Portrait of A Novel (14 page)

James himself provides the best account of this moment, writing in his preface of how, as she enters the drawing room, Isabel “
deeply recognizes
. . . in the presence there, among the gathering shades, of this personage . . . a turning point in her life.” The two women spend the next weeks in each other’s company, as the house prepares for Mr. Touchett’s death, and Isabel’s admiration of her new friend grows by the day. Madame Merle is tall and fair and widowed, and something over forty. She works elaborate morsels of embroidery, she plays and paints, and though Gardencourt is hushed by sickness, she stays on because Mrs. Touchett wants her to; a welcome guest who also knows just when to leave and where to go next. Isabel thinks her a
“woman of ardent impulses, kept in admirable order,”
and soon recognizes that she’s under the older woman’s influence; that at moments, indeed, she wants to be like her.

If Madame Merle has a fault it’s that she seems
“too perfectly the social animal.” Even her new protégé admits that she cannot conceive of this supple creature in isolation, cannot imagine her inner life, and Isabel is troubled by the fact that Ralph doesn’t like her. He says that he was once in love with her; but he does not like her, and Madame Merle knows it. They do, however, agree about one thing, for she too has an interest in our heroine’s future. Yet their interest takes a different form. Ralph’s generosity may be stained by his own longings, but he nonetheless wants to see what Isabel does with herself, to see the kind of life she will fashion. Madame Merle says, in contrast, that she wants “to see what life makes” of Isabel, and emphasizes the shaping force of the world around her. The difference is crucial, and points to a talk the two woman have shortly before Mr. Touchett’s death.

The older woman admits to being ambitious, but she calls her own unrealized dreams “
preposterous
.” Isabel answers that she herself has known success already. She has seen a childhood fantasy come true, and then blushes at the accuracy with which her friend defines and discounts it. A young man on his knees? We have all had that, and if “
yours was
a paragon . . . why didn’t you fly with him to his castle in the Apennines?” The location is nicely chosen. Hawthorne gave his readers such a mountain refuge in
The Marble Faun
, and Anne Radcliffe had earlier used that setting in her 1794 Gothic romance,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
. Madame Merle’s words suggest that Isabel’s dream is above all a literary one, and tired. They remind the girl of the plot she’s rejected, and they also suggest her lingering naïveté, in a way that makes her prickly. He has no such castle, she says, and besides, “I don’t care anything about his house.”

Madame Merle finds that sentiment crude, and the conversation that follows stands as one of the most probing moments in all James’s work. He gives us here an understated examination of the very nature of the self, of the American self in particular, and the passage needs to be quoted at length. “
When you have lived
as long as I,” the older woman says,

“. . . you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have 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 clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”

A great respect for
things.
The phrase links her to Balzac, in whose world sexual desire is but a shadow of the lust for material goods, and whose great hero, as James himself wrote, is the 20-franc piece. And Isabel replies:

“
I think just
the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should! . . . My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me.”

For one thing, it’s not her choice to wear them—though Madame Merle puts a stop to that line of reasoning by asking if she’d prefer to go naked.

Early in
Anna Karenina
, Tolstoy writes that his heroine’s beauty lies in the way that she seems to stand apart from her clothes. “
What she wore
was never seen on her,” and even the most luxurious dress becomes an unnoticeable frame for the self. So it is for Isabel—or rather that’s how she wants it to be. This passage comes a few pages after Ralph’s conversation with his father, and we read her words with a certain irony, knowing what she doesn’t: that whether or not her clothes express her, she’s soon going to have a lot more of them. Still, this argument looks like a fair fight. We can’t easily reject either woman’s position, and while the balance does finally tip, we’re not happy about it. We’d prefer to side with Isabel—with youth—and her ideal remains necessary, the ideal of some unified and autonomous self, independent of and anterior to its social circumstances. Madame Merle, in contrast, suggests that the self is socially determined, and not entirely separable from the world around it. The things around us may express that self, but they also serve to shape it. Our possessions represent us—they provide the shell within which the self is bound and through which other people come to know it.

Madame Merle speaks for the kind of self that Isabel had rejected in rejecting Warburton: the self as defined by its appurtenances, by a trailing penumbra of houses and history; the self as both person and personage. She speaks for age, for the things our young lady will need another twenty years to learn, and she also speaks as a “lady”; speaks for the social category to which both women belong and whose shaping force is so completely naturalized that Isabel can’t even see it. But above all she speaks for Europe. And Isabel is the voice of American exceptionalism, a woman who sings of herself, and only herself; who believes her possessions are arbitrary, a limit imposed on her freedom, and who cannot accept the idea of merging that self in some other identity, in a moat or a name or a cotton mill. She likes instead to see herself as a version of what the critic R. W. B. Lewis called the American Adam, heroine “
of a new adventure
, an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race.” Isabel is an orphan, and even as her Aunt Touchett pays the bills, she speaks of the girl as being her own mistress; someone who wants, as James tells us, “
to leave the past
behind her.” The paradox is that she finds her clean start in coming to Europe, to an Old World in which she appears newborn. Yet her very desire to discard the past tells us that she has one. No “lady” is without a social inheritance. No one with Caspar Goodwood behind her—no one with a sudden £70,000 of family money—is quite so pleasantly bereft.

