Portrait of A Novel (28 page)

Indeed, Isabel wants to—wants anyway to try. She believes that to give her husband this personage as a son-in-law would be to “
play the part
of a good wife. She wanted to be that; she wanted to be able to believe, sincerely, that she had been that.” Still, she finds Warburton’s attachment strange. Pansy seems to her so small, so limited, but she does try to talk herself into it; then she remembers Rosier and admits that the girl prefers the young American. That night Isabel is sitting by herself in the drawing room when her husband comes in. It’s the first time James has shown them together and alone since their marriage, and Osmond now tells her that he wants their visitor to declare his intentions. That admission costs him something. He’s so used to acting as if none of the world’s prizes are ever worth an effort, and his words make Isabel recognize how intensely he wants to see his daughter at Lockleigh. Still, the girl can’t make it happen on her own; any proposal will depend upon Isabel’s willingness to use the influence he knows she still has. “
The moment you
really wish it, you can bring him to the point,” he says, and his words mean exactly what Ralph had earlier suggested. Osmond may speak of loving his daughter, but he knows that her chief merit in Warburton’s eyes can only be her nearness to her stepmother.

“
It lies in
your hands,” he tells her, and then walks out, while Isabel remains by the fire. What she sees as she sits there will produce a moment of reverie that lasts the full length of a night, a chapter that stands as one of James’s greatest achievements and a turning point in the history of the novel.

I
sabel will sit long that night, until the oil lamps have burned out and the candles have guttered down to their sockets. She will sit and think, motionless, while her mind moves over the whole history of her married life. Nothing happens in the
Portrait
’s famous forty-second chapter, and yet her meditation “
has all the vivacity
of incident,” as James put it in the novel’s preface, a reverie that throws the novel’s action forward by returning her to her past. And she begins by working through the situation that Osmond’s words have put before her. Those words make her see that Warburton does indeed want to please her, and she wonders if he believes even now that she might be something more to him than a friend. Still, she cannot quite square the idea with the evident sincerity of his fondness for Pansy. That fondness may be a delusion, but she immediately acquits him of pretending to be in love with the girl as a way of pursuing her instead. In fact, Warburton himself has been genuinely startled by Ralph’s earlier suggestion; a few chapters on he will look at it squarely and take himself back to England. But to acquit Warburton is not to acquit Osmond, and with each minute the “
service her husband had
asked of her” seems more and more repugnant. He wants her to flirt—but that puts it too mildly. He wants her to use what sexual hold she has over Warburton as a means to her stepdaughter’s marriage; as though she were bait. He’s pimping her, and she knows it. So her recognition of the Englishman’s innocence brings her no peace, and as she sits through the night, she finds herself “haunted with terrors,” among them the curious sensation of seeing her friend and her husband together.

On this night Isabel will think, more than ever before, about just why she married, and what made it go wrong. She—we—will feel the continued power of Osmond’s charm, and we will understand just how her distrust of her husband has grown. Neither of them is the partner the other one expected, though at first he had believed “
he could change
her, and she had done her best to be what he would like.” We will get the explanation that James refused us when the novel resumed after Isabel’s marriage and at the end of these dozen pages will know almost everything of importance about the early years of their union. That ellipsis will be closed. James’s work here offers a new way of presenting the interior life, a new kind of fiction, and yet the chapter gives us more than an early example of what William James would soon name the “
stream of consciousness
.” It will of course give us that, and in a moment we will see how. But it also has a structural task to perform in the novel as a whole.

James either could not or chose not to dramatize the week-by-week dissolution of trust that is the Osmond’s marriage. He offers us Isabel’s retrospective understanding of its failure but doesn’t depict the process of that failure itself, and I do not think it possible to define with any precision the complex of psychological and technical reasons that made him refuse such scenes. So let’s presume instead that such a depiction was never his purpose, that his interest lies elsewhere, in Isabel’s understanding of the consequences of her marital choice. Still, we do need to know why it’s the wrong choice, and at this point George Eliot can help us. Though not in the obvious way. She writes brilliantly about marriages going wrong in both
Middlemarch
and
Daniel Deronda
, and that of Gwendolen Harleth and Henleigh Grandcourt in the latter novel is in some ways a model for Isabel’s own. Another aspect of
Daniel Deronda
seems to me equally important, however, and far less often remarked upon.

We’re now accustomed to novels marked by narrative disjunctions, books predicated on flashbacks or memory that seem to glide back and forth in time; books in which the order of events and the order of their telling are at odds. We have read Conrad and Faulkner, Proust and Woolf, and know how to piece a chronology out of a story’s discontinuous shards. But the readers of James’s day were not nearly so used to such structures. Most novels of the period relied on a linear narrative, and though they might allow themselves brief moments of retrospection, the story thrust always forward.
Daniel Deronda
is different. George Eliot liked the opportunities that the massive serial parts of
Middlemarch
had given her, and she returned to that form in the later book, once more dividing it in to eight parts of about 100 pages each. This time, however, she did something more than use that architecture as a way to ease her movement from plot to plot. She also used those large blocks of narrative to disrupt chronology in a way that a more conventional serial novelist like Dickens could not. The epigraph to her first chapter suggests that any such opening is but the “
make-believe
of a beginning”; all starting points are arbitrary, and “no retrospect” ever takes us back to the true origin of things. Narrative form isn’t given by the calendar, but must instead be made, and so, after a dramatic opening scene at a German casino, George Eliot falls back in time for 200 pages in order to show how her characters got there. The opening chapters hold us—an English girl losing at roulette. We want to know why she plays with such abandon. And what about the man who returns the necklace she pawns?

Of course, George Eliot wasn’t the first to begin in the middle; her structure has one of the grandest of all pedigrees in the
Odyssey
and the
Aeneid
. Very few Victorian novels used that gambit, however, and none so successfully. Nevertheless, such breaks in sequence would have an incalculable effect on later fiction, beginning with
The Portrait of a Lady
itself. Not that James appears, at first, to disrupt chronology as such. The jump that puts young Rosier at Madame Merle’s door is not in itself a violation of narrative order. But it does create a gap. It puts us into a situation we don’t fully understand, and here James found an elective affinity with his predecessor’s experiment in time. George Eliot presents her own retrospective in an omniscient third person that’s indistinguishable from that in the rest of her narrative, fully dramatizing each stage in the process that has brought her main characters to the casino. James’s narratological problem is more complicated. In the preface to
The Golden Bowl
he described his own inveterate preference for an “
oblique view
of my presented action”—not an impersonal God-like account of the affair, but rather one “of somebody’s impression of it.” And so it is at this crucial moment in the
Portrait
. The middle of Isabel’s marriage lies itself in the middle of the novel, and James needs to fill us in, not as George Eliot does on what happens before the book “begins,” but instead on the events of its unwritten center. He closes the gap by breaking chronology, allowing Isabel’s memory to stitch over the tear in the novel that is the moment of her marriage itself: a chapter of interior monologue in which there is no physical action beyond the burning of a candle.

Still, a full understanding of just how this chapter covers—or perhaps recovers—the past will require a closer look, and before proceeding we had better get the taste of it in our mouths:

He had told her
that he loved the conventional; but there was a sense in which this seemed a noble declaration. In that sense, the love of harmony, and order, and decency, and all the stately offices of life, she went with him freely, and his warning had contained nothing ominous. But when, as the months elapsed, she followed him further and he led her into the mansion of his own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was. She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind, indeed, seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. Of course it was not physical suffering; for physical suffering there might have been a remedy. She could come and go; she had her liberty; her husband was perfectly polite. He took himself so seriously; it was something appalling.

