Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  Isabel’s initial goals are vague. She is “fond of her own liberty” and “fond of knowledge,” though wary of those “unlighted corners.” She wishes to “see” for herself but not “to touch cup of experience. It’s a poisoned drink.” She is not sure she wishes to marry anyone, and the novel’s first startling action is her refusal of Lord Warburton, the closest equivalent in The Portrait of a Lady to a Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightly, on the grounds that she would be escaping her fate to accept the peace, kindness, honor, and security that would come with marrying him.

  That, ultimately, there isn’t a right suitor is the novel’s striking twist on the marriage plot. I don’t think we are meant to regret Isabel’s refusal of Lord Warburton, the noble but somewhat vitiated English aristocrat, or of her other suitor, Caspar Goodwood, the “hard,” “armored,” sexually disquieting American capitalist. Marriage is still the only thing the heroine ultimately can “do,” but, to begin with, the very idea of marriage fails to meet the requirements of her imagination, and, then, the choice she makes—snared by others and blinded by her own illusions—is a horrific one. In reversal of the formula of fairy tales, the third suitor proves the villain, not the hero.

  James leads into Isabel’s unhappiness obliquely. Some time has passed, at least a year, since we saw her last on the brink of marriage. We’re at a party at the Osmond villa in Rome, an establishment we presume to be sustained by Isabel’s money. As Madame Merle talks with Ned Rosier, a young man interested in Pansy, we learn a child, a little boy, has died (thus we infer Isabel has had sex with her husband), and also, as Madame Merle puts it to Rosier, that Isabel would be likely to favor his courtship of Pansy “if her husband doesn’t.”

  “Does she take the opposite line from him?” the scene continues.

  “In everything. They think quite differently.”

  As a reader sympathetic to Isabel I’m relieved to learn husband and wife think differently—this means Isabel is still herself, at least if Madame Merle can be believed.

  But as the book continues, with marriage—now the marriage of Pansy—still its preoccupation, we experience the fuller complexity of Isabel’s entrapment. Unlike Gwendolyn Harleth, who fears she would have come to hate her husband if he hadn’t died, Isabel does not hate Osmond—this is said explicitly—but she knows he hates her. The poisoned cup of experience has clarified her vision. She can name Osmond’s egotism, his conventionality, and his hatred of her, his wife, all of which she does, unflinchingly, in the meditative vigil of Chapter 42, which James calls the finest thing in the book. It seems to me important that even before she learns the secret past of Osmond and Madame Merle, she understands her husband’s vicious nature and acknowledges her own predicament, even while not seeking to escape it. “They were strangely married, at all events, and it was a horrible life.” That terrible statement is exhilarating in its clarity.

  My students, most of whom believe in their right to personal happiness, want Isabel at the novel’s end to go off with Caspar Goodwood, or at least not go back to Osmond. The ending is famously ambiguous, and class discussion of it is always intense. What is the effect on Isabel of Goodwood’s at once powerfully physical and highly metaphoric kiss? What does it signify that it spreads in her like “white lightening” but that “when darkness returned, she was free?” She knows now “where to turn” and sees “a very straight path.” But all that we learn after this—and we learn it indirectly from Henrietta’s concluding words to Caspar Goodwood—is that Isabel has “started for Rome.” James was aware that he had left his heroine, as he puts it, “en l’air.” His justification for this open ending was that “the whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.”

  James may have focused in his conception of the book on what Isabel “will do,” but it’s what she sees that seems to me his more central concern. And hasn’t she by the novel’s end seen everything she needs to: the malice of Osmond, the roles of Ralph and Madame Merle in her life, even her own abiding strength? As for how her painfully acquired knowledge leads to more doing, the novel does indeed leave us en l’air. I believe she will not desert Pansy but don’t know what form her abiding loyalty will take. James has not really envisioned a destiny for her beyond the marriage plot—or if you will, the extension of the marriage plot into post-nuptial unhappiness. But that plot is subsumed by the drama of consciousness. The author has taken the consciousness of his young woman seriously. The weight of interest, as he tells us in the preface, is in her being a subject not an object.

  For my generation, sensitive to ways women had been objectified and eager to reclaim our power as subjects, The Portrait of a Lady could be readily claimed as a feminist text. Including the novel in my women studies course of the 1980s, I did not ask Isabel Archer to be a role model or even to be happy. Rather, I saw the heroine’s “progress” in the evolution of her understanding. That reading still seems to me an important one.

