long corridors of the past. She asserts a sense of continuity as a way to survive, to endure, in the present.

  “I was perfectly free.” So Isabel says to Henrietta, and so she believes. Nobody made her marry Osmond; she elected her own fate. That faith in the individual’s freedom to shape the terms of his or her own life stands as one of the founding principles of nineteenth-century fiction, of a form that presents its people, in Iris Murdoch’s terms, as being at once “free and separate and related to a rich and complicated” social world. Murdoch’s phrase is one I’m always tempted to misread—I imagine her as having written “free and separate but related,” as though those qualities were in some necessary opposition. Yet she doesn’t present them as contradictory. George Eliot’s Dorothea has the freedom, and even the free will, that she needs to make her own choices; so does Tolstoy’s Levin in Anna Karenina. Yet neither those characters nor their authors would have denied that their freedom has limits, that they remain connected to and shaped by the life of their time and place.

  Isabel claims something more radical. As a young woman, she had insisted on her right to choose which rules she might follow and had refused to believe that she could be measured by anything that belonged to her, by such possessions as a house or clothes. She was separate from all that, liberated from her enveloping circumstances, and her belief in that freedom speaks, as I have said, to an Emersonian conception of individual identity. It is autonomous, self-made, self-reliant; in a word, American. Nevertheless, she has decided to surrender that freedom, as marriage itself requires; she has chosen to form a part of something larger than she is alone, and thinks that she must bind herself to the very degree that her earlier state was free. But now her faith in that earlier and perfect liberty begins itself to erode; an erosion that stands as a direct consequence of Osmond’s hopes for Pansy’s marriage. James will not go so far as Zola. He won’t suggest that Isabel’s environment determines her fate and character, though he recognizes the challenge that naturalism provides, not only to Emerson’s ideal, but also to the more traditional sense of the self on which books like Middlemarch depend. He does, however, confront her with a set of facts that will force her to revise her peculiarly American understanding of her own past, of the degree to which she has made her own life.

  James defines Isabel’s response to the Roman sadness as habitual, her customary way of thinking about the place, but he also offers his account of it in terms of a particular moment. She drives out one day determined not to think of a conversation she has just had with Madame Merle, and at this point James returns us to the tableau with which her midnight reverie had ended. For the older woman has seemed unreasonably disappointed to learn that Warburton has gone back to England instead of proposing to Pansy. She had so wanted that marriage, she says, and excuses her show of interest by adding that “when one is such an old friend, one can’t help having something at stake.” But what? Then her questions bubble up, and as she probes and pushes, as she tries to discover just what Isabel thinks of it all, one thing becomes clear. She believes, with Osmond, that Isabel has sent Warburton away, and not out of charity, not because she knows that Pansy loves Ned Rosier instead. No, Madame Merle suspects that Isabel wants to keep the Englishman for herself. Which makes her somehow desperate beneath her smiles, until she finally—commandingly, beggingly—asks the younger woman to “Let him off—let us have him.”

  The pronoun startles—“us”—and makes one wonder just why this family friend feels free to use it. Nor can we miss the note of ravening hunger with which she speaks. But Isabel has already begun to hear a “mocking voice” in her head, telling her that “this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman . . . was a powerful agent in her destiny.” So indeed her aunt has always claimed, insisting that Madame Merle had arranged Isabel’s marriage, introducing her oldest friend to the young woman’s fortune. Isabel has never believed it: Madame Merle had perhaps made Gilbert Osmond’s marriage by prodding him out of his lassitude, but the older woman has had nothing to do with her own. That was a matter of her own free choice. Now, however, she has a chill on her soul, and at that “us” she grows pale. “Who are you,” she asks, “what are you . . . What do you have to do with my husband. . . . What do you have to do with me?” And her friend, whose eyes seem to radiate darkness, answers in just a word. “Everything.”

