The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady is considered to be one of the first American novels to make full use of social and psychological realism as European authors - such as Flaubert, Balzac and George Eliot - were already practicing in their works. Considered to be his biggest accomplishment along with The Ambassadors, Portrait added Isabel Archer to the company of great fictional heroines - as the likes of Elizabeth Bennet, Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre - and, in a century marked by unsatisfied bourgeois wives and adultery in fiction - Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina come to mind -, it was a breath of fresh air to accompany and delve into James' protagonist's thoughts and inner feelings.

Starting with a very slow pace, the narrative contains long and elaborate descriptions. It feels James is painting a richly detailed picture for every scene. As we arrive in Gardencourt - the Touchett's English country estate where our story opens and closes -, we encounter Mr. Touchett, his son Ralph and a family friend called Lord Warburton. Among other things, they discuss how Mrs. Lydia Touchett is in America and will bring along her niece called Isabel Archer to visit Europe.

Isabel is a young woman, from Albany, New York, who accepts her aunt's offer to initially stay with her in Gardencourt and then later travel through the continent, eager to explore and be enriched by the places she's never been before and experience life at its fullest. Upon her arrival, we begin to learn what her ideals and plans are, along with her hopes and dreams.

Since the beginning, her cousin Ralph seems to have been as curious as we were to see what Isabel would make of her life. In a way, we almost could say Ralph was conducting an experiment: Isabel had an independent mind, she was emotionally and psychologically self-sufficient - didn't seem inclined to get married for the time being, which was different for a girl of her age at the time. She was thirsty for knowledge first and foremost: “I don’t want to begin life by marrying”, Isabel asserts to Ralph. “There are other things a woman can do." But without money, how far could she go with her unattached ways? She was probably bound to eventually getting married. Her cousin, then, arranged it and she became financially independent as well. Certain that he was doing Isabel a good deed, Ralph convinced his father - who was very fond of Isabel - at his deathbed to leave her an impressive amount of money. Now she had all that was necessary to decide her destiny without any barriers or anyone to hold her back. The experiment was on.

After traveling for over a year, the now wealthy Isabel Archer is in Florence, where her aunt lives. A friend she greatly admired, Madame Merle - Mrs. Touchett's close friend who Isabel got acquainted with some time after she arrived in Gardencourt - skillfully introduces her to Gilbert Osmond: an American expatriate widower who's lived in Italy for years. Isabel is very impressed with his refinement and intelligence and thinks of him as having a beautiful mind. Despite her family and friends complaints about this relationship, Isabel - after having declined two previous suitors - accepts Osmond's marriage proposal.

The story then jumps in time and there's a narrative shift: for a bit, James leaves Isabel and Osmond in the background while he focuses on Pansy Osmond - Osmond's young daughter - and Edward Rosier - Isabel's childhood friend who's in love with Miss Osmond and is trying to get Madame Merle to help him marry his darling girl. Through their story, we still have glimpses of Isabel's life and we learn that she's been now married for two years and that she lost a son who died six months after his birth. Isabel and her husband seems to disagree about everything and we learn she's unhappy.

Henry James, who once conducted a very slow paced - almost contemplative - narrative, gradually started to accelerate it, adding drama and a sense of urgency to his words.

Right after an unsettling argument with Osmond one evening, Isabel, now feeling more distraught than ever, starts pondering and analyzing the many circumstances she finds herself in. The author immerses us in a deeply personal and intensely psychological account of her thoughts and emotions. Among the things Isabel reflected upon for a long time were the conclusion that her husband must hate her and the realization that Osmond had gained total control of her - the once independent and strong witted woman was now a subjugated spirit; the woman who once seemed to be against doing what was expected of her was now conforming to her husband's decisions. "When the clock struck four she got up; she was going to bed at last, for the lamp had long since gone out and the candles burned down to their sockets."

Complicating things even further is the revelation Countess Gemini - Osmond's sister - makes to Isabel of a long time secret, that leaves her completely shaken. This only comes to deteriorate even more her relationship with Gilbert. Now, fully aware of the situation she was put in through manipulations and schemes, Isabel is faced with a big decision: her cousin Ralph is dying in Gardencourt and her dictatorial husband is completely against her visiting England. Showing the old Isabel may still be somewhere locked inside of herself, she confronts her husband and leaves to be with her cousin.

