by Colm Toibin
The Portrait of a Lady exudes more energy than Washington Square not only because its heroine fills a larger space spiritually and intellectually but for two other reasons. The first is that Isabel’s solitude is not only denser and richer, but it is also given more dramatic weight. In the Preface he wrote more than twenty years later James analysed what he had done with Isabel Archer’s ‘inward life’, when he referred to that scene where, by allowing her mind to circle and re-circle, he brought Isabel and the reader to a realization of what has been hidden from both up to then. ‘And I cannot think,’ James wrote,
of a more consistent application of that ideal [of making the inward life of a character as dramatic as any set of external events] unless it be in the long statement, just beyond the middle of the book, of my young woman’s extraordinary meditative vigil on the occasion that was to become for her such a landmark. Reduced to its essence, it is but a vigil of searching criticism; but it throws the action further forward than twenty ‘incidents’ might have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity of incident and all the economy of picture. She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night … it all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the book …
The other scene from the book that James mentions in the Preface as also a key to the book’s dynamic is the scene in which
Isabel, coming into the drawing-room at Gardencourt, coming in from a wet walk or whatever, that rainy afternoon, finds Madame Merle in possession of the place, Madame Merle seated, all absorbed but all serene, at the piano, and deeply recognises, in the striking of such an hour, in the presence there, among the gathering shades of this personage, of whom a moment before she had never so much as heard, a turning-point in her life.
Madame Merle is presented to both Isabel and the reader as a surrogate aunt for Isabel, who will take the place of Mrs Touchett or augment her effort to direct Isabel towards her destiny. Isabel will be free, of course, to resist such direction, being less brittle and selfish than Mrs Touchett and less worldly and sociable than Madame Merle. What James then does is allow the character of Madame Merle to shift in the book, or move from being an aunt to being a rival. He sexualizes an aunt, and this act gives The Portrait of a Lady its power. He radically destabilizes the category of aunt, moves Madame Merle from being someone who protects Isabel, who stands in for her mother without having a mother’s control, to being someone who seeks to damage her, defeat her. He makes Isabel realize this by herself, through her own powers, thus making her solitude a sharp weapon, a tactic almost, as much as a vulnerable condition.
But James also wishes to dramatize, to take what happens in the secret chambers of the self, the mind at work in silence as registered by the novelist in sentences, and move this into dialogue, open drama. The scene where Madame Merle confronts Isabel, asking why Lord Warburton has not continued his interest in Pansy, the daughter of Isabel’s husband, is masterly in its stagecraft, its creation of dramatic illusion, its understanding of the sheer power in a novel of playing it as though there were two actresses on the page, rather than a silent novelist communicating with a silent reader. When Madame Merle overplays her hand by asking Isabel to ‘let us have him’, to let her and Osmond and Pansy have Lord Warburton, ‘Madame Merle had proceeded very deliberately,’ James writes:
watching her companion and apparently thinking she could proceed safely. As she went on Isabel grew pale; she clasped her hands more tightly in her lap. It was not that her visitor had at last thought it was the right time to be insolent; for this was not what was most apparent. It was a worse horror than that. ‘Who are you – what are you?’ Isabel murmured. ‘What have you to do with my husband?’ It was strange that for the moment she drew as near to him as if she had loved him. ‘Ah then, you take it heroically! I’m very sorry. Don’t think, however, that I shall do so.’ ‘What have you to do with me?’ Isabel went on. Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes from Isabel’s face. ‘Everything!’ she answered.
In that moment a transformation of an exquisite kind takes place in the book as the older woman removes her guise as aunt and puts on the mask of rival. There is another moment worthy of attention when shapes change, when figures who played one role move into another, thus adding to the texture of the book. It is in the very last chapter after the death of Ralph Touchett when Isabel embraces her aunt:
She went to her aunt and put her arm around her; and Mrs Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as might be, to take it. But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white face was terrible. ‘Dear Aunt Lydia,’ Isabel murmured. ‘Go and thank God you’ve no child,’ said Mrs Touchett, disengaging herself.
Thus it emerges that Mrs Touchett, as well as being an intrepid and amusing aunt, has all the time been a mother, watching over Ralph as he weakens as the book proceeds. Like Madame Merle, her role in a novel that is itself filled with duplicity is dual; the fact that she does not simply play one role, or that the simplicity of her role is so starkly undermined in that scene with Isabel, by allowing the novel to layer and offer density to its own procedures, gives it a powerfully protean dynamic.
