Showing papers in "The Henry James Review in 1986"

An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James

Abstract: James Baldwin has never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative Ufe. Furthermore, the Baldwin-James connection has been weU argued by others, particularly by Charles Newman in his \"The Lesson of the Master: Henry James and James Baldwin,\" and by LyaU Powers in \"Henry James and James Baldwin: The Complex Figure.\" Newman suggests that the problem for both Baldwin's and James's characters is \"the opacity of their culture and the question of their identity within it,\" that the \"psychological consequence\" of their \"obscure hurts\" is \"self-imposed exile,\" from the vantage point of which America can be more objectively observed: \"Paris, France, and WoUett [sic], Mass., are not knowable without the other\" (53, 63). Powers agrees essentiaUy with Newman. At the center of his article is the whole question of identity as opposed to manners: \"the aims of these two writers are much the same: to examine the problem of learning to live in a 'civilized' society whose manners, conventions, prejudices often threaten individual integrity; of coming to terms with that society's demands; and of managing to make the necessary compromises—but without giving up one's essential self, 'that charming conversible infinite thing, the intensest thing we know'\" (667). Early in his essay Powers refers to an article by WiUiam Weatherby in which Weatherby mentions a portrait of James owned by Baldwin (651). An interesting story Ues behind that portrait, a photograph signed by both John Singer Sargent and Henry James of the portrait painted by Sargent to honor James on his seventieth birthday. The photograph was sent to Baldwin in the early 60s by Michael James, a grandson of WiUiam James, who had been impressed by a civU rights speech he had heard Baldwin give in Chicago. As I was Baldwin's secretary at the time and as Baldwin was away, I corresponded with Michael James and tried to convey to him some sense of how appreciative I knew Baldwin would be. When Baldwin returned he was, in fact, deeply moved, and he hung the photograph directly above his writing desk. The picture became a kind of direct link between him and a writer who, as far as Baldwin was concerned, came closer to sharing his concerns than any other. That the gift would be appreciated was no surprise. Baldwin and I had talked many times about James (on whom I was writing a doctoral dissertation under Leon Edel) and Baldwin had lectured several times on The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors for my classes at Robert CoUege in Istanbul. In everything that he said in those conversations and those lectures, it was clear that his relationship with James was of a very special sort, perhaps of the sort that existed between James and Balzac. James was his standard—the writer

The Early Critical Reception of The Portrait of a Lady (1881-1916)

Abstract: In 1880 Henry James's friend of his youth, Thomas Sergeant Perry, proposed to write a review-essay of aU James's work up to that year. The novelist discouraged him on very particular grounds. \"I should be proud indeed to read a review of my 'literary career' from your hands,\" he wrote, but he added, \"I would rather you should wait a few montiis, tiU my big novel (to be published tiiis year) comes out. It is from that I myself shaU pretend to date—on tiiat I shaU take my stand\" (Harlow 305). The \"big\" novel to which James aUuded was TAe Portrait of a Lady, and it was to become—as he predicted—the principal work of his first phase, and one of his best-loved novels. The Portrait was first published in serial form in Macmillan's Magazine in October, 1880, almost concurrently in the Atlantic Monthly in November, 1880 (Edel, Laurence 318), and tiien in book form in London and in Boston in November, 1881 (Edel, Laurence 52-54). Six weeks after its publication in America 2,937 copies were sold. James's pubUshers regarded tiiis as a notable success (Monteiro 68). By August, 1882, a total of 6,500 copies had been printed by his American publishers. In England, however, diere was a slight drop in sales despite die numerous reviews of the book. A total of 7,000 copies were printed in England (Gard 550-51)—a considerable success by prevaiUng standards, given tiie experimental nature of the book, though far from being a best-seller. The critical reaction in England and America was mixed. In his 1951 stady \"Henry James and die EngUsh Reviewers,\" Donald Murray pointed out tiiat while much critical comment was devoted to die novel, tiie critics generaUy failed to appreciate James's method of characterization (4). For example, in 1881 in an unsigned article for the Saturday Review the critic stated tiiat in almost everything that James had written

Love, Marriage, and Divorce: The Matter of Sexuality in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: For its first half, TAe Portrait of a Lady is a courtship novel; the second half, however, is a marriage novel, marriage closely observed and tellingly questioned. In bodi sections, tiie matter of human sexuality is repeatedly brought forward, overtly and covertly, and die matter of sexuality is intimately entangled in tiie novel's denouement, in Isabel's decision to return by \"a very straight path\" to the Palazzo Roccanera. In order to read Henry James's novel properly, we must be attuned to die literary and social contexts of a past century, the vanished world to which it addressed itself. We must be attuned to die terms, die vocabulary, of die discourse on sexuality that hummed all about Henry James—as a small boy, young man, and maturing artist. As it happens, one of the chief contributors to nineteenth-century discourse on sexuality was Henry James's father. I am not suggesting that the son necessarily agreed with the father, that he was \"influenced\" by die paternal thunder, but I do contend tiiat the elder James's writings on marriage and \"die woman business\" provide highly pertinent instances of nineteenth-century notions about relations between the sexes, obviously illustrative examples of die lexicon employed to talk about such relationships. Since the two Jameses were writing to and in die nineteenth century, we should not read TAe Portrait of a Lady witii eyes bunkered by post-Freudian, post-Marcusian assumptions; we would also be well advised to pay careful attention to the nineteenth-century text of the novel, not be diverted from an appreciation of the nature and magnitude of James's 1881 achievement by the brilliance of his revisions of the novel a quarter-century afterward. In tiie introductory volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argued that our accepted notions about the place and valuation of sex in the Western world from the seventeenth century on are quite misleading, tiiat this was not so much a period of repression and censorship as an age in which there was, increasingly, \"a veritable discursive explosion\" witii regard to sexual matters: Rather tiian die uniform concern to hide sex, radier than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the age of reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse. (Foucault 34)