  Which makes Isabel realize that her aunt was right. Madam
e Merle has indeed made her marriage; which means that Madame Merle has made her. She has never been free, and was in some ways least free when she imagined herself most, when her new fortune allowed her to indulge her imagination, to believe she could do what she liked. Isabel remembers here that her friend had become especially affectionate after learning of her inheritance, and though she has long recognized that her husband’s ascetism is but a mask for his worldliness, she also realizes, now, that “the man in the world whom she had supposed to be the least sordid, had married her for her money. Strange to say, it had never before occurred to her.” He has measured her by the things that belong to her, and married her, in Madame Merle’s words, for the shell of her appurtenances.

  Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps he might be willing to take that money and let her go, to swap her freedom for her fortune. This is as close as Isabel gets to the question of divorce, which Italian law, like that of the rest of Catholic Europe, did not then allow; even in England it remained extraordinarily difficult. For that she would probably have had to return to America, where in some western states it was relatively easy; easy enough, at any rate, to figure in the books of James contemporaries, Howells’s Modern Instance among them. Still, such novels almost always depict divorced women as morally “light,” and Isabel doesn’t appear to consider that journey. Her thoughts refer instead to a legal separation, in which she might pay Osmond to go away, using the investments otherwise secured to her by her marriage settlements. An English lawyer would find that easy enough to arrange, and yet even so it would make public what she sees as the shame of her failure. But Madame Merle’s words also prompt another thought. Isabel has always said to herself “that the worst was still to come,” and now she thinks it has. Being married for her money is the “worst [thing] she could think of,” and yet James chooses that phrase to make us remember what his heroine has forgotten. He wants us to recall Edgar’s claim in King Lear that “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’” we have still greater troubles before us.

  Isabel’s talk with Madame Merle is but the first of the series of interviews—let me use the Victorian word—that James uses to move the novel toward its end. It makes her wonder if the older woman is someone to whom she might apply “the great historical epithet of wicked,” a term she knows only from books and of which she has always believed she had no personal knowledge. Any full account of James’s conception of evil will have to wait until the novel’s conclusion, however, and for now it’s best approached through his handling of plot, in every sense of the word; not only his own narrative plan, but also the designs his characters have upon each other, the secrets they hold, the metaphoric daggers in their sleeves. Osmond, for example—Osmond decides to put a bit more pressure on his daughter, to give the screw another turn. Warburton’s interest has suggested that Pansy can “aim high,” and he’s disappointed that she’s still fond of Ned Rosier, still has some remaining shred of an independent life. In Florence he had spoken proudly of bringing her up “in the old way,” but what he does now is the old way indeed. He sends her back to her convent, he demonstrates his power by locking her up. It is, he says, just a brief retreat, “a chance for a little seclusion.” She will soon be out again; once she has learned the right way to think.

  Then a telegram arrives from Gardencourt. Ralph has been back in England for some weeks, but his life is now counted in days, and Isabel knows at once she must see him; whatever came between them has now lost its force. Except it hasn’t—or rather he hasn’t, Osmond hasn’t. When Isabel goes to tell him of her plans, she finds him preparing a watercolor copy of a print of an antique coin. Critics have always had fun with James’s description here, for it perfectly captures both Osmond’s values and limits. He is a copy of a copy; even his money comes to him thirdhand. But he has a bitter sting, and nowhere more so than in this scene, the last in which he appears. He sees no need for the trip, and tells Isabel that her relations with the visiting invalid had kept him on tenterhooks all winter, albeit for reasons he will not specify. He thinks her desire to go is simply an act of marital revenge, and his words are worth quoting at length:

  “It’s dishonourable; it’s indelicate; it’s indecent. Your cousin is nothing whatever to me. . . . Your cousin is nothing to you; he is nothing to us. You smile most expressively when I talk about us; but I assure you that we, we, is all that I know. . . . You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I am nearer to you. . . . You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know; but I am perfectly willing, because—because. . . . Because I think we should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing!”