The Portrait of a Lady, through its length, presents a number of opposites, but the most striking ones are the battles between freedom vs. destiny and affection vs. betrayal. In the book's final moments, we witness that Isabel is offered a way to go back to where and to whom she was when she first came to Europe: "The world's all before us - and the world's very big", she is told. She could once again explore life and fill herself with hopes - but declined the opportunity: "The world's very small", she answered. With a much talked about conclusion that has both fascinated and infuriated - another battle of opposites? - readers, James' ending remains open to a lot of interpretations.

It's disturbing to watch an unhappily married woman with an opportunity to leave it all behind - and the means to do it - simply not choosing freedom. Did Osmond finally accomplish to shatter her spirit? Another theory is that maybe marriage was an unbreakable vow and she felt she had a moral duty to her husband. Or was she trying to be protective of Pansy - who was mirroring Isabel's unhappiness and was another example of a woman who seemed to think that she was obliged to follow other's decisions even if it made her unhappy - and determined to stand by her side and not let the same happen to her step daughter? Innumerable possibilities...

James has been known for structuring his novels with a series of circles surrounding a center. With that in mind, a hopeful interpretation of the book's ending is that, in order to complete that circle, Isabel must return to her husband, properly end her marriage so she could once again be able to start anew and free her spirit once and for all.

Rating: for such an interesting and comprehensive analysis of freedom, human consciousness and ultimately, existentialism: 4 stars.

It is very unlikely that anyone would be able to articulate as well as Henry James himself did his intentions and method of writing The Portrait of a Lady in his New York Edition Preface, which was included in my Penguin edition. For this reason I recommend the edition over the Library of America version, or any other which lacks the Preface. He describes the building of his novel-cathedral as an effort of placing brick upon brick. Truly, each brick is well-moulded, carven with impressions of great interest to the reader of 19th-Century fiction. Henry James is very much of that particular century a paramour, if not the Demi-god, who employed all known instruments of the human intellect to construct a virtual portrait of several character archetypes in prose which seems in itself alive, even as it confounds with its arabesques, its circumlocutions, and its encumbrances. That there is any question whether it is relevant or readable is a testament to the author’s inscrutable style - an acquired taste if there ever was one. Insinuating that he utilized a large number of superfluous words is unnecessary. One acquainted with James should know that words were more of a malleable clay, the mere molecules of the organisms he crafted.

The Portrait of a Lady is as overwrought and sumptuous as anything else he wrote - a judgement based solely on the 1500 pages from his oeuvre I’ve thus far read. It is simple of plot and complex of texture. It is a potent and aromatic tincture. Only a refined connoisseur might pick out all its manifold emanations and insinuations. ****Trigger Warning **** There is quite a lot of gratuitous syntax in this book - but mentioning this again is extraneous. Furthermore, he is fond of the emdash. —As am I. I might also warn the reader that the level of obsession with the institution of marriage goes beyond unhealthy into the territory of the uncanny, even - dare-I-say - into the obscene. It was a common practice around this time for pudgy, well-leisured, stocky, balding, over-educated men to write of nothing else. James was perhaps leader and prime advocate for this cause. In fact the subtleties of his fictional universe might all trace their gravitational attraction to this central source. Put simply, this is a book about marriage. Women, according to the characters in this novel, had a duty to marry, and above all, to marry well. She, as a species, was capable of little else, one might gather from James’s theories. Isabel, our central character, throws a wrench into this mechanistic worldview - at least for a good half of the novel. She remains a captivating character nonetheless, as do even the least woke of James’s brainchildren.

Of course, the characters have no day jobs to trouble them. Not a single one of them has worked a day in his or her life. Their time is amply consumed sniveling and braying, offering a grotesque variety of overarching societal observations. The commentary is in large part as spinsterish as was James. The discussions are speculations and measurements upon the manifestations of propriety, also stipulating upon the various measures of men and women within the household - which in itself is a vehicle of procreation - and yet this facet of human existence, i.e. sex, was apparently a vast, unknowable mystery to our poor author. All of this immanent melodrama is inflicted unfairly upon the unsuspecting natives of the trendy European locales frequented by our players. They cannot spend their money fast enough. It flows like manna. Nor can they hope to inherit enough for their needs. James is so phobic of bachelorhood, so consumed with the importance of marriage, one wonders if he was at all a fisherman of eligible women, if he was not the most eligible of them all.