  I did not teach Tess of the d’Urbervilles in “The Heroine’s Progress.” The Thomas Hardy novel that seemed best suited for the course was Jude the Obscure, since “modern,” educated, neurotic Sue Bridehead is such an intriguing example of the “new woman” of the 1890s. Tess is also a heroine of the 1890s—the novel was published in 1891, a decade after James’s The Portrait of a Lady—but despite the “ache of modernism” that Hardy attributes to her sixth-form education, Tess can hardly be called a new woman. In both her d’Urberville lineage and her Durbeyfield ties to the region, she is connected to the land and seems almost its emanation. She digs turnips up from its soil but can’t dig herself out of her life, bounded by class, sex, and poverty. Things happen to her; she is not seeking new vistas. She suffers and is sacrificed. It’s an old story, though told in the context of late nineteenth-century agrarian and religious upheaval.

  Aligning Tess of the d’Urbervilles with The Portrait of a Lady, as I have done for my own purposes in this chapter, further reinforces the sense of Tess as a deeply traditional story. Its setting is rural, not cosmopolitan; scenes occur in English fields and woodlands, not the houses and gardens of urbane expatriates; the ending is classically resolved, not open; Tess, for all Hardy’s insistence on her purity, is objectified in traditional ways associated with women and sexuality. When she yawns, Angel Clare sees “the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s.” She is also a milkmaid who murders her seducer, a figure one can trace back to tragic maids in old English ballads.

  Yet for all this, Tess also expresses a progressive, even radical vision. No author of his time more ardently than Hardy fathomed the repressiveness of Victorian morality, the strength of sexual drives in men and women, the unnatural constraints imposed by marriage, and the untruthfulness of novels that ends with “the regulation that ‘they married and were happy ever after.’” He wanted to substitute for “the catastrophes” of “this false coloring” the “catastrophes based upon sexual relationship as it is,” words from his 1891 essay “Candour in English Fiction.” And he anticipated how fiercely the reading public would resist his candor.

  For the serial publication of Tess in The Graphic Hardy was forced to remove the seduction scene and the scene in which Tess baptizes her own baby, both sanitized and published separately as, respectively, “Saturday Night in Arcady” and “The Midnight Baptism: A Study in Christianity.” Among other concessions to the magazine’s readers, he even altered the scene in which Angel Clare carries the milkmaids across the puddle. “Let me run and get a wheelbarrow . . .” the version in the Graphic reads. Hardy was able to restore most of his original text for the book edition, but this greater freedom from censorship did not mean freedom from controversy. Tess as a fallen woman from a lower-class background has fictional predecessors: Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede, even Hardy’s own Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd. All these, however, serve as foils to the pure heroine while Tess, in contrast, is that pure heroine, despite her experience and despite what mi
ght seem Hardy’s own ambivalence towards her (the snake’s mouth).

  As a contemporary reader I easily assent to Tess’s purity, though I find myself eliding that term into others that for me have more meaning: courage, generosity of spirit, or, better still, integrity. Yet Hardy’s chosen word is important. Tess is a heroine of her times, but she is also a kind of archetype. She survives violation and neglect, and Hardy’s assertion of her purity is his vision of a purity of being that transcends all pressures and accommodations. She suffers “catastrophes based upon sexual relationship as it is” with both Alec and Angel, but she emerges from these uncompromised, even as a murderer, compelling us, as she does Angel at the end, to suspend moral judgment in our awe at her authenticity of feeling. Certainly Hardy idealizes her—James also idealizes Isabel Archer. But idealizing suggests distance. And yet, remarkably, Hardy realizes an exquisite closeness with Tess, a sympathy with her right to live in her sexualized female body. This body is natural and not corrupt. It is attached to a soul.

  iii

  I COME BACK TO the scene of my mother lying with me on the floor in her bedroom, talking about the naturalness of sex. My mother spoke sincerely, yet she also felt the need to guard her sexual secrets (there must have been others beyond the one about Freddie Ayer) then and for the rest of her life. I have wondered about my mother’s secrets, about their influence on our lives. In literature when a secret exists, especially a sexual one, it’s bound to be influential, both in its concealment and in its revelation. In Tess it’s the concealment of her past from Angel and her revelation of it on her wedding night that propel the story towards its tragic end. In Portrait the secret past liaison between Madame Merle and Osmond sets in motion the plot to have Osmond marry Isabel, and the revelation of that secret gives Isabel the knowledge she needs to come into her full self, the self that will “last to the end.”

