James admits that Isabel’s external adventures are “mild,” but he calls her inner life “exciting.” Her friend Henrietta Stackpole works as a journalist, but there is never any consideration of Isabel adopting a profession. Unlike Tess, the poor dairy maid, she doesn’t have to support herself. As I think about my course “The Heroine’s Progress,” I am struck by how minimally the notion of work enters into any of the middle-class heroines’ destinies. Rhoda Nunn has her typing school and Lily Briscoe her painting; one assumes that Nora, having left the doll’s house, will get a job. But by and large energies are consumed in extricating from old situations rather than in entering new ones.
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
