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A review by miraclecharlie
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
4.0
I'm sure there have been many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pages written about Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, and I don't imagine I've much to say that hasn't already been somewhere better said, so, I will be brief, and personal --- because, after all, that's what my book talk always is: personal. (This certainly did NOT turn out to be brief after all. Sorry.)
First, I believe the edition I read contains the original 1881 text, not the 1908 revision, and I could lie to you and say I mean to compare the two, but, no. It took me ages to get through this novel. In fact, it was this novel which was --- in part --- responsible for me leaving Twitter. Its sentences are circumlocutory, full of digressions, circling the point with excursuses that confound and contort, and its paragraphs go on for pages at a time, full of divagations and easily confusing colloquy.
In short (long), Henry James was writing for a very different audience-brain than we have today; the work requires concentration, long-term focus and attention. When I began it, I found I had to re-read, time and again, sentences, paragraphs, sections, because my attention had wandered, my brain so accustomed to checking social-media apps every ten minutes and experiencing life parceled into 240 character snippets which, even at that length, have begun to seem overly-long, it could not read the sensually developed and constructed, often musical prose in the manner it was meant to be read --- as in, to savor, to sit in relaxed repose and allow it to engulf me, envelop me in its moods and manners. Getting through a page, at first, was nearly impossible for me.
Which was frustrating. Because the shape of my edition of the novel, the smell, the foxed pages, and its length and tone took me back to my childhood, again, when I could often be found reading books shared with or given to me by my aunt, Sissie. I might well have spent an entire summer week doing NOTHING but reading The Portrait of a Lady at my aunt's home, holed up in one or another of its many unoccupied rooms which were full of various branches of the family's discarded furniture that I would arrange in a manner I imagined to be that of a New York City apartment, luxury penthouse, which was where I meant to live as a grown-up. I guess I'm still waiting to be that grown-up. I fear he's passed me by.
But I still want to read like that. I want to --- and have been working toward --- building a life in which the leisurely reading of sculpted prose, five-hundred pages of classic writing, deeply explored character, and breaths between the sentences --- is the kind of life I live. It became clear to me that spending so much energy and pinning so much of my self-worth and image on whether or not I was getting enough likes or being welcomed into the club of literary Twitter had compromised my intelligence. And worse, it made it nearly impossible to sit still and become part of the story as I so often had in my youth.
So, goodbye to Twitter (for now, anyway) and hello to more classics I've long ignored, like Portrait of a Lady.
But, what about the book, Charles? Oh, that.
American, Isabel Archer, is brought to Europe by a wealthy aunt; becomes close to her cousin, Ralph, who arranges for her an inheritance which makes her prey for manipulators and users. But her real ruination is in what appears to be her surrender to the conventions and structures of the society and time in which she lives, where her yearning for independence and realized self-hood makes her an outlier. Early on, in Chapter 7, in discussion with her aunt, Mrs. Touchette, who has insisted Isabel leave a drawing room where Lord Warburton, a sort-of-suitor at this point, has been speaking to her, this:
"Of course you are displeased at my interfering with you," said Mrs. Touchette.
Isabel reflected a moment.
"I am not displeased, but I am surprised --- and a good deal puzzled. Was it not proper I should remain in the drawing room?"
"Not in the least. Young girls here don't sit alone with the gentlemen late at night."
"You were very right to tell me then," said Isabel. "I don't understand it, but I am very glad to know it."
"I shall always tell you," her aunt answered, "whenever I see you taking what seems to be too much liberty."
"Pray do; but I don't say I shall always think your remonstrance just."
"Very likely not. You are too fond of your liberty."
"Yes, I think I am very fond of it. But I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose," said Isabel.
Eventually Isabel --- having turned down a number of suitors --- weds Gilbert Osmond, who turns out to be a duplicitous beast of a ne'er do well, described here:
"The desire to succeed greatly --- in something or other --- had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on, the conditions attached to success became so various and repulsive that the idea of making an effort gradually lost its charm."
And finally, in Chapter 42, which takes place in a long, dark night of Isabel's soul, where she comes to the conclusion she has thrown away her life, made a grievous, foolish error, and yet never honestly considers escaping it, we really have --- effectively --- come to the ending, which is foreshadowed in her thinking therein, an impression validated when in the last pages of the novel, given an opportunity to save herself, she abjures, having said in what amounts to defeat, "The world is very small."
A discovery made about the limitations in which she has chosen to live, imprisoning herself in a narrow world, knowing what is thought to be proper, and choosing, to her own detriment and sorrow, to do that thing though it will bring her nothing but sorrow. Some have described Isabel Archer and The Portrait of a Lady as protofeminist, a conclusion with which I have some difficulty agreeing, but I am not a scholar of feminism. However, for me, for it to qualify as such, Isabel Archer would have had to acted with more self-agency rather than acquiesce, throughout and finally, to the conventions of the time.
I suppose such discussions and so many studies made of what some consider Henry James's finest work are what validate it as a classic. I cannot help but wonder, however, what classics we might have been denied because the Isabel Archers of the time were unable to be free to write their own stories, and we have, instead, a canon largely composed by and through the consciousnesses and experiences of men.
Luckily for us, some writing by women survives, though it is not nearly as well-known as it ought to be --- See Lolly Willowes and Diary of a Provincial Lady for example.
First, I believe the edition I read contains the original 1881 text, not the 1908 revision, and I could lie to you and say I mean to compare the two, but, no. It took me ages to get through this novel. In fact, it was this novel which was --- in part --- responsible for me leaving Twitter. Its sentences are circumlocutory, full of digressions, circling the point with excursuses that confound and contort, and its paragraphs go on for pages at a time, full of divagations and easily confusing colloquy.
In short (long), Henry James was writing for a very different audience-brain than we have today; the work requires concentration, long-term focus and attention. When I began it, I found I had to re-read, time and again, sentences, paragraphs, sections, because my attention had wandered, my brain so accustomed to checking social-media apps every ten minutes and experiencing life parceled into 240 character snippets which, even at that length, have begun to seem overly-long, it could not read the sensually developed and constructed, often musical prose in the manner it was meant to be read --- as in, to savor, to sit in relaxed repose and allow it to engulf me, envelop me in its moods and manners. Getting through a page, at first, was nearly impossible for me.
Which was frustrating. Because the shape of my edition of the novel, the smell, the foxed pages, and its length and tone took me back to my childhood, again, when I could often be found reading books shared with or given to me by my aunt, Sissie. I might well have spent an entire summer week doing NOTHING but reading The Portrait of a Lady at my aunt's home, holed up in one or another of its many unoccupied rooms which were full of various branches of the family's discarded furniture that I would arrange in a manner I imagined to be that of a New York City apartment, luxury penthouse, which was where I meant to live as a grown-up. I guess I'm still waiting to be that grown-up. I fear he's passed me by.
But I still want to read like that. I want to --- and have been working toward --- building a life in which the leisurely reading of sculpted prose, five-hundred pages of classic writing, deeply explored character, and breaths between the sentences --- is the kind of life I live. It became clear to me that spending so much energy and pinning so much of my self-worth and image on whether or not I was getting enough likes or being welcomed into the club of literary Twitter had compromised my intelligence. And worse, it made it nearly impossible to sit still and become part of the story as I so often had in my youth.
So, goodbye to Twitter (for now, anyway) and hello to more classics I've long ignored, like Portrait of a Lady.
But, what about the book, Charles? Oh, that.
American, Isabel Archer, is brought to Europe by a wealthy aunt; becomes close to her cousin, Ralph, who arranges for her an inheritance which makes her prey for manipulators and users. But her real ruination is in what appears to be her surrender to the conventions and structures of the society and time in which she lives, where her yearning for independence and realized self-hood makes her an outlier. Early on, in Chapter 7, in discussion with her aunt, Mrs. Touchette, who has insisted Isabel leave a drawing room where Lord Warburton, a sort-of-suitor at this point, has been speaking to her, this:
"Of course you are displeased at my interfering with you," said Mrs. Touchette.
Isabel reflected a moment.
"I am not displeased, but I am surprised --- and a good deal puzzled. Was it not proper I should remain in the drawing room?"
"Not in the least. Young girls here don't sit alone with the gentlemen late at night."
"You were very right to tell me then," said Isabel. "I don't understand it, but I am very glad to know it."
"I shall always tell you," her aunt answered, "whenever I see you taking what seems to be too much liberty."
"Pray do; but I don't say I shall always think your remonstrance just."
"Very likely not. You are too fond of your liberty."
"Yes, I think I am very fond of it. But I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose," said Isabel.
Eventually Isabel --- having turned down a number of suitors --- weds Gilbert Osmond, who turns out to be a duplicitous beast of a ne'er do well, described here:
"The desire to succeed greatly --- in something or other --- had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on, the conditions attached to success became so various and repulsive that the idea of making an effort gradually lost its charm."
And finally, in Chapter 42, which takes place in a long, dark night of Isabel's soul, where she comes to the conclusion she has thrown away her life, made a grievous, foolish error, and yet never honestly considers escaping it, we really have --- effectively --- come to the ending, which is foreshadowed in her thinking therein, an impression validated when in the last pages of the novel, given an opportunity to save herself, she abjures, having said in what amounts to defeat, "The world is very small."
A discovery made about the limitations in which she has chosen to live, imprisoning herself in a narrow world, knowing what is thought to be proper, and choosing, to her own detriment and sorrow, to do that thing though it will bring her nothing but sorrow. Some have described Isabel Archer and The Portrait of a Lady as protofeminist, a conclusion with which I have some difficulty agreeing, but I am not a scholar of feminism. However, for me, for it to qualify as such, Isabel Archer would have had to acted with more self-agency rather than acquiesce, throughout and finally, to the conventions of the time.
I suppose such discussions and so many studies made of what some consider Henry James's finest work are what validate it as a classic. I cannot help but wonder, however, what classics we might have been denied because the Isabel Archers of the time were unable to be free to write their own stories, and we have, instead, a canon largely composed by and through the consciousnesses and experiences of men.
Luckily for us, some writing by women survives, though it is not nearly as well-known as it ought to be --- See Lolly Willowes and Diary of a Provincial Lady for example.