At this moment Isabel seems both entirely responsive to sexual passion and afraid of it in equal measure—afraid because responsive, because the strength of Goodwood’s emotion has turned the key of her own, and she discovers how entirely capable she is of losing herself. We remember the fear with which she regarded the likelihood of Warburton’s proposal, and her sense of the uncertain ground that Osmond’s declaration produced, her imagination halting before it could go too far. We remember too her belief that if a certain light ever came she could give herself entirely. Now that light has come indeed, and with a force that makes Isabel sink and gasp not for breath but for thought. Goodwood’s kiss clouds her head even as she thrills with perception, and it is exactly her presence, her independence, of mind that she most fears to lose. It’s what she had to fight for with Osmond, who wanted to deck her inner world in his own genius for upholstery. But she had saved herself. She sat before the fire and puzzled out her life, she came to a clear understanding of the forces that had shaped and trapped her, and she learned the nature of her own blindness. She set herself free, even before leaving to sit by Ralph’s bed. Now she might lose it all, but then Goodwood releases her, the darkness returns, and she knows what to do.
James’s revisions suggest the reason for the decision Isabel now makes; reasons that seemed obscure to many readers of the first edition and maybe even to the author himself. She returns to Rome. She leaves Gardencourt as quickly as she can, and the news comes to us as a punch, a kick, a stab. Rome? For what, and why? Once again James pulls away from Isabel at a moment of decision—he did not show her in the act of choosing Osmond, and he does not show her here. Once more he staggers us with a fait accompli. This second decision had, however, seemed undermotivated in 1881, as though Goodwood’s kiss had simply shown her where her duty lay. The later version gives us something much more complicated, and we can begin to understand it by taking literally the words she speaks at random. She goes to Rome to get away from Goodwood, not only from the “aggressive fact” of his presence but also from her own desire. She goes because she recognizes that the most valuable thing she has is a free mind, and Goodwood challenges that freedom as Osmond no longer does, threatening the autonomous self she has fought so hard to regain. She chooses, knowing what she doesn’t want, and she goes because at this point nothing forces her to; her choice is an active one, and she goes because she can. She goes, finally, because to stay would require her to accept an illusion. She would have to believe, with her own earlier self, that an unfallen world does indeed lie all before her.
The younger James had neither the language nor the emotional experience to write about that. The older one did, and he used it to show us just why Isabel makes this final choice. It’s not that she’s afraid of sex per se, as some readers have always thought, but that she refuses to grant it the power she now knows it could have. She will not allow her fate to be determined by desire. Whether James is right about this, whether he could or should have allowed her something more—well, that’s another question. In Maggie Verver he created a woman whose independence of mind is sharpened by that same desire, and in creating her he learned what he needed to know in looking at Isabel once more. He was himself a different man by then, and the world of the novel was different too. Stephen Crane had already given us his own Maggie, that girl of the streets, and Edith Wharton would soon bring a mathematical precision to seduction in The Reef; D. H. Lawrence would begin to work, and Proust as well. The printed page had started to admit what everyone talked about. But James was right about it for this character, for Isabel. In the New York Edition he could show, as he could not in 1881, just why she behaved as she did, and yet in doing so kept both the character and her novel within the boundaries he had first defined. She isn’t different in the later version; but he does know more about her.
The news that Isabel has returned to Rome comes on the book’s last page; the novel did not begin with Isabel, and it does not end with her either. Our heroine disappears from the text, vanishing into the smoke and the steam of a southbound train, and leaving Henrietta behind to give Caspar Goodwood the news. He turns away when he hears it, but Henrietta then grasps his arm and tells him to wait. On which, in the last words of the first edition, “he looked up at her.” Finis.
But what kind of ending is that? It is so fast, and so startling, that we seem to plunge as deeply into the waters as Isabel herself, a confusion in which our feet have no bottom to find. Many of James’s first readers felt troubled by it, and wondered just what, exactly, Goodwood was meant to wait for. The Spectator’s R. H. Hutton thought that the novel finished on the verge of what it dared not describe, and that Isabel’s straight path led directly to a “liaison with her rejected lover.” In Blackwood’s, Margaret Oliphant acknowledged James’s usual way of teasing his readers “with an end which is left to our imagination,” but her own imagination joined Hutton’s in seeing some “future stain” on the heroine; a suggestion she refused to abide. And James himself took pains to clarify those last sentences. His notebooks are explicit: Isabel now “feels the full force of [Goodwood’s] devotion—to which she has never done justice; but she refuses.” He did recognize his readers’ puzzlement, though, and at a Boston dinner party in 1883 he told the table that Henrietta’s words merely offer the man a note of encouragement about life itself. Not that he takes it, as the 1906 revisions make clear. There, Goodwood looks up at her “only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young.” No reader of that later version can entertain Hutton’s fear; even Goodwood himself no longer believes that Isabel might turn to him.