Isabel Archer: The Architecture of Consciousness and the International Theme

Abstract: Isabel Archer is the most sharply etched of a long line of romantic, imaginative, provincial heroines whom I shall designate as \"Emma's Daughters\" (from their forerunner and prototype, Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse) in contradistinction to the very different \"Pamela's Daughters\" defined by R. P. Utter and G. B. Needham.1 In addition to Emma Woodhouse, Isabel's predecessors include Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Her successors in the twentieth century include Sinclair Lewis's Carol Kennicott in Main Street and Willa Cather's Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy. The \"Emma\"-heroine is womanly, active, energetic, and values her autonomy, whereas the \"Pamela\"heroine is girlish, passive, and helpless, even though she may set a moral example for others. Ian Watt remarks that the Richardsonian heroine \"is devoid of any feelings towards her admirer until the marriage knot is tied\" (161). The \"Emma\"-heroine's initiation into maturity, to the contrary, is usually precipitated by a jolting realization that she is passionately attached to a man with whom she fears marriage will be impossible. \"Emma's Daughters\" can all be described as \"Female Quixotes,\" after the 1752 novel of Charlotte Ramsey Lennox, The Female Quixote, which influenced Jane Austen. Ironically, in 1843 S0ren Kierkegaard complained that European literature lacked \"a feminine counterpart to Don Quixote,\" and Harry Levin commented in 1963 that 'To set forth what Kierkegaard had spied out, to invade the continent of sentimentality, to create a female Quixote—mock-romantic where Cervantes had been mockheroic—was a man's job. Jane Austen might have done it, but not George Sand\" (247). He then proceeds to credit Flaubert with the creation of the first quixotic heroine, but actually Jane Austen had already \"done it\" in 1816, following the example of Mrs. Lennox's satire about Arabella, a motherless girl raised in provincial isolation on a diet of seventeenth-century French romances. Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, and James all focus upon a woman trying, like a Conradian hero, to realize her \"ideal conception of her own personality.\" The basic components in all four works are a society that imposes more stringent limitations upon women than upon men, and a heroine nourished upon books rather than upon life, who is given to flights of fancy. Each heroine is frustrated both by her own ignorance and isolation and by a materialistic, conformist society that is even more hostile to the female imagination than to the male. Henry James has the advantage of building upon a \"small tradition\" served variously by Austen, Flaubert, and Eliot before him, and James is therefore the most conscious of his heroine's literary lineage. In his Preface to the New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady he quotes George Eliot (from Daniel Deronda) on the importance, in literature as in life, of \"the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry\": \"In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection\" (Preface 9). He compares his Isabel to some of Shakespeare's witty heroines, but especially to George Eliot's Hetty Sorrel, Maggie Tulliver, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth. As George Levine has also noted, however, the one Eliot heroine closest in conception to Isabel, Dorothea Brooke, is conspicuous by her absence (244-257). Eliot herself was indebted to Austen, and probably, though not provably, to Flaubert. In two different letters she speaks of reading Emma aloud around the time of composing Middlemarch. Whether or not she had read Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), it was reviewed while she was editor of the Westminster Review. The anonymous reviewer was probably not Eliot herself; he speaks intemperately of hurling the book across the room in disgust, and then retrieving it and being captivated by its stylistic virtuosity. Eliot's linguistic abilities, however, are well documented, and she did review Balzac's Le