  The secrets in these novels emerge, but they are so potent as to be almost unprintable. Hardy omits Tess’s confession to Angel from his text, while managing to convey its intensity through bodily gesture and the image of the diamond necklace Angel has fastened around her neck.

  She bent forward, at which each diamond gave a sinister wink like a toad’s; and pressing her forehead against his temple, she entered on her story of her acquaintance with Alec d’Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without flinching and with her eyelids drooping down.

  We cut to a new chapter, which begins: “Her narrative ended; even its reassertions and secondary explanations were done . . .” Tess has told her story, but we haven’t heard it. I have read feminist critics who reproach Hardy for denying Tess her own voice in this scene. Yet that’s not what I’m thinking as I take in the toad simile (another reptile) or the tenderness of Tess’s and Angel’s foreheads pressed together. Throughout the novel Hardy is so bold and brilliant in the settings and gestures he finds for his characters—the sleepwalking scene, Tess and Angel among the cows, Tess on the threshing machine at Flint-Ashcomb, Tess sleeping at Stonehenge. These images remain with me far more than what the characters say. Speech in a Hardy universe seems paltry. There are greater seismic forces at play.

  In The Portrait of a Lady, on the other hand, whatever the brilliance of James’s settings and all his metaphors of houses and windows and birds and gardens, speech matters. Sometimes utterances are passionately direct; often they are enigmatic or elliptical, puzzles that compel our attention. Thus, silences matter, too, the things that aren’t said or are hinted at obliquely. In Hardy we see the author creating the ellipses; in James the characters themselves seem to take on this function. I am especially attentive to the words—and words unspoken—that in a series of cautious encounters convey the secret of Pansy’s birth. The first is Isabel’s wordless shock at the sight of her husband seated and Madame Merle standing, a lingering image she doesn’t yet understand; the last is the scene between Isabel and Madame Merle at Pansy’s convent in which “Madame Merle had guessed in a second that everything was at an end between them, and in the space of another instant, she had guessed the reason why.”

  The power of the unearthed secret is then acknowledged in a pointed yet still elliptical exchange:

  “I think I should never like to see you again,” says Isabel.

  And James gives the defeated Madame Merle the last word. “‘I shall go to America,’ she quietly remarked . . .”

  What would have been the conversation, what would have been the “scene” if I had learned my mother’s secret before she died? Since these possibilities would have been part of the real world and not literature, I doubt if we would have spoken with Jamesian restraint. In a way I’m glad the scene didn’t happen. It may be my abiding reluctance to look into unlighted corners, but I can’t help feeling the damage might have been great. As it is, I have been able to confront my mother only in dreams, in which I control both sides of the dialogue. I ask in my dreams, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But the dream always ends before she replies.

  I hardly ever dream about Freddie. His imprint on my psyche seems faint or is so deeply buried as to be inaccessible to consciousness. Knowing he was my father has changed some fundamental sense I have of myself, but it hasn’t done much to change how I live my life or to shift my attachments. Tess learns she is a d’Urberville, and tragic consequences ensue from that discovery. I learned I was the daughter of a philosopher, and the discovery gave me a story. Casting myself as a writer, not a victim, I set to work on a family memoir. Writing the book engaged my best energy and spirits, and its publication, as I’ve said, helped me gain promotion to the rank of Full Professor. Perhaps I should think of this as Freddie Ayer’s fitting last gift to me: the twelfth book of his bequest.

  The Odd Women and Howards End

  In the fall of 1985, I wasn’t thinking about fathers. Trevor Westbrook had died seven years earlier, leaving me with a dreary but soon muted sense of the failure of our connection. The adventure of Freddie lay three years in the future, and I had, in fact, lost touch with this old “family friend” after he and Dee separated and then divorced. I heard he had married someone new, but I never met her. Freddie and I hadn’t seen each other since my stay in England a decade earlier nor been in any form of contact.