Still, that fear is instructive. It reminds us of how sharply sudden the book’s last words are, of how disconcertingly little we’re told about what’s going to happen next. We suffer from the absence of news, and that suggests both how much we have come to care about Isabel and the strength of our need for a conclusion. Not just an end. Endings may be bitten off or cut short, as this one is, and what we want instead is some final disposition of the characters’ lives. George Eliot lets her widowed Dorothea remarry and have a baby, and she also orders Lydgate’s early death; Anna Karenina disappears beneath the wheels of a train, and Levin, having decided not to kill himself, walks home with his wife and child. These separate fates may delight or trouble us, but what really matters is that we know. Their lives are settled, and when we shut the book, we can leave them in place. Yet about Isabel we know nothing, as though James’s protagonist herself were but a loose end. He stops with her en route to Rome, and we can’t really predict what will happen when she gets there. Some of us may even grasp at the straws of what he doesn’t write. We know she has “started for Rome,” but James doesn’t say that she’s returned to her husband, and we can find ourselves clutching at the ambiguity.
James thought about the problem of winding things up for the entirety of his career. In his notebooks he recognized that the “obvious criticism” of the Portrait would be that it wasn’t finished, that he hadn’t “seen the heroine to the end of her situation—that I have left her en l’air.—This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.” And twenty-five years later he returned to that idea in the preface to Roderick Hudson: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw . . . the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” Human life spills out of form, and another episode is always possible. The novelist needs to acknowledge that and yet also to ignore it, and one of the ways James draws his circle is by drawing a circle in fact. The book returns to where it began—the same house, the same people, even the same bench, and that proto-modernist patterning offers a reassuring sense of wholeness, like the couplet at the end of a sonnet. It helps us accept that jagged stump of a last page. For James took a gamble here, and the response of his readers suggests that in 1881 it wasn’t entirely successful. Many of them couldn’
t accept a heroine who seemed to have one foot over the edge of the unknown, couldn’t accept uncertainty. We are used to open endings now, and in part because of novels like this one; because James has turned us into the kind of readers who can be trusted to work things out for ourselves, and don’t need a final chapter of dessert and ices.
James wrote in his notebooks that Isabel’s departure for Italy stands as the story’s climax—not Ralph’s death, and not even the kiss. Those incidents work instead to produce that climax, one in which the book narrows itself down to a decision between two starkly different futures. It presents us with a simple binary in which she must either stay or go, and once she makes that decision, in full knowledge of the forces that have shaped her, the novel is of necessity over. And we cannot say what will happen to her now; what would happen, if she were real. James seems to have thought of giving the Portrait a sequel, writing in his notebooks that what he had done was “complete in itself,” but adding that “the rest may be taken up or not, later.” He never did, and in 1898 answered a friend’s question about the chance of one by saying that it was “all too faint and far away.” No record survives as to what he thought might happen after the end of the last page—if indeed he thought anything at all. For one of the wonderful things about this clipped and disconcerting ending is that Isabel seems to travel into a future that lies outside her author’s own knowledge. Some readers want her to take up Pansy’s cause, and others believe that she goes home in defeat. Maybe she will suffer on in a place where others have suffered before her; maybe Osmond will take her money, and let her go. The lives we choose for her say more about us than they do about the character herself; in my own next installment her new awareness makes her formidable, and she goes home only to fight. Isabel’s future will have more possibilities in it than anyone can know when she steps onto that train, simply by virtue of being a future, but this chapter of her imaginary life is now closed.
“Nothing is my last word about anything.” The statement comes from a letter in which James answered a reader’s objection to one of his stories, and anyone trying to reach some final sense of a man who wrote so many millions of words should bear them in mind. Yet a last word we must have, and so let it be here. James enjoyed looking at pictures, and while visiting the London galleries in the early summer of 1882, he found himself drawn to a portrait that appeared to “raise the individual to the significance of a type,” one that made a khaki-clad reporter named Archibald Forbes seem the epitome of the globe-trotting Englishman. His own great picture was just a few months behind him, and we may take his words as an account of what he had tried to do with it. Another self-description comes in the lines he wrote a few years later about Sargent, when after considering such already-famous works as Madame X and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit he warned the painter against his own facility. For while “there is no greater work of art than a great portrait,” the truly magnificent ones unite a sharp immediate perception with some quality of “lingering reflection.” The artist must be patient with his subject, must live with it and into it and learn to see beyond its surface. Only then can he humanize its formal problems.