The Myth of America in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady had its hundredth birthday in 1981. It starts its second century by being in print around the world—in die United States and Britain in its variant texts—and more widely translated than at any time in its existence. Oxford has included it in its \"World Classics\" and in American literature it stands beside The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick (which was largely out of print for many years). In recent years, it has acquired a particular distinction as die first major \"feminist\" work of modern times, an American artistic successor to George Eliot's fictions, which dwelt most often on troubled and worldly heroines. In writing die novel, James sought to place his \"portrait\" in me great fictional gallery of modern ladies—among portraits of women like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, or the heroines of Jane Austen or die Brontes, or the young women of Thackeray or Trollope. Most of them sought, in a world mat denied them equality, forms of freedom from being simply parties in marriage contracts. James's ironic intention was to lift Isabel Archer out of me marriage market by endowing her widi the largest measure of freedom; he wished to demonstrate also the prohibitions and boundaries that society nevertheless imposed on her. \"The idea of me whole thing,\" he wrote in his notebooks, \"is that the poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom and nobleness, who has done, as she believes, a generous, natural, clear-sighted thing, finds herself in reality ground in the very mill of die conventional\" (CN 13). James seems to have had another intention as well. This was to paint Isabel within a \"mytii\" of America. In one of his early letters to W. D. Howells about his prospective novel he remarked, \"My novel is to be an Americana—me adventures in Europe of a female Newman, who of course equally triumphs over the insolent foreigner\" (HJL II, 72). This conception of Isabel as an \"Americana\"—a female counterpart to his hero of The American, Christopher Newman—permits us to ask ourselves: In what way did she, in her creator's imagination, become one of his \"representative\" Americans? His first novel had dealt with die fate of an American sculptor in Rome; his second had been the story of an American businessman who goes to Paris in search of a wife. Christopher Newman had decidedly been enveloped in certain American myths—a teller of \"tall tales\" (Rourke 238-65), at ease with himself, and carrying his native world witii him into foreign lands. Isabel Archer's personality was modified in the writing of die novel; she became, as James again told Howells, \"a great swell, psychologically: a grande nature\" (HJL II, 97). He endowed her with many American qualities and many American beliefs. In examining diese, it should be possible for us to discern the American mytii or mydis mat were in the background of her author's mind. The direct use of recorded mydis in a literary work offers no particular problem for criticism. James Joyce made no secret that his Ulysses was an Odyssey in Dublin: and his text amply demonstrated me wanderings of Leopold Bloom. What he kept secret, but leaked to the critics, was his plan for using episodes diat paralleled me adventures of Ulysses. Thomas Mann's Joseph series is drawn directly from die Old Testament story. The indirect or implied use of mytii, such as we find in James's American and in The Portrait of a Lady, calls for a \"dissecting out\" of die mydiological themes. Mircea Eliade, the eminent authority on myth, suggests mis to us when he speaks of the modern novel taking the place \"of the recitation of myths in traditional and popular societies.\" He adds that in modern fiction there has been \"a literary survival of great mythological themes and characters\" and these, as he says, need to be \"dissected out\" (191-92). Such dissection is not easy, and there are many scholars whose delight in the \"literal\" makes tiiem turn away from what is implied, and from what requires psychological or tiiematic penetration. The memod we use can only be tiirough the study of the author's icons, the allusions and references that in the weaving of die tales create for us the memory of analogous older myths or those current at me time of me writing. As James used his intuitive psychological observations to delineate character, so

A Woman in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: Many things make Middlemarch an important novel. George Eliot's blending of the elements of gothic fiction with those of the novel of manners is not least among diem. She makes a tiioroughly respectable clergyman, Edward Casaubon, by virtue of his starched notions of correct conduct, into a monster who crunches bones in a cavern; she makes a respectable society wife, Rosamond Vincy, by virtue of her ladylike ways, into a basil plant that feeds on a murdered man's brains; she makes a respectable banker, Nicholas Bulstrode, by virtue of his calling as God's instrument, into die Old Nick of die novel. These tiiree prominent characters in Middlemarch dramatize die horror of good manners. They expose the bankruptcy of a myth of social concern founded on nothing more than respectability— that \"Damocles sword,\" as Carlyle called it, tiiat hangs \"forever over . . . poor English life\"—when it confronts a myth of individual freedom founded on a love of justice. Middlemarch engages to show how a gothic tradition tiiat centers on deatii can become psychologically ghasdy when it appropriates a manners tradition that centers on life. For characteristically the novel of manners centers on what Plato defined as die cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—and die gothic novel centers on what the Apocalypse presents as die last tilings: deatii, judgment, heaven, and hell. Henry James learned a variety of things from his reading and study of George Eliot's fiction; and The Portrait of a Lady shows tiiat what he learned from Middlemarch, especially, was a sense of gothic manners, a sense of the horror of respectability. He saw how ladies and gentlemen, by tiieir insistence on a total adherence to socially accepted norms of conduct, became horrible human beings. The Portrait of a Lady presents a trenchant critique of a culture and civilization that have come to prize formalism over life. As an exposé of gothic manners, die novel makes its finest lady, Madame Merle, a damned soul, and its finest gentieman, Gilbert Osmond, a devil. In his search for alternatives to such a lady and such a gentieman, James hit upon a man and a woman; he hit upon Ralph Touchett and Isabel Archer. But to tell their story differently from the way Eliot told hers of Ladislaw and Dorothea, James chose to emphasize Isabel's consciousness and sensibility more exclusively than Eliot did Dorotiiea's. He had tiierefore to focus his attention and ours on a woman in TAe Portrait of a Lady. That choice made his novel a searching indictment of gotiiic manners at the same time that it made it a telling permutation on die kind of fiction that George Eliot invented in Middlemarch.