In some ways there’s nothing particularly difficult about this passage, and its first readers had few problems in comprehending it. It provides an example of the
free indirect discourse
that most of James’s contemporaries used in depicting their characters’ inner lives. He allows Isabel’s own particular idiom—her vocabulary and biases and ways of understanding—to percolate through his own narration, and the language provides a series of tip-offs that tells us we’ve been put inside the character’s mind: the verb “seemed” in the first sentence, the reiterated “then, then” with which James suggests Isabel’s incredulity, the afterthoughts represented by all those semicolons. We come particularly close to her in the passage’s last words—“something appalling”—which offer a colloquial summation of Osmond’s character. Yet though Isabel’s notes do infiltrate James’s voice, they don’t undermine it. His own tones are muffled, but they remain very much in place, and he maintains the distinction between author and character. So we see through her eyes, and at the same time look at those eyes; we have just enough distance on her to mix our sympathy with judgment.

All this is conventional enough, and yet there is indeed something different about the way Isabel’s mind works here. Her language is intensely visual, and while the imagery in this passage runs to the domestic, in other places it refers to the garden or the seashore or the vista of a “
dark, narrow alley
.” Those images are, however, all metaphors; the four walls that surround her are not precisely those of the Palazzo Roccanera. Osmond may seem as if he had “deliberately, almost malignantly . . . put the lights out one by one,” and yet the shadow in which she now lives belongs to a moral and not a physical climate. Very little in this chapter points to a particular moment in Isabel’s married life, to the individual events of those missing three years: an account, say, of her first dinner with Osmond after the death of their child; or an argument over his belief that even the best of women all eventually take lovers. That’s not the kind of thing she remembers. Instead, she allows her mind to slip from one generalized moment of perception to another, collapsing those years into a sense of the “
everlasting weight
upon her heart.” But that sense, like the rest of the chapter’s richly imagistic language, remains untethered to an account of any one incident, and even as James fills the gap in his narrative, the actual events of
her life go undramatized
.

In this, his account of Isabel’s reverie differs markedly from his predecessors’ accounts of their own characters’ inner lives. One example must serve for many. Near the end of
Middlemarch
, Dorothea Brooke sobs herself to sleep on the floor, believing that her hopes of happiness are now forever gone. When she wakes, however, she forces herself to relive the shattering events of the previous day and to weigh the role of other people in the scene that has so broken her. She thinks consecutively, she asks herself questions and answers them, she comes to a final understanding and determines to act upon it. It takes about a page, and similar moments could be found in Austen or Trollope, Thackeray or Howells. Isabel’s night before the fire occupies a much greater space in the novel, a much longer time in the reader’s experience, and part of its originality lies in the simple fact of duration. Her meditation is long enough to provide its own justification. It doesn’t have to lead to any course of action, and it ends without her having reached a conclusion of any kind. Yet there is a greater originality in what the chapter
doesn’t
do, in its refusal to fill those missing years with what James called “
solidity of specification
.” For Isabel’s mind, ordinarily so hampered by Osmond’s mocking egotism, here seems to float free. She roams, she wanders, unconfined by reference to any particular moment, and it is no accident that her mind is most active when she sits most perfectly still, as though consciousness itself were briefly disembodied.

We can get a richer appreciation of James’s work here by looking at something his brother wrote just a few years later. William James spent the 1880s at work on his own first book: a massive project, intended as a college text, which he turned in ten years late and that finally appeared as the
Principles of Psychology
in 1890. Early versions of some of its chapters did, however, come out along the way, and in 1884 he published an essay called “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” in
Mind
, then as now one of the most important of all journals in the academic study of philosophy. There he coined a phrase that has, for better or worse, become central to our understanding of modern fiction. William James argued that what first strikes us about what he called the stream of consciousness is its absence of uniformity, “
the different
pace
of its different portions.” It pools and it flows, spreads wide and runs deep, but its activity never ceases and there is no part of our mental life that does not belong to it. In putting it that way he underlined his difference from earlier thinkers, who conceived of consciousness “
like one who should say
a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. [Yet] Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow.” That, in fact, is what George Eliot had done with Dorothea—she had drawn out a few buckets of interiority, and stood them in a row. But for William James consciousness wasn’t a set of propositions or conclusions. It was a process, unbounded, and his essay provides an exceptionally rigorous account of how, in the years to come, the novel would describe that inner life. It is a kind of crib sheet for modernism itself.