James historicized such ambitions in his study of Hawthorne, writing that the idea of “
the supremacy of the individual
to himself . . . must have had a great charm for people” whose society seemed bare of other amusements. The words come from his account of Hawthorne’s relations with New England’s reforming class in general and Emerson in particular, and this moment in the novel is in fact often read in terms of Emerson. Many critics cite a line from “The Transcendentalist,” in which he writes that “
you think
me the child of my circumstances. I make my circumstances,” and suggests that the thought “which is called I” has the power to mold the world into the form of its own desire. In truth, there’s nothing easier than to find Emersonian tags for Isabel’s self-conception. We may pluck a line from “Self-Reliance,” in which he describes the human soul as defined by a continuous process of
becoming
, “self-sufficing, and . . . self-relying,” and goes on to treat one’s possessions as a form of accident, scorning a world in which people measure each other by what one has rather than what one is. We may look at “History,” in which Emerson tells us that the self is greater than all geography, that history matters only because it allows us to make metaphors for our souls. But we also need to remember that the
Portrait
itself is larger than Isabel’s own consciousness. It knows from the start some things that she will only gradually discover, and we must remember too that James thought Emerson’s own great weakness was his “
ripe unconsciousness of evil
.”

Isabel believes in her own autonomy, her own enabling isolation: a belief, and a dream, that all her later experience will challenge, as she learns what the Old World has to teach; a folly at whose cost she will purchase wisdom. For in the words of John Adams, there is “
no special providence
for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” The same, except in ideology, in our fixed belief that we aren’t; a belief that makes us the perpetual victims of our own born-again innocence, lost one year and renewed the next. James asks us here to define our relation to the world outside, to the life beyond our borders. Do we need it? Can we stand alone? The stakes in this delicate talk about clothes are enormous, and his characters’ words address not only the nature and limits of the individual self, but also that of our own country’s relation to other lands; the relation that James’s own expatriation had put into question. And that account of the limits of self-sufficiency is what, above all, makes
The Portrait of a Lady
stand as a great American novel.

We cannot, however, take the full measure of those limits until the very end of the book, and there are other things to say about this moment. Look again at Madame Merle’s claim that “one’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self.” The qualification is important. It allows for a distinction between public and private, between the self in its social definition and the self in itself. Isabel herself doesn’t hear that distinction, but we should, and we can gloss it by looking at some words from William James’s
Principles of Psychology
(1890). In his chapter on the self the older brother writes that “
a man’s Me is the sum total of all that he
CAN
call his
, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.” Henry wasn’t the only member of his family to enjoy lists, and it’s hard not to be swept away by the charm and force of this one; and hard as well to believe William didn’t have his brother’s novel in mind when he wrote it, so closely does it track Madame Merle’s account of our defining “envelope of circumstances.” Yet William’s conception of the self isn’t limited to that envelope. For he splits that self into two parts, into a “me” and an “I.”
Me
is “
the self as known
”: not only as known by other people, but also as perceived by what he calls
I
, “the self as knower.” The
I
is fully aware of that
me
, of its expression through one’s hat and shoes and tone of voice, its “
empirical aggregate
of things objectively known.” That aggregate is what the
I
knows of itself, how it describes itself to itself. William adds, however, that “the
I
which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate.”
I
is irreducible.

William James speaks to both of his brothers’ characters here, the
Me
of Madame Merle and the
I
of Isabel Archer; the Isabel who insists that the self remains separate from the sum of what she can call hers. Except that she’s wrong. “
Whatever I may
be thinking of,” William writes, “I am always at the same time more or less aware of
myself
, of my
personal existence
,” and over the course of the novel Isabel’s growing self-awareness becomes inseparable from the increasing complexity of that existence. She would not come to perceive so much if the shell around her did not so press, if she weren’t forced to think her way through the circumstances that wrap her tight. And the knowing instrument of her
I
will take some part of its shape from the things that do indeed belong to her, as she does to them. At this point, however, Isabel speaks for an identity of
I
and
Me
—for an
I
that subsumes its
Me
. She speaks as though she has had some existence prior to or separate from her circumstances, and perhaps in a sense she has.

“She stood there in perfect isolation,” James wrote in his preface, recalling the way in which, at first, this slim shade of an untethered girl was all he had to build on. He had nothing else, not at the start, no plans or materials or tools. He had to find them. He had to learn what destiny she would affront; had to invent a clutch of possibilities for her, a story, other people. That makes James’s own creative dilemma as one with Isabel’s situation, and that dilemma is what determines the structure of his plot. He needs to envision the appurtenances of which she wants no part; must imagine a way to bring her into some full contact with the world around her. As we will see in this book’s next part, the business of
The Portrait of a Lady
lies in discovering a set of possible actions and relations for a character who begins by standing alone.

P
ART
T
HREE

ITALIAN JOURNEYS

Rome, Outdoor Market in Piazza Navona
.
By Giuseppe Ninci, ca. 1870s. Albumen print.

(Courtesy of Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts)