The Columbia History of the American Novel

decades immediately after the Civil War rendered their sense of the surfaces and depths of American social and psychological life. 'Conventions' has a ring of traditionalism at odds with what they were committed to. But the term usefully highlights the constructed nature of the enterprise both for the writers and for us.

For James's contemporaries, his The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was — and remains for us — an exemplary representative of American realism. Early in the book James describes the Archers' old double -162- house in Albany and the full family life connected with it. James then carries Isabel Archer into the recesses of her childhood past and into the recesses of her favorite room, 'a mysterious apartment' filled with old furniture with which 'she had established relations almost human.' The double house, the humanized room, and the sense of an inner life establish an intimate connection between house and self. Like the house, Isabel's self is divided or at least pulled in opposing directions. The door to the mysterious room is bolted, the door's sidelights are covered with green paper, and though as a little girl Isabel knew the door opened out onto the street 'she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side — a place which became to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.' Like the Emerson who celebrates the inner life of the self-sufficient individual, in this version Isabel looks inward into the depths of the imagination, creates a drama of delight or terror, and on principle avoids testing her theories against what she will find on 'the vulgar street.' As an adult in this same room she blithely tells her aunt, 'I don't know anything about money.' It is not really fair to equate Emerson, inwardness, and the imagination with the romantic and the street and money with realism. Emerson, after all, spoke for the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, and Isabel has an immense appetite for experience. In part James conceives Isabel so that he can explore a conflict between two sides of his American cultural heritage. As an American writer and realist, he is especially sensitive to the issue of the reliability of the imagination under the pressure of money and the vulgar street.

For James, the imagination and the inner self are not isolated or reified. In Isabel's case they are intimately related to her sexuality. James has Isabel encounter a series of suitors. 'Deep in her soul — it was the deepest thing there — lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive.' The thought causes 'alarms' that become increasingly intense. She is cold toward Lord Warburton because of 'a certain fear.' The drama builds because James keeps the sources of the fear unspecified and the entire issue in suspension.

As a representative American, Isabel often fuses the language of American political culture with the language of Emersonian self-163- reliance. 'I like my liberty too much,' Isabel says to justify turning down Lord Warburton. She continues in the accents of a Fourth of July address or of the Declaration of Independence, 'it's my personal independence. . my love of liberty.' Or in a recognizably Emersonian mode, 'I only want to see for myself.' Isabel's pursuit of happiness is a central concern, as is her fear that in marrying Lord Warburton she will be escaping unhappiness, 'what most people know and suffer.' In rejecting Lord Warburton, Isabel is affirming the American values of independence and love of liberty as over against the security of established English wealth, landed property, and aristocratic position.

Inseparable from this drama of conflicting political cultures is the depth of Isabel's feelings, expressed in a characteristically Jamesian metaphor. Isabel resists like 'some wild, caught creature in a vast cage.' Although Isabel often sees Lord Warburton as kind, he can also emerge 'with his hands behind him giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop.' As a potent male keeper, 'booted and spurred,' Lord Warburton thus plays a part in a submerged drama of sexual politics, a drama that is much more open with her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood. Isabel's feelings about sexual power, her own and her suitors', animate the overt drama of mind and values. 'Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?' Isabel thinks. 'What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than these large, these fabulous occasions? If she wouldn't do such a thing as that then she must do great things, she must do something greater.' She worries that she is 'a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.'

James throws further light on the self Isabel fears after the dilettante Gilbert Osmond declares his love. 'What made her dread great,' James reiterates, 'was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread — the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there,' James stresses, 'like a large sum stored in a bank — which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.' On this view the self is not a wellspring of infinitely renewable energy but a bank, a repository of -164- a finite sum of money. James reveals that the market society has infiltrated the deepest recesses of the self, even of Isabel Archer, who knows nothing about money. Her fear of 'giving herself completely' is a complex fusion of her fastidiousness, her desire for independence, her unwillingness to subordinate and cage herself, her deep feelings about sexual power and powerlessness, and her mixed feelings about money and all it stands for.

Caspar Goodwood inspires the deepest fear of any of the suitors because he directly expresses his sexual passion. Throughout her last meeting with Goodwood, Isabel is 'frightened' at his 'violence.' She feels 'she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which others dropped dead. . the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth.' Death and sexual love merge as James's imagery enacts the physical emotions connected with a fierce seduction or rape. Isabel 'floated in fathomless waters. . in a rushing torrent.' Sounds come to her 'harsh and terrible. . in her own swimming head.' 'She panted' when she pleads with Goodwood' to go away.' Instead, 'he glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.' In the conventions of the period a kiss, reinforced by James's imagery, has the force of sexual intercourse. For Isabel, Goodwood's 'hard manhood,' his 'aggressive' physical presence, culminates in an 'act of possession.' The possession is sexual but also involves the issues of freedom, independence, and money. Osmond sees Isabel as a commodity, as his prize possession. In returning to Osmond, a choice open to multiple interpretations, Isabel is in part fleeing from the intensities of Goodwood's passion, from the possession he threatens, although overtly he argues for their complete freedom to do what they please. Isabel, however, is also affirming her independence and rejecting her status as a possession as both Goodwood and Osmond define possession.

In a possessive market society, money is the ultimate commodity, the ultimate possession. Isabel wants to see for herself, to judge for herself, but she does not know anything about money. She is also torn between her impulse to know the world, to throw herself into it, -165- and her impulse to trust herself, to devalue worldly possessions, and to ignore the vulgar street. After she inherits a fortune, she is afraid. 'A large fortune means freedom,' she tells Ralph Touchett, 'and I'm afraid of that.' If she failed to make good use of it, she goes on, she 'would be ashamed.' The stakes are high because shame is intimately connected to a sense of personal identity and self-worth.

Isabel argues for a sense of self that excludes possessions. 'Nothing that belongs to me,' she tells Madame Merle, 'is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one.' Isabel is particularly indifferent to houses and dress. Madame Merle disagrees. 'What shall we call our 'self?'' she asks. 'Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us — and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self — for other people — is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps — these things are all expressive.' James has Madame Merle give a working definition of the self appropriate to an expanding consumer and possessive market society. On this view, the self expands or contracts in relation to possessions. 'There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman,' Madame Merle argues; 'we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances.'

Until well after her marriage Isabel does not realize the extent to which Madame Merle and Osmond, two artists, two dramatists, have manipulated her. They present Osmond as a refined man indifferent to the opinion of the world, indifferent to money, indifferent to the 'cluster of appurtenances.' His relative poverty allows Isabel to feel generous. She is bestowing something on a worthy recipient. The power relations are the reverse of a marriage to either Lord Warburton or Caspar Goodwood. Osmond is also much less of a masculine sexual presence than either of his rivals. Isabel imagines a Gilbert Osmond and falls in love with her own creation. In the destabilizing crosscurrents of a changing market society, the imagination is both necessary and problematic. Isabel, committed to seeing for herself, is unable to see that Osmond worships money and the opinion of the vulgar society he professes to despise.