  The only parent in range was my mother, aging and arthritic, who still swayed the lives of those around her as if we were saplings bowing to her strong gusts. “Why don’t you just bring in the coffin with the cake and be done with it?” she had grumbled at my plans for an eightieth birthday party. No one except Bow Wow had ever given her a party. She caviled and complained, suspicious of my motives. Then from the first guest’s arrival, she was fine. “Thank you for going to so much trouble,” she said to me afterwards. “I didn’t think I would like a party, but I did.” I was very pleased to hear that. As her daughter I seemed always to be ricocheting between despair and elation.

  For a long time I had been embarrassed to be a person whose mother figured so powerfully in her life and emotions. I remember a friend’s husband, a psychiatrist, saying about me when I was in my twenties and dating one of his friends, “The only thing wrong with Wendy is her mother.” His words seared. I was ashamed. Now, though, thanks to second-wave feminism, it had become more acceptable to have a strong mother and more understandable to be enmeshed with her. People even envied me—I had a “role model.” Nice cooking-baking, stay-at-home moms were out of fashion. Also in our lives and in our work, we were looking at relations “among women,” the title of a 1980 book by Louise Bernikow. Nancy Choderow had written about mothers and daughters. As had Nancy Friday. Mothers and daughters. Sisters. Women as friends. Women as lovers. These were topics feminist writers and scholars and teachers in the classroom were exploring.

  So when a delegation of Brooklyn College’s women’s studies faculty came to meet me, their new dean of undergraduate studies, and asked if I would like to speak on my scholarship at a Women’s Studies brown-bag lunch, I was spurred to write an essay that arose from “The
Heroine’s Progress,” the course I had developed as an English and Women’s Studies offering at Barnard a few years earlier.

  That course had traveled with me in my recent career moves. After leaving Barnard in 1983, I had taught it at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where I’d spent two years as dean of the college, and now, in the fall of 1985, a newcomer to Brooklyn College, I was planning to introduce it there as well.

  My talk drew together George Gissing’s minor 1891 classic, The Odd Women, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910. I had been struck by the books’ similar endings, noteworthy in the way men have more or less been sidelined, and women, left to raise a child whose father is absent (The Odd Women) or dead (Howards End), take charge of the future. I titled the talk “Sisters and Progeny” because in both novels the women caring for the baby are sisters and also because “sisterhood” was the rallying call of the 1970s and ’80s feminism that was engaging my contemporaries and me, as we joined together to oppose patriarchy and claim equal opportunity for our gender. It was exhilarating to see women escaping the denigrations of Betty Crocker ads, claiming sexual freedoms, enlarging professional vistas, maybe going to medical or law school and not just graduate school in English, or at least having choice, at least not having to stay stuck in bad or avowedly limiting situations. To speak about my work at the brown-bag lunch was a way of presenting myself as a sister feminist to my new community.

  But if my theme was the solidarity of women, it was also the enervation of men. I know I was trying to work something out of intense concern to me personally—not just the power and potential of women but also a question about men. Who might they be in the lives of women emancipated from their dominance? In a sense my world was catching up with my own understanding because I had always known women to be powerful. Not just my mother but also the many successful working women of our acquaintance in Hollywood—costume designers, actresses, singers, and writers—gave me models of female efficacy. But what role did men play in such women’s lives? I remember “Pops,” the husband of couture lingerie designer Juel Park, who often invited us to her beach house. While Juel would gossip with my mother about the stars who frequented her elegant shop on Rodeo Drive, Pops went off to the bedroom to take his naps. That’s the image of him that lingers. “Men are children,” my mother instructed me. To her they always seemed pitiable, easily manipulated creatures, good for sex, to be sure, but in important matters not to be counted on. From her father who died in her infancy right through Trevor and Bow Wow, men had let her down badly, that was clear. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, the one man she seemed to have admired as well as loved, had shown his unreliability by dying right in front of her—and doing it just before Christmas! Of course, my experience with men diverged from hers. But in it, too, despite my great longing for an alternate script, lay a fair share of doubts and disappointments. In the books I chose to discuss at the Brooklyn College Women’s Studies brown-bag lunch, men are weak or defective. It was not my own history I had in mind, but to have fixed on books in which women are energized and men unreliable cannot have been merely accidental.