Furthermore, the story is not of much concern here, but the people are. James is capable of tenderness, as well as a lot of snideness. His powers of dialogue are only equalled by his extraordinary description. This novel offers ample prestidigitation in that regard. You will not tire of viewing the landscape he has painted, if you can stand the people in the foreground. Above all, this is a masterpiece of elocution, enlarging upon the above-mentioned questions and tensions, arising from quite natural human associations. The verisimilitude is a superstructure upon the underlying themes. The flabby sentences take on weight as they accumulate, barreling forward in that Jamesian snowball, until they finally hit home, touching upon the elusive natures of our fellow sufferers, gracing that beautiful pinnacle of textual refinement, sought after by such purveyors of the experimental mode as David Foster Wallace. No one else approaches James in my opinion when it comes to thick and rich adornment. The superhuman powers of articulation were possibly James’s forte, if not his charm.

Look for the clear signs of faith in the study of physiognomy. Bask in the splendor of the author's rhetorical aplomb as his inexhaustible sea of atmospheric minutiae congregates into a finely stippled rendering of moral ambiguities. Relish the witty banter, envy the swaggering Lord Warburton as he fulfills what you suspect will be a major role in the heroine’s life. This is an idyllic document of great power, if one can weather the grueling mental maneuvers required to keep pace. At bottom, it asks whether marriage is a prison or the relief from a meaningless existence. It would be a pity if James never defined the answer in his own case.

I expected to like this more than I did. I found it needlessly long, occasionally pompous, and ultimately unsatisfying. Still, there's a lot of good stuff in here: the exciting independence of Isabel in the early chapters, her palpable misery in her marriage, the vivid and memorable secondary characters, and above all (for me, at least) the set pieces. James was always able to make me feel like I knew just what a room or garden looked and felt like -- though he also frequently made me feel as though I was observing it from behind a glass wall.

I read somewhere that Edith Wharton was always striving to be as good a writer as Henry James; frankly, I think she's much better. Wharton's work is far more elegant, focused, economical, and empathetic. There were moments in this book when James convinced me that he understood what it's like to be a human, but for the most part his prose seemed strangely removed and difficult to penetrate -- and therefore kind of annoying. I got used to it, but I never fully warmed to it.

It took me the entire month to get through this; on some days I avoided it like a chore, but on others I couldn't wait to curl up in bed with it. I'm glad to have read it, but I don't feel like I *needed* to have read it.

8.5/10

This won’t get written the way I wanted to write it, as life has taken as many turns, in the past 6 weeks, as Henry James has commas ... and I can’t be spending much time reviewing — in writing, at least. More’s the pity since I had a lot to say on this one, this time ‘round.

I’ve become a bedside sitter, attendant, to a family member who has been, is, quite ill, ... and so while my time is spent in reading, I’m not sure I'm taking in all that much.

The end of this novel brought me to the beginning of the real life illness, and so Ralph and Isabelle’s last interview brought me to my (emotional) knees, as only those who have read this can appreciate. Hence no spoiler warnings necessary.

Not to turn this into a FB moment, which I loathe, I felt I just wanted to explain to my nearest and dearest goodreaderly friends that I haven't done a runner on you or my reviews, I’m just in a bit of a fog at the moment, from which I hope to emerge soon, and re sharpen my tongue for more irony and sarcasm laden reviews.

I’m sadly missing Ovid’s Metamorphoses group, in which I longed to participate, but the personal metamorphosis which is taking place at the moment is proving to be more transformative than even Ovid could hope to influence on me.

Still reading all your wonderful, witty, charming, insightful, inspiring ... and, most gratifyingly acerbic, reviews. They provide such a joyful, sustaining moment in my day.