Henry James did that with Isabel Archer, and with the novel that contains her. He did it twice, in fact, seeing ever more deeply into the slim shade of a young girl who had once stood there all alone in his mind, ready to affront her destiny. He built a house for her, and ever since, readers have wanted to live in it, wandering through its hallways and looking out of its windows, hoping for a cup of tea with some of its inhabitants and wishing we could warn her against others. Some of those readers may want to give the lady one more room of her own, and for all of us a sense of her being flows out beyond the ending, as though Isabel had some life beyond the words that fix her to the page. That too was a part of James’s ambition, and one he paradoxically fulfilled by refusing to tell us everything we might wish to know about her. We want her to go on—but let me borrow his words once more, and offer you the last sentence of the preface he wrote for her: “There is really too much to say.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first read The Portrait of a Lady during the fall of 1977, in a class at Amherst College taught by John Cameron. He did not often let himself refer to James’s biography, still less to the details of the novel’s publication. But I learned most of what I know about the rhetoric of fiction from him and from my other teachers at Amherst, and my education there sits in judgment on each sentence I write.
A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation made it possible for me to spend the academic year 2007–08 at work on this book’s opening chapters. Smith College has been characteristically generous with sabbatical leave, travel grants, and other research funds, and I am grateful to the provost’s office and in particular to Susie Bourque for that material support. Earlier, a grant from the Mellon-8 Consortium administered by Smith encouraged me to spend a summer putting together a detailed proposal, a narrative of what I wanted this book to do. And at the other end, I finished this book in Paris, where Columbia University’s Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall graciously provided me with an office.
My agent, Steve Wasserman, found me the perfect editor in Bob Weil. Bob pushed me into paradox, pushed me to be at once tighter and yet more expansive, and my every page is stronger because of his work on it. At
W. W. Norton and now Liveright I am indebted as well to Drake McFeely, Phil Marino, Peter Miller, Will Menaker, Devon Zahn, and Fred Wiemer.
Christopher Benfey, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and David McWhirter read the entirety of the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. Several colleagues at Smith deserve special thanks: Rick Millington and Michael Thurston served as my guides to the American nineteenth century; Nancy Mason Bradbury did the same thing in a far more literal way in Florence. I owe a particular debt to Greg Zacharias and Pierre Walker for making available the transcripts of James’s unpublished letters from 1880 and 1881. Many other people had the generosity to answer my questions; my gratitude to John Auchard, Michael Anesko, John Pemble, David Ball, Philip Horne, Cornelia Pearsall, Fred Kaplan, Larzer Ziff, James Shapiro, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Franco Zabagli, Sara Philo, Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon, Carol Osborne, Paul Saint-Amour, David J. Supino, and Joseph Donohue. Sir Julian Rose arranged for my visit to Hardwick; Piers Plowden and Francesca Rowan, the current tenants of Lamb House, allowed me a glimpse of James’s bedroom and upstairs study.
Yale’s Beinecke Library and Harvard’s Houghton Library allowed me to use their holdings. At Smith I am grateful to Karen Kukil and Martin Antonetti of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, while Susan Barker in the College archives and Henriette Kets de Vries at our superb museum gave me their help with the photographs. Catharina Gress-Wright and Stephanie Friedman, my undergraduate research assistants, have worked with skill and care.
Most rigorous of critics and best of traveling companions, Brigitte Buettner has had to listen to far too much about Henry James for far too long. Our daughter Miriam has yet to read a word of him. But she did enjoy the garden at the Lamb House.
SOURCES AND NOTES
The literature on Henry James is enormous and ever-changing. The biographies are rich; the criticism both helpful and provocative; and the documentary evidence pertaining to his life, his work, and his world can seem unending. I have benefited from everything I have read but have kept my references to a minimum. These notes indicate the sources of my quotations and mark a few specific debts, but they are not intended to summarize the terms of scholarly debate.
I have used the Library of America volume of James’s Novels, 1881–1886 as my source for the 1881 text of The Portrait of a Lady; for the novel’s revised version and preface in the New York Edition, I’ve drawn on the relevant entry in the series of Oxford World’s Classics. A complete and newly authoritative edition of James’s letters is under way from the University of Nebraska Press, but many of the important ones are already in print, and some of them s
everal times. For quotations from letters I therefore give the date and the recipient, and note whether it remains as of 2012 unpublished, but do not cite any one source for those now available. Interested readers should consult the on-line Calendar of the Letters of Henry James (jamescalendar.unl.edu) about where to find any particular piece of correspondence.
References to standard works—The Prelude, Middlemarch—are given by either line or chapter number but are not keyed to particular editions; in the case of some short poems and essays, I have simply supplied the date. Canny readers may notice that at times I work in close paraphrase of a Jamesian text, or even include the occasional ventriloquized phrase, an unmarked or buried quotation. A good example can be found on my prologue’s first page—“taken possession of it, inhaled it, appropriated it,” words adapted from a letter to his family of 1 November 1875. I have given references for some of these in the notes below, but not all.
All italics in quotations appear in the original.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR SOURCES FREQUENTLY CITED
A—Henry James, Autobiography. Edited by F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion Books, 1956.
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