New Ways to Kill Your Mother

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 oddly 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,