The Enigma of Serena Merle

Abstract: For the current reader, for this current reader, at any rate, the undeniably manipulative and allegedly villainous Madame Merle is the most intricately rendered character in The Portrait of a Lady. She is its energizing force, its complication, and, in at least one central sense, its resolution. She propels almost all the significant action. Ostensibly a structural parallel and contrast to Henrietta Stackpole, she is more suggestively a parallel and contrast to Isabel, who works her will. Finally exposed, unloved, seemingly defeated, and returned to America, Serena Merle is still in play on the last page of the novel. For whatever the ambiguous intricacies of Isabel's complex motives in returning to Rome at the end of the novel, unabashedly central to them is a willed dedication to the care of Pansy, Serena Merle's daughter. And if one considers anxious concern—admittedly, ambivalent anxious concern—for the well-being of that daughter also to be the spring that motivates Madame Merle's every ploy, then the question is not simply rhetorical when, in her last scene with Osmond (and in one of the great lines of the novel), she wails, "Have I been so vile all for nothing?" (PL 437). It is thus perhaps a deep irony in this deeply ironic book that its most troubled villain is simultaneously its most persistent enigma. Although Serena Merle was described by Joseph Warren Beach in 1918 as "perhaps the most perfect creation" in The Portrait of a Lady (207) and although extensive attention was given to her as recently as 1975 (Veeder 122-24) in what is described by an even more recent commentator as "the fullest and most penetrating analysis of . . . [her] that has been made" (Wagenknecht 53, η. 14), this first "great bad heroine" of the James canon speaks to the contemporary reader, I believe, in unexpected ways.1 The centrality of her role in the novel is apparent enough. Yet there are some touches, in her initial appearance when Isabel first meets her, that come to one only from hindsight, though James himself, in his preface, links the scene to the even more famous one of Isabel's solitary vigil before the fireplace of chapter 42, describing both as "two very good instances" of what he there calls "conversion," scenes that were to be "a turning point in . . . [Isabel's] life" that required for the writer the task of "producing the maximum of intensity with the minimum of strain" (AN 56-57). When one re-examines this scene, two or three suggestive aspects arise that possibly would not originally have struck one. Some readers will remember that Serena Merle was born in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, a daughter of a "high officer in the United States Navy," one who "had a post—a post of responsibility—in that establishment at the time" (PL 153). And perhaps most readers will have remembered that Isabel first thought her to be French and was later even more intrigued to discover her to be a compatriot ("rarer even than to be French seemed it to be an American on such interesting terms" [PL 152]). But some of the details of the word-play that establishes her American roots have implications that cannot fully be seen without a retrospective view of the entire novel. The pertinent passage is expressed thus: It would never have been supposed she had come into the world in Brooklyn—though one could doubtless not have carried through any argument that the air of distinction marking her in so eminent a degree was inconsistent with such a birth. It was true that the national banner had floated immediately over her cradle, and the breezy freedom of the stars and stripes might have shed an influence upon the attitude she there took towards life. And yet she had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind. (PL 154)

"In the Dusky, Crowded, Heterogeneous Back-Shop of the Mind": The Iconography of The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: Since the very name of TAe Portrait of a Lady designates it as a work of art, the novel receives from the first an iconic emphasis. The word icon is used here both as Panofsky defines it, the element that involves iconography, the stady of works of art for tiieir meaning rather than for their artistic values (26), and as die OED defines it, \"an image in the solid.\" Those images \"in the solid\" wiU fluctuate from works of art to works of utility treated as works of art in the later version of the novel. The function of the contained objects in TAe Portrait reveals itself on analysis as a major element of James's craft. We know from his letters that he wanted tiiis novel to \"immortaUze\" him, and tiiat it was to be in relation to his previous writings \"as wine unto water.\" The proof of James's expertise in handling die many iconic references in TAe Portrait lies in the way they are quietly absorbed into the texture of the book, and it is only after we have examined the novel that we realize with what ingenuity and skiU they have furthered James's narrative aims.

The Lessons of the Father: Henry James Sr. on Sexual Difference

Abstract: When Henry James Jr. wrote his memoirs in his late sixties, he was surprised at the number of times he could recall accompanying his father away from home—he alone without any of the other four children (SB 68). The aging son interpreted this public father-and-son companionship as an odd reflection of midnineteenth-century American manners, but I should like to propose an alternative interpretation: the father wanted his second son, the namesake, to inherit his own sense of social life. Henry Sr. would show the public world to Henry Jr. and explain it to him. The impression Henry Jr. gives of his father in the two volumes of memoirs, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, does not wholly agree with what one can learn about this father from other sources, especially his own writing. The son drew a portrait of a man devoted to a doomed yet heroic intellectual labor. The senior James never succeeded in getting anyone to believe in him, or really listen to him, but he never lost heart. He was a droll Olympian, completely without pomp or public honors, a magnificent man and father. He would not force his cherished ideas on his children, and yet these ideas saturated the home and rendered it all the more sacred. Convert the literal into