Isabelle Archer will have to wait another day for my critique; but as she is the very Queen of Procrastination... and even perhaps Prevarication (since she seems to be so good at lying to herself, if nothing else), she won’t mind at all, as she sits through the night, watching for its end, as we all must do, have done.

It certainly is a classic of its time, and also a 5 star masterpiece for James. Probably his best. Every parcel and mind minutia of thought philosophy or self-identity seems captured here for Isabel.

And yet for me this read? Hard, far more than just difficult- it's similar to clicking 100 or 200 lens poses while surrounding an optic capture venture. Doing a 360 degree circle procedure project for the ultimate surround photo. And then after that process- translating all abstracts and reality of that view's pieces into impressionistic art fragments and putting them into double paragraph length sentences pasted and arranged.

None of these people talk or construct English as any person I've heard in this century or the last one either. So there you go- have at it. It's slow nuance too parred down to near still life in spots.

Once at the beginning of Chapter 24 I reread a sentence at least 5 times. It had so many sub-phrasings and adjuncts that I still have no idea what it was about. That's why it is a 4 star for me.

These people had way, way, way too much time to think. It's a class and period and bottom line onus for which I can't connect that well to/for/with from the get-go. But saying that it is, the depth was remarkable.

Plotting and ending- I will say nothing. The story is the Isabel "growth" or self-determination ability factors? In marriage choice is just part of that function. Also for men of the period. But more specifically for the most "lucky" female individual? You decide.

It's the top peak of elitism and also a compare /contrast for functions within the international brands of snobbery / social hierarchy as well. Absolutely would not be for every reader- this book. Not this period or these people either could begin to be their "cup of tea" within this parsing of an English structure that makes Faulkner a runner up for "sentences that would be impossible to diagram". Others have reviewed this better upon the cultural/societal aspects.

This is a novel of education, but it is education which is forced upon an independent mind: Isabel Archer learns the interplay of moral systems and natural systems. She is immoral in her continual rejection of conventional, systematic solutions for her life, both the male ideals of the British Lord W and the American O.G. But her life is also the problem of evil, in a curious way: not that she is really Eve, for she is anti-Eve, anti-seduction; but that she is woman, even though she tries not to be. She fights what she is, as both conventional and natural inheretrix of womanhood, but her knowledge is not sufficient--not God's, or Fate's, perhaps--to face the problem of evil on her own. She is prey to the most profound threat to her independence. Osmond is an unnatural male; he is the solution to Isabel's rejection of the natural subordination of womanhood through sexual passion: Osmond is sexually passionless. But he is convention itself in his desire to subordinate her, "Osmond possessed in a supreme degree the art of eliciting one's weakness" (497, S.C. ed)
In Ch. 26, Osmond articulates his intent to "sacrifice" Isabel's "ideas"; that is, James discloses universal evil, an evil which Isabel has no way to deal with. Isabel's "generosity" assumes, at the start, sincerity at least, from her top-of-the-heap moral position, based on her arrogant intellectual comprehension. Through the novel she confronts a villain with no extentuating moral qualities, who is blind to her generosity--not to mention her womanhood.
In Ch 16 she says to Goodwood, "Do you need a reward for an act of generosity?" And he, "Yes, when it involves a great sacrifice." Isabel, "There is no generosity without sacrifice. Men don't understand such things." Isabel knows she is sacrificing something in her marriage to Osmond, but she does not at that point know she is sacrificing her womanhood.
Isabel's "ideas" are to be understood more in the context of continental philosophy, not American: they are part of her direction, her intention. She sacrifices herself to conventional evil in order to avoid a universal subjection born in her as woman, the dependence on passion and subjection to male. Isabel chooses to be, finally, a lady, but not a woman. She loses her arrogance, but also her moral appeal. She sacrifices her womanhood for her "personal independence," which turns out to be morally inadequate for happiness.
But perhaps Feminism has changed that, made independence adequate for happiness?

As can be inferred from the title, this novel is really a character study, and what a fascinating – and occasionally infuriating – character Henry James created with Isabel Archer. As I was reading, I wasn’t sure if I liked or despised her, I recognized myself in some of her behaviors, and shook my head at others. Wonderfully realized and complex, it’s impossible not to be fascinated with Isabel, so I get why her three suitors just won’t leave her be.

