The Portrait of a Lady

"I think this is the first time I’ve thought of The Portrait of a Lady as a story about marriage, but of course it is—it’s a story about the institution of marriage, and the diminished sphere of choice that was available to women at the time. Stories about marriage are clearly not just stories about love—sometimes not even stories about love. Marriage as a social institution, marriage as a form of power—these are at the heart of the story here. Even Isabel Archer’s seduction by Osmond is a narrative that is one of power rather than romance. I first read The Portrait of a Lady when I was in college, and most of my attention went to the first half of the book, when Isabel is defining herself as a young woman. I read it again a decade later, and I was primarily struck by the second half of the book, which is about the disillusionment of Isabel’s character—a disillusionment that also functions as an awakening. But that’s what’s extraordinary about Isabel Archer’s character—that she sees with the force of real clarity, and she carries on. The narrator in Rebecca repeatedly presents herself as ordinary—although I think the power of her narrative indicates that she is more than she admits. I think Isabel Archer is a little different, she is depicted as an exceptional woman ‘confronting her destiny’. I think James is referencing all the narratives of American exceptionalism, of American innocence and American savagery. So she is symbolic in that sense, but I also think she’s an extraordinary character on the page, one of the great female characters in the history of the novel."

"Henry James, asked why he gave his characters money, said ‘I gave them money because I want to give them as much freedom as possible.’ Now, if you remember, at the very beginning of the novel Isabel Archer doesn’t have any money, she is left the money by her uncle. And that gives her a kind of freedom she didn’t previously have. But the lesson here is that however much freedom you think you have, you haven’t really got it if your instincts are not free. I think so. Empowered by money she wants to exert her power. She wants to exert her power in what looks like a benign way, by marrying Osmond and giving him a kind of freedom he doesn’t have because he is poor. She married him for all the wrong reasons. It’s a very good example of when people act from a sense of forced principle. She’s got a picture of herself; the novel is called The Portrait of a Lady and I’ve always been very interested in that because I’m fascinated by people’s pictures of themselves. We all have pictures of ourselves and they usually do more harm than good. The picture Isabel has of herself is that she’s a lady of largesse and generosity, and to some extent that’s true, but it’s only any good being a person of largesse and generosity if you know where to put that largesse and generosity. She’s blinded by her own picture of herself as a grand patron and is unable to see who the characters around her actually are and how they’re using her. She’s dazzled by her own sense of herself as someone who can do good. Henry James is brilliant on power relationships—people say his books are about money and class but they’re not, they’re about power. He understood the ways in which we are all seduced by power. And here we have Isabel who believes she has a desire for freedom but whose stronger desire is, in fact, for power, the power to exert her own freedom over other people. And that is why she makes her terrible choice at the end of the book—which I find incredibly painful—when she goes back to her unhappy marriage. There’s a kind of recognition woven into the book’s final pages, a kind of penance, if you like, where again, like Pip, Isabel comes to terms with the limitations of her own picture of herself. In a sense that line came out of my very great admiration for Henry James. His interest was in consciousness and, in his view, the purpose of being alive was to develop in consciousness, to take in more and more in a bid to perceive the world as it is, more fully, more truthfully, more honestly, and to relate to it more truthfully and more honestly. And that is inevitably a painful business because it involves elements of self-recognition which are very hard to bear. But on his terms life would be insufferable without that development. As I recall that passage, James uses images of constriction, of going into caves and narrowings. So what looked to Isabel like an opening out of life has proved to be a kind of dead end."