Isabel Archer and the Enclosed Chamber: A Phenomenological Reading

Abstract: James's ending to TAe Portrait of a Lady historically has disconcerted or at least puzzled many readers.1 Caught up in the mystique of Isabel's alleged extraordinary character, taken in by her charisma, or involved in die results of her ruinous mistake, readers \"interpret\" a suitable romantic ending to die tale just as Isabel herself might. Everyone agrees tiiat she returns to Osmond; James offers us no room for hedging over tiiat. But several critics see an \"improvement\" in the marital relationship, with Isabel gaining the upper hand and bringing new freedom to Pansy as well. \"For many people art means rosecoloured window-panes,\" James writes in \"The Art of Fiction.\" A willful misreading of die end of TAe Portrait of a Lady is exactiy die kind of critical act for which James there issues a caveat: \"picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy\" (AF 17). Basing his interpretation on the imagery of the final scene, John Rodenbeck, for instance, decides tiiat \"It is Caspar who gives Isabel her freedom, reconciling her to what lies beyond die bolted door. . . . The bolted door is opening, and Isabel is stepping out, to mingle with the world. . . . When Isabel goes back to Rome, therefore, at the end of die book, she has not fled. Having burst the bolted door, she has simply turned back, widi die full power of her new liberty, to do her duty and get Pansy equally free\" (339). This critic, like others, falls into the trap of making the imagery achieve more than it actually does, to coincide witii our best hopes for the heroine.2 Nowhere does Isabel \"step out\"—she in fact walks into die house from die Gardencourt lawn. She has fled—she runs blindly back to die house. Nor has a bolted door burst—Isabel reinforces the lock by putting her hand on the latch. If she is reconciled, it is to that within the chamber, not beyond the door.3 The temptation of such an interpretation is to view Isabel as her admirers do, not as she is. Despite her supposed great potential and unusual character, Isabel is a repressed and rather mundane person. Altiiough duped by die Osmond-Merle conspiracy, with diem Isabel finds her true home, die place she belongs. Her acquiescence to die Osmond way of life is a coming home for Isabel because it offers her the private life of the isolated, enclosed chamber. Ralph is correct in his assessment that Isabel wants to see life, not experience it, for throughout the novel she flees from intimate encounters, especially those with any sexual possibilities. Osmond's reserve, his social mask, his sterile decadence, and his isolation are attributes tiiat, in the end, appeal to her as components of tiie least compromising alliance in her climactic Hobson's choice. James forces the attentive reader to interpret the end of die novel in light of all tiiat has come before, \"to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge die whole piece by die pattern\" (AF 11). Thus, we cannot view die house imagery of die final few paragraphs in a vacuum. Consistently diroughout the novel, James experiments with the possibilities of the metaphor of enclosed space, utilizing it primarily to reinforce his literary concern with psychological reality.4 Houses, rooms, corners, curtains, walls, doors, and keys—all contribute to our understanding of human inter-relationships, manifestations of personality, and individual self-images. In his book-lengtii study of James's use of imagery, Robert L. Gale bases his argument on a similar critical methodology. The apology for his work includes die principles tiiat the figurative language of James's writings forms an organic whole; that it reveals his compositional habit of mind and narrative emphases; and that it helps \"explicate his texts\" in that it \"habitually paints setting, characterizes, foreshadows, implements plot, and reinforces theme\" (4).6 Similarly, Richard Gill has shown die monumental effect of die English country house on James and his narrative imagination, operating as necessary mise en scà ̈ne: historical symbol and social backdrop tiiat tellingly reveal modern isolation of self and die failure of community (21-23). An understanding of Isabel's final act, then, entails equal attention to die foregoing architectural imagery, for James guides us to die inevitable conclusion from the beginning.6

Visions and Revisions: The Past Rewritten

Abstract: A quarter of a century after TAe Portrait of a Lady was first pubUshed, Henry James turned again to the novel, in 1906, to revise it extensively for the New York Edition of his novels and tales. That revision was a particularly important piece of work; and properly to appreciate the significance of James's alterations and to understand die resultant novel, one must consider carefully the \"moment\" in which the task was undertaken. The events in James's career, both in his life and in his work, that preceded tiiat task of revision, and also tiiose that foUowed it, are matters of principal concern. Particularly crucial was James's return to America, in August, 1904 (after an absence of two decades), for a visit of almost a year. It is hardly surprising that revision of TAe Portrait would be major: it was not only an early work, but also one that seems always to have held peculiar significance for James himself. His personal involvement in it was especiaUy profound and intense. And he was evidently convinced well before he began tiie actual writing of it that it would be something of real weight—literaUy his \"masterpiece\"; as early as 2 February 1877 he informs HoweUs that it wiU require \"fuU elbow room\" (HJL II, 97). But it would remain an \"aching fragment\" until he found die leisure and die elbow room in Florence in 1880. The novel ran seriaUy from October, 1880, to November, 1881, in Macmillan's Magazine and from November, 1880, to December, 1881, in the Atlantic Monthly. The book came out in London and Boston at the end of 1881, and revisions for that were minor. That edition, slightly retouched, served as die text of die novel for the first \"Collected Edition\" of James's works, published by Macmillan in November, 1883. The extensive, substantial, and detailed revision was that of 1906, for Scribner's New York Edition of 1907-1909. TAe Portrait was published in 1908 as volumes III and IV. Understandably, major revision of such an important work in the James canon has been the subject of much scholarly and critical attention, beginning with the comments of Theodora Bosanquct, James's last amanuensis, just two years after his deatii.1 Consequently, we know quite clearly and in ample detail what the changes were that James made in die 1881 version of the novel to prepare it for Scribner's and what those revisions achieved. James sharpened die imagistic expression of the narrative; he made concrete and palpable what had been comparatively abstract and vague, and he increased both the dramatic quality of tiie novel and its thematic development. He also altered various images to bring tiiem into conformity with others in order to create extended metaphors, a sustained symbology. He further emphasized tiie romantic quality of his heroine, Isabel Archer, in the early part of her adventure. He refined and strengtiiened the dominance of her point of view in the novel and gave increased attention (necessarily) to the importance of her consciousness. He enhanced die emotional value of Ralph's concern for Isabel. Most obvious, perhaps, is die greatiy strengthened erotic element in the novel (only latent in the early version), particularly as it involves Caspar Goodwood—and Isabel's attitude and response to him. James thus prepared, with augmented dramatic effectiveness and weighted tiiematic emphasis, for the most striking alteration of aU—Caspar Goodwood's kissing Isabel in the closing moments of the novel. AU of this, quite evidently, has particular bearing on Isabel's final decision to return to Rome as the novel ends. The most substantial agreement among tiiose who have studied James's revisions of TAe Portrait is that three features characterize the later version: first, the increased importance given to Isabel's mind— her imagination or inteUect or consciousness—which now dominates die novel; second, die developed erotic element, so salient in Isabel's last encounter with Caspar, third, die enhanced emotional appeal of Ralph Touchett. The first two of these are perfectly visible in the famous kissing scene. The 1881