  Ralph is nothing to him, and can therefore be nothing to her. The pronoun he uses—“your cousin”—may undermine his argument, but Osmond speaks here as if a wife finds her being both in and through her husband alone. His we is really I, and the dishonor of which he speaks lies in his eyes only, the product of his own indelicate imagination. Still, we can’t simply dismiss his statement. Isabel herself has said much the same thing to Henrietta, in explaining why she cannot leave him, and Osmond’s words, at once calculated and strangely sincere, will have a terrible effect. She may think that his very soul is “malignant,” but she cannot act against this conception of matrimony. So she finds herself in check, unable for the moment to move, unwilling to take a step, not against her husband, but against the idea of marriage itself. To see Ralph before he dies, she is going to need some help.

  That help comes in the form of Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini. James wrote in his preface to The Tragic Muse that the art of fiction was in large part the art of preparations, and what he does now with Amy Osmond justifies her entire scatterbrained existence, her intrigues and love affairs and cries of enthusiasm over ruins that she never leaves the carriage to see. He makes her do what she was invented to do—to tell Isabel something that only a sister can. James’s heroine passes her in the hallway, her misery beyond words, and an hour later the woman comes to her in a despair of her own over Isabel’s terribly “pure mind,” and offers her a bit of old family history, a piece of gossip that the Countess thinks she should have guessed long ago. The news is simply that her “first sister-in-law had no children.” And that little fact will give an extra and awful meaning to Madame Merle’s “Everything.”

  Pansy is indeed Osmond’s daughter—but also, the Countess says, the daughter of “some one else’s wife. Ah, my good Isabel, with you one must dot one’s i’s!” Then the story tumbles out. Some readers will not be surprised to learn that Osmond and Madame Merle were once lovers, and that they had a daughter a year after the death of Osmond’s first wife. That was in Naples. Osmond then moved north, telling people his wife had died in childbirth, and was believed; and yet the story did require the actual mother to renounce “all visible property” in the girl. Soon enough Madame Merle’s own husband died, but Osmond was poor and the widow wanted a fortune; besides, the Countess adds, by that time he had tired of her. Nevertheless, they plotted to help one another, and Isabel herself is the result of their pact. “I have watched them for years,” Amy says, and “I know everything—everything.” She even knows that to Isabel her brother has been faithful, as he was not to his first wife. Or faithful at least in the usual sense; he is “no longer the lover of another woman. . . . But the whole past was between them,” and with Pansy so visible a reminder of it that Madame Merle dreads being seen next to her, lest people spot a resemblance. The Countess believes that the mother has never given herself away, but Isabel knows better. The mother has indeed betrayed herself—“Let us have him”—even if she had not then recognized it.

  Which is, of course, the crucial question. Why hasn’t she? And though it’s not quite the same question, why haven’t we? To the Countess, Isabel’s innocence is really a great bore. She hasn’t known because she remains willfully naïve; as she said before her marriage, she doesn’t want to hear anything that Pansy may not. In
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot allows her heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, to marry despite knowing that her husband supports a mistress and their children. She makes her drama out of the character’s knowledge; James, out of her ignorance. Isabel hasn’t known because she didn’t want to, because she trusted: because she had such an extraordinary conception of what marriage to Osmond would be like, because her imagination so looks for the good, the ideal, that it amounts to a failure of imagination itself. The more interesting question is why we haven’t known—not just why James hasn’t told us but why the book doesn’t allow itself to know the truth until Isabel does. The novelist himself had of course planned it all from the start; his working notes are uncertain only about how best to manage the revelation. And some readers do figure it out. They know enough about the conventions of fiction to spot the twists in James’s plot; they manage to interpret instead of just noticing the burden of the unspoken in that opening conversation on Bellosguardo. Some readers stay on their guard because life has made them do so, and others because James has; because they know that in his work the profession of fine motives is so often a mask. Yet even the most skilled and suspicious members of his audience have not been told the truth in what are literally so many words, and more first-time readers than not are surprised by the Countess’s tale.