In James’s novel The Ambassadors, written more than twenty years later, Lambert Strether appears in the guise of uncle, as, initially, Marie de Vionnet appears as aunt. Thus Chad can play the role of nephew to both and can seem to have an interest in Madame de Vionnet’s daughter. Once again, as the novel develops, James plays with absence. Chad’s father is dead; his mother is alive, but does not appear in the book except as an energy that pulls him towards her. In the empty space left by absent parents, then, it is clear what must happen. The surrogate uncle will fall for the surrogate aunt. And the two young people will find each other attractive. And the novel will, once more, be the story of the further exclusion of the mother, her annihilation all the more dramatic and satisfying because she is so needy.
James has other plans, however, and he plays these out in a recognition scene of exquisite subtlety as Strether, having made a random trip outside Paris, observes two figures in a boat, slowly sees that they have spotted him too; they are not Chad and Madame de Vionnet’s daughter, however, but Chad and the Madame herself. In the way they seek to avoid being seen, everything becomes apparent. ‘This little effect,’ James writes,
was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether’s sense of it was separate only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million, but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other than Chad.
Thus once more James has sexualized an aunt. It is as though Henry Crawford came to Mansfield Park in search of Lady Bertram rather than Fanny; or Mr Darcy were found in the countryside in his shirtsleeves with none other than Mrs Bennet, or Aunt Gardiner; or Mr Bingley were found in a carriage with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In other words, James took what was necessary for a novel in his time to have power and weight – the replacement of the mother by the aunt – and then saw what was possible, the making of the aunt not simply an enabling figure, or a cruel comic figure, or a passive figure, but a highly sexualized woman, and so, within the dynamic of the novel, a figure capable of moving at will from one role to another, causing havoc within the narrative systems created for her.
In both The Turn of the Screw and The Golden Bowl, it is as though the mother never existed, as though the characters came into being by some method specially created by the novelist rather than by nature. She is not an absence; she was never present. She is unthinkable. Instead, a surrogate aunt emerges, who is deeply neurotic in the former book, and oddl
y nosy and wise in the latter. The children Flora and Miles thus inhabit that rich space made for Victorian fictional characters; they are orphaned, and nothing can happen to them until the aunt figure, in the guise of the governess, arrives, and then everything can happen. In The Golden Bowl, just as Charlotte Stant appears ready to become Maggie Verver’s potential stepmother, by marrying Adam Verver, Maggie’s father, she also becomes Maggie’s rival for the Prince, who is Maggie’s husband. As every other force in the book remains stable, solid, Charlotte is the element who is shape-changing, untrustworthy, duplicitous. Those around her can be released from being contaminated by Charlotte by the arrival of a surrogate aunt in the guise of Fanny Assingham, who will treat the story of the book as story, in the same way as a reader will, but will also be the figure who will smash the golden bowl.
In The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy goes to her rich Aunt Maud on her mother’s death, her mother having left her more or less penniless, and her Aunt Maud makes her an offer that is outlined in the opening of the book. It is the offer that is at the very basis of the novel from Austen to James. Aunt Maud wishes her niece to be an orphan and wishes to control her life, or manipulate her future. She wants her niece to go and see her father. Kate tells him: ‘The condition Aunt Maud makes is that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor speak nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you shall cease to exist for me.’
Having given up her father, Kate is now in the hands of her aunt, and it is these hands that slowly mould her and come subtly close to corrupting her. It is her aunt’s will that causes her to behave as she does. Her aunt watches over her possessively, as Aunt Peniston does Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, published three years later. In neither book is the younger woman loved or offered unconditional protection by the older woman; in both books the aunt is manipulative and difficult rather than hospitable to the orphaned niece, or comforting, or understanding. In Wharton’s book Lily Bart is brought to ruin; in The Wings of the Dove Kate Croy is allowed to ruin herself in a much more ambiguous and spiritual way; in both books, the brittle presence of the aunt hovers over the action, darting in and out of the narrative like a large needy reptile.
Into the action arrives the young heiress Milly Theale, whose history, we are told,
was a New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect of the mass of money so piled on the girl’s back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and in particular was strange – a combination in itself of a nature to engage Mrs Stringham’s attention.
Mrs Stringham is, of course, childless, old enough to be Milly’s aunt, and she becomes Milly’s surrogate aunt to match Kate’s aunt in the novel about two women, both orphans, both in the care of their aunts, both moving slowly towards destruction, one of the body, one of the moral spirit.
This idea of the family as anathema to the novel in the nineteenth century, or the novel as an enactment of the destruction of the family and the rise of the stylish conscience, or the individual spirit, comes in more guises than the replacement of mothers by aunts. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out: ‘Of all the fathers of Jane Austen novels, Sir Thomas [Bertram] is the only one to whom admiration is given.’ This idea of the annihilation of the communal and its replacement with the person, and the novel being one of the agents of this, as much as a result of it, comes throughout the century, however, in the guise of mothers fading and aunts arriving. As Rupert Christiansen has pointed out in The Complete Book of Aunts, it occurs in the novels between Austen and James as much as it does in their work. It occurs in the novels of Dickens (David Copperfield and Little Dorrit) and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), of Thackeray (Vanity Fair) and Trollope (He Knew He Was Right).
But as the century went on, novelists had to contemplate the afterlives of Elizabeth and Darcy, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram, had to deal with the fact that these novels made families out of the very act of breaking them. It was clear that since something fundamental had been done already in the novel to the idea of parents, something would also have to be done to the very idea of marriage itself, since marriage was a dilution of the autonomy of the individual protagonist. There is a line that can be drawn between Trollope and George Eliot and Henry James in which all three dramatize precisely the same scene, each of them alert to its implications. Each of them is alert to the power of the lone, unattached male figure in the novel. This male figure is not openly looking for a wife, and this is what makes him dangerous, more dangerous than any aunt has been. He can have an uneasy sexual presence with a way of noticing and listening. He can have the power of conscience, and the pure strength of someone who does not have obvious desires. He can represent the novelist in the novel, but is also from the future, from a world in which the making of marriages is no longer the main subject for a novelist. Once more, it is his solitude that gives him power, as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice derives his power from his solitude as much as his fortune, until he marries Elizabeth.
There is a chapter in Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn, published in 1869, called ‘Lady Laura Kennedy’s Headache’, when Laura Kennedy tells Phineas that her marriage has been a mistake. In doing so, she uses his first name, not having done so before, and becomes oddly intimate with him while making clear, as she says, that ‘I have blundered as fools blunder, thinking that I was clever enough to pick my footsteps aright without asking counsel from any one. I have blundered and stumbled and fallen, and now I am so bruised that I am not able to stand upon my feet.’
As they talk she compares Phineas, who is young, sympathetic, handsome, free, to her dry, bullying husband. As she does so, her husband approaches, and bullies her further, doing so in the presence of Phineas, who is now in possession of very dark knowledge indeed.
In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, Deronda himself comes into possession of precisely the same knowledge when Gwendolen takes him into her confidence. She, like Lady Laura Kennedy, has married a bully. As in Phineas Finn, the reader learns how dangerous the Phineas or Daniel figure is, how much the bullying husband will resent him and how much the wife, locked in a nightmare marriage, will depend on him not only in her dreams but in the construction of her own narrative. Phineas and Daniel operate irresponsibly in this aspect of the novel, they are like cells who do not duplicate, or atoms whose power cannot be penetrated or dissolved. They stand outside a marriage as a force even more destructive than the husband himself, someone outside the family, utterly attractive, stealing power for themselves. A woman talking about her husband to another man offers an electric charge to the novel, a charge reflected in the very response of Gwendolen to her own confession:
She broke off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning, that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compassion which was spread over his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before …
In the meantime Grandcourt, the tyrant husband, watched his wife and Daniel: ‘No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Daniel escaped him.’ In a later scene, when Gwendolen once more appeals to Deronda to understand what is happening in her marriage and he tells her, ‘My only regret is, that I can be of so little use to you,’ the writing takes on a force, filled with shimmering movement and dramatic excitement. ‘Words,’ she writes,
seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril of
wreck – the poor ship with its many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm. How could he grasp the long-growing process of this young creature’s wretchedness? – how arrest and change it with a sentence? He was afraid of his own voice. The words that rushed into his mind seemed in their feebleness nothing better than despair made audible, or than that insensibility to another’s hardship which applies precept to soothe pain. He felt himself holding a crowd of words imprisoned within his lips, as if the letting them escape would be a violation of awe before the mysteries of our human lot. The thought that urged itself foremost was – ‘Confess everything to your husband; leave nothing concealed’ – the words carried in his mind a vision of reasons which would have needed much fuller expression for Gwendolen to apprehend them, but before he had begun to utter those brief sentences, the door opened and the husband entered.