The Political Context of The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: Historian A. P. Thornton writes: \"Imperialism is a relationship comparable to marriage in its resistance to comprehension\" (Field xiii). This assessment could serve as a provocative headnote to Henry James's TAe Portrait of a Lady, a novel concerned obviously witii marital confusion and discord caused by distorted expectations but less obviously with political relationships. Although many insist that James was apolitical, concerned only with his art, Isabel Archer's struggle for power over her destiny is nothing if not poUtical; Osmond's courtship of her, nothing if not imperialistic; and her decision to return to him, nothing if not resistant to comprehension.1 Many valuable studies attempt to explicate Isabel's motivations using textual and psychological approaches, yet none successfully deals witii the central political issue of the work.2 PhilosophicaUy a daughter of Emerson, Isabel wishes to remain a sovereign entity, yet as die novel progresses she is manipulated and invaded by forces eager to bring her under tiieir control.3 Such activity is a paradigm of imperialist politics. I do not, however, intend to construct an allegory here; rather, I wish to suggest that James's deep interest in the political battles of his day, a major one concerning die imperial effort, manifests itself in TAe Portrait of a Lady. Furthermore, I wiU demonstrate tiiat his evolving political attitudes evidenced in his essays and letters direct many of his revisions of the novel for the 1908 New York Edition.

Americans in European Gardens

Abstract: Like Hawthorne and many earlier American writers, Henry James was fascinated by the subject of the potential dangers awaiting Americans in Europe. During the first half of James's long writing career, his fiction was almost exclusively about American innocents attracted by die culture and long history of Europe and faUing prey to its temptations and corruptions. Robert Emmet Long has written at lengtii on how Hawthorne influenced James in this and many other respects. He has in particular shown how James was indebted to Hawthorne's Dr. Rappaccini, of the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter," in creating his character Gilbert Osmond in TAe Portrait of a Lady. There is no doubt tiiat Hawthorne's tale haunted James aU his life. In his Hawthorne (1879), James noted tiiat, along with "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter" represented "die highest point tiiat Hawthorne reached in tiie short story form" (H 44-45). As late as 1907, James referred to die story again, calling die American commercial scene "a huge Rappacini-garden [sic], rank with each variety of the money-passion" (AS 57). In this essay, I shaU extend Long's discussion of die influence of "Rappaccini's Daughter" on TAe Portrait of a Lady in order to show how James developed and compUcated both the images and the themes he drew from his predecessor. Hawthorne's tale is relatively simple in its outline, though ambiguous in its conclusioa Beatrice grows up in the garden cultivated by her father and becomes immune to its poison flowers. A young man, Giovanni, strongly attracted to her, is lured by Rappaccini into the garden. Rappaccini plans that the two shaU become a new kind of Adam and Eve in this Italian garden, which is deatii to the rest of the world. When the young man himself discovers that he has become immune to the poisonous flowers of the garden, he accuses Beatrice of betraying him. The antidote he obtains to rid her of the poison kiUs her. In the course of the story, Hawthorne suggests that the poisoned garden may be "die Eden of die present world" (112). He presumably means that the Eden of die present is rife with the poisoned flowers of evil and tiiat aU its inhabitants are in danger of becoming immune to them. The original sin in this garden, however, is not so much disobedience as it is man's desire to meddle and interfere with the nature of otiiers, just as Rappaccini has meddled with the nature of the garden and witii that of Beatrice. There is a great deal of such meddUng in TAe Portrait of a Lady. Like Rappaccini, Osmond entices Isabel into his garden, experiments witii her nature, and in die tiiree years of the marriage encompassed by the novel manages partly to infect her system with his poison. Isabel herself becomes partly immune to the poison but resists taking the antidote offered to her by her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood. The process of this poisoning is iUustrated in chapter 42 when Isabel, alone before the dying fire of die great drawing room in the Palazzo Roccanera, reflects on her marriage. She realizes that Osmond has intended tiiat her mind was to belong to him, "attached to his own like a smaU garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gatiier an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching" (PL 355). In Hawthorne's story, Giovanni discovers that he has been infected by die poison of the garden when a bouquet of flowers gathered elsewhere withers in his hands. Similarly, Isabel discovers that Osmond has a "faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiUng everything for her that he looked at. . . It was as if he had had die evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune." The infinite vistas of Ufe that she anticipated widi Osmond dwindle to "a dark, narrow alley with a dead waU at the end" (PL 349). It is clear to others that Isabel has been partly infected by die envenomed garden of her husband's wiU. Ralph wonders: "Poor human-hearted Isabel, what perversity had bitten her?" (PL 324). For a time she faUs in with Osmond's scheme to snare Warburton for his daughter, Pansy. As Long has pointed out, Pansy is much like Beatrice in that she too has been imprisoned in the poisoned garden of Osmond's