Isabel is very modern for the time at which “Portrait of a Lady” was written: stubborn, highly intelligent and fiercely independent; but she lacks worldly experience, so she makes willful choices that aren’t always the smartest. In a typically American way, Isabel desires above all the freedom to make her own choices. But the freedom to choose often entails the freedom to makes mistakes: this is essential to self-discovery, of course, and Isabel being full of contradictions (and a rather high opinion of herself) she will not let herself be swayed from doing exactly what she wants to do…

We all make mistakes: that’s life, and no mistakes would make for rather short and boring novels. But I am confused as to what Mr. James is trying to say about female independence: how independent is Isabel, really? Freedom entails responsibility, and I found Isabel rather capricious and immature in her reasoning: it seems to me that she rejects Goodwood and Lord Warburton more to show that she can than for any other reason, as if to show off her capacity to say no. She admits to wanting to be happy, and not knowing what happiness is all in the same breath. Poor Henrietta tries really hard to tell her she needs to keep her wits about her, but Isabel reacts to that the same way teenage girls react when their mother scolds them: by being defiant and sulky and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. She wants to be strong and assertive and while she claims that bad choices are hers to make, that doesn’t make them any less bad. Her lack of experience allow the deviousness of Osmond to work with ridiculous easiness: he just has to not fall all over himself to get her attention as she is fascinated and seduced. Gawd, teenage girl behavior, again! Idealism is great, but realism is important too: the world does not adapt to our whims, and Isabel learns that the hard way.

In some ways, this felt like the urban version of “Far From the Madding Crowd”: pretty headstrong lady with three beaus who makes all the wrong decision and is too proud to admit she put her foot in it up to the ankle. The difference here being that Mr. Goodwood, Lord Warburton and Mr. Osmond are all detestable. At least Bathsheba had Gabriel Oak, but poor Isabel only has a pile of louts… It was also hard for me to not think of “Liaisons Dangereuses” while reading “Portrait”: Isabel is no hare-brained Cécile, but in Ralph Touchette’s words, she gets caught just the same – there are no scandals, but plenty of misery. The general ambiguity that permeates this novel like a fog is fascinating: Is James praising feminism, or does he think it’s a doomed effort? Is he pro-marriage, or virulently against it (I mean, find one happy union in this book… go on… I’ll wait…)?

When Isabel realizes that she married a pretentious poser, she knows she has no options but to put up with it, because she can’t bring herself to do anything she would consider dishonorable. That, and her pride won’t allow her to show she is unhappy, even to her closest friends. She also considers the welfare of her stepdaughter very carefully: the repercussion of a scandal would affect Pansy and her chances of escaping the scheming her father and his acolyte probably have in store for her.

I am a huge Edith Wharton fan, and I knew James had been her close friend and inspiration, so I knew I would enjoy his work, but I also found it a lot less engaging than Wharton’s. It took me a while to read “Portrait of a Lady” because it was a strangely impersonal reading experience: I didn’t feel much for any of the characters besides a mild pity that they should all make such unhappy lives for themselves. Osmond and Madame Merle are certainly malevolent and manipulative, but I was expecting them to be more outrageous in their behavior towards Isabel: their villainy is not at the same level as the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. As lovely as the writing was, the whole novel ended up feeling a bit too flat to really be enjoyable: I never felt immersed in the world on the page, and while this might have been deliberate on James' part, I did not enjoy feeling so remote from the story I was reading. This was disappointing, because I had heard so many people rave about this classic, and I thought I would love it. 3 underwhelmed stars.

“The great thing is to love something.”

Set in England and Italy, The Portrait of a Lady is the story of Isabel Archer, a young, beautiful, strong-willed and free-spirited American.
She is proud to be independent and has plans for the future. She wants to make something of herself. She wishes to travel the world and see everything there is to see. And when she inherits a great sum of money from her uncle, she realizes there is nothing to hold her back from fulfilling her dreams.
But life has other plans for her.

This is a story about choices and consequences; about honoring promises and about decency and integrity as opposed to perfidy, vanity and conceit.

There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again.