Henry James and the Reverend William Rounseville Alger

Abstract: Henry James occasionaUy satirized a type of Unitarian minister in his fiction, most notably the Reverend Benjamin Babcock in The American. Much as he modeled Roderick Hudson, GUbert Osmond, Juliana Bordereau, Mary Prance, little Bilham, and other characters on people he knew personaUy or by reputation, James may have caricatured a historical figure in Babcock.1 From boyhood he had been acquainted with such prominent American Unitarian ministers as Theodore Parker and Frederic Henry Hedge. When he entered the Harvard Law School in the autumn of 1862, moreover, James occupied \"quiet cloistered rooms in the comparatively sequestered Divinity Hall,\" which mainly housed \"post-graduates and others, of a Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological faculty\" (AB 418). Yet the sanctimonious Babcock is neither a transcendentalist Unitarian like Parker and Hedge nor a caUow ministerial student like the residents of Divinity HaU. Indeed, though the joke went around at the time that a typical class at the Divinity School contained \"two mystics, two sceptics, and two dyspeptics\" (Morison 395), James referred but once in his fiction, and without a hint of irony, to \"the young men who were studying for the Unitarian ministry in that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue\" (TB 120). Could his satire have another source? The model of middlebrow Unitarianism most available to James was, in fact, the Reverend WiUiam Rounseville Alger (1822-1905). As I have explained elsewhere (\"W. R. Alger\"), Alger was a weU-known Unitarian minister and man of letters, especially popular throughout his native New England during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. His works were read by Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, his lectures approved by Parker, Whittier, and William Lloyd Garrison. In early 1865, depressed by the recent deaths of two of his children, Alger took leave from his Boston pulpit and traveled alone in Europe for six months. During a stop in Venice, he befriended the American consul, William D. HoweUs (Scharnhorst \"The History\"). He later incorporated a brief memoir of part of this tour in The Friendships of Women (1867), a compilation of essays about types of feminine friendship, published a few weeks before he succeeded Parker as minister of the largest congregation of liberal Christians in America. In 1871, while again traveling in Europe for his health, he suffered a mental collapse. He would continue to write and lecture for thirty more years, but his later projects were justly neglected. Still, a generation after his death Alger was admitted to the circle of prominent figures sketched in the Dictionary of American Biography. Although there is no evidence that James and Alger ever met personaUy, there can be no doubt that James knew the Unitarian minister at least by reputation. They shared common friends, HoweUs in particular. Each contributed to the magazine The Galaxy between 1866 and 1868. Certainly their families were acquainted. Either William Alger or his cousin Horatio interviewed the elder

James's London Tales of the 1880s

Abstract: Although James had written about London in \"A Passionate Pilgrim\" and \"An International Episode\" in the 1870s, it was not until the next decade that he focused his short fiction on the city in four tales: \"The Siege of London\" (1883), \"Lady Barberina\" (1884), \"The Path of Duty\" (1884), and \"A London Life\" (1888). Instead of emphasizing the picturesqueness of the British capital as he had done earlier, he now turned his attention to depicting English society and American outsiders \"caught up and involved in the sweep of the machine.\" As he points out in a preface, it was during this time he was \"infinitely interested in almost any demonstration of the effect of London\" since it was \"material ever to one's hand\" (AN 135). The stories, dealing with courtship and social climbing, divorce and corruption, innocence betrayed and alienation, foreshadow What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and The Wings of the Dove. Their significance lies in the way that they reveal collectively the prominent part the city plays both in his work and in the lives of his Americans. In fact, the first thing that strikes one about these tales is their remarkable similarity with respect to characters, settings, and themes. The central figures, each one a \"candid outsider,\" become caught up in the \"machine\" with varying degrees of success. Nancy Headway in \"The Siege\" triumphs over it. Jackson Lemon in \"Lady Barberina\" compromises with it. The narrator of \"The Path of Duty\" grows discouraged and finds herself isolated. Laura Wing in \"A London Life\" flees back to her country disillusioned if not terrified after her confrontation. In most instances the scenes belong to the comedy of manners—a drawing room, Hyde Park, the theater. The motifs range from coping with snobbery and tradition to countering gossip and immorality. In addition, the stories reflect James's increasing disappointment with the London society that he had come to admire as a boy through Punch and became enamored of when he established his residence in 1876.1 Almost immediately he found \"the English world . . . interesting, inspiring, even exhilarating\" (HJL II, 86). He wrote Charles Eliot Norton in 1880 that despite problems he got along with the people \"beautifully . . . they are, for me, the great race\" (LHJ 74). As the decade proceeded he changed his mind, not so much about the metropolis that continued to fascinate him but about the upper classes. The Dilke divorce scandal of 1885 caused him to decry the \"low 'moral' tone of London.\" A year later the CampbeU divorce case made him even more pessimistic.2 He compared English society to the rotten state \"of the French Aristocracy before the revolution\" and to \"the congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down\" (LHJ 124). English life, he felt, was becoming \"grossly materialistic.\" The 1890s saw a deepening of these criticisms. Maisie in What Maisie Knew, while talking to her mother about one of her lovers, thinks of \"madness and desolation . . . ruin and darkness and death,\" thoughts not unlike those of Laura Wing about her sister and her promiscuous life style. Laura is also a

Framing James's Portrait: An Introduction

Abstract: In many respects the reader duplicates Isabel Archer's experience, but always with the difference that the reader is conscious of the ways in which others, including the narrator, manipulate Isabel, and always with the forevision, so long in coming to her, that Isabel's career will not be happy. We learn early on that Isabel \"became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly that will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity\" (PL 95). Even so, James's narrator intends his presentation of Isabel to disarm \"scientific criticism\" and \"to awaken on the reader's part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant\" (PL 54). The very \"appeal to charity\" is the narrator's, and he succeeds insofar as many readers identify with Isabel in her innocence and savor the bitterness of its loss. Henry James's preface to the New York Edition of the novel suggests that, when he revised the novel in 1906-1907, he, too, in the process of rereading duplicated Isabel's adventure. Even for first readers of The Portrait of a Lady, the question of how to regard Isabel Archer becomes increasingly tangled as the novel unfolds, disclosing more and more the complex ambivalence of the narrator's view of her and, even more, of the author's. We might conjecture that the problem arises from the identity of author and heroine, so that his criticism of her and his commitment to her are intimately tied up in his sense of himself. I do not mean that Henry James and Isabel Archer are identifiable in any crude sense. We have long known, however, that there are some points of identity, particularly that James drew closely on autobiographical materials for his description of Isabel's Albany childhood. Something of James is no doubt in many of his characters, including also, in this novel, Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond. But that his own readerly experience of the novel was one of sympathy with Isabel above all seems clear from the preface of 1905, in which the traces of his participation in Isabel's experience are unmistakable. The preface is to be sure many things: an autobiographical reminiscence of the circumstances of James's composition of the novel; a reminiscence also of the \"beautiful genius\" of Turgenev; a plea for James's method of treating his subject in The Portrait of a Lady; and a plea also for critical discrimination. But above all it is a record of the novelist's experience in rereading and reseeing his novel, a retrospective record set down after he finished the revision that the preface introduces. Read as such, the preface strikes me as remarkable for the way in which James's commentary suggests his imaginative collaboration in Isabel Archer's way of seeing and in her sense of value. The language of his preface is complicitous with the very conceptions and predilections that constitute his heroine's most severe liabilities. Isabel's tragedy arises from her blindness and her pride—the blindness and pride of youth, of innocence, and of inexperience, but also, more precisely, the blind, presumptuous side of an Emersonianism that cannot conceive of any limitation to the transcendental self, any more than it can imagine genuine evil. Thus, \"she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action\" (PL 54). \"Her nature,\" moreover, \"had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses\" (PL 56). Keeping these phrases in mind, ought one not to hear an echo of them in James's visit to the recesses of his own imagination in the preface? Quite as interesting as the young woman herself, at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter of the growth, in one's imagination, of some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the fabulist's art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there. (PL 4; italics added)

James Discovers Jan Vermeer of Delft

Abstract: Although Proust has been given credit for being the first novelist to introduce Vermeer as a modern taste in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (in which Swann writes an essay on the Dutch master and Bergotte, dying, must see the \"little patch of yellow\" in The View of Delft), it is actuaUy Henry James who anticipated the French novelist. In The Outcry, both in its play version (written in 1909 but never produced) and in its novel version (1911), the young connoisseur Hugh Crimble recognizes in a supposed Cuyp a little landscape by Vermeer, or Vandermeer of Delft, as he was then also known. In a novel devoted to the correction of false attributions of paintings, the recognition of the Vermeer establishes for the reader the sensitivity of the young connoisseur and his unerring eye. The big issue of whether or not a painting by Moretto is much more valuable than one by Mantovano, a painter who, unlike Vermeer, is an invented artist, but whose pictures, like those of Vermeer, consist only of a few choice and rare examples, wiU be decided not merely by his judgment but by that of one of the world's great authorities. But it is Hugh's own genius that immediately recognizes the Dutch master.