Portrait of A Novel (9 page)

James had similar reservations about George Eliot’s last novel,
Daniel Deronda
, another book evenly split between two characters who hardly ever meet. One is the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money even while knowing of her husband’s mistress and their children, and the other is the title character, a young Englishman who late in the novel discovers his Jewish ancestry. Most readers have followed James in finding Gwendolen the more interesting of the two, but his account of George Eliot’s work depends upon something more than a preference for one narrative line over another. James had little interest in the multiplotted novel that stands as the mid-Victorian norm. The slow episodic meander of Dickens or Thackeray may have spelled enchantment to him as a child, but the adult’s taste rejected them, and over thirty years after reviewing
Middlemarch
he returned to the burden of his critique in the preface to his own
Tragic Muse
.

In that book James chose, for the first and only time in his career, to run the centrifugal risks of his Victorian predecessors by yoking together two originally separate narratives. He laid one scene in the theater, the other in English parliamentary politics, and worked throughout in the fear that the seam which joined them might not hold, that he might not be able to fuse these disparate lives into a unified composition. Painters had an easier time of it, he thought. The eye can move from point to point in an instant, and so they can give us two pictures in one; he marveled at the way Tintoretto could depict “
without loss
of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place.” But he could not envision so varied a coherence in prose, and in writing about
The Tragic Muse
he worries at the question until it resolves itself in one of his greatest phrases, his necessary if inaccurate description of Victorian fiction as a menagerie of “large loose baggy monsters.”

Middlemarch
sometimes puts Dorothea aside for many pages at a stretch, and on some of her reappearances the reader does have to work to reconnect her to the rest of the novel. Still, we now find George Eliot’s special glory in precisely the spot where James thought her weakest—in the very plurality of her narrative, with its attendant sense of all her characters’ missed chances. Nevertheless, his review of
Middlemarch
tells us more about the book than any other contemporary account, and if the best of James’s own novels are in contrast marked by what he called the
“deep-breathing economy”
of a single story, it’s because he had what he saw as her own limitations before him. He wrote in conclusion that the book
“sets a limit . . . to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.”
That judgment holds. Members of the following generation like Hardy or James himself drew heavily on George Eliot’s work, albeit in very different ways; but in neither case did they imitate her sense of narrative structure.

James’s several pieces on her raise other questions as well. In 1866 the very young critic lamented her decision to run the plot of
Adam Bede
on past its climactic pitch, to tie the book off with fifty pages of reconciliation. Anyone could see what would probably happen next—did the novel really have to spell it out? George Eliot made things too easy for us. The ideal reader he wished her pages had implied would be someone engaged enough to deduce it all for himself; an active, inference-drawing reader for whom no meaning need be underlined. This question will return to us when we consider the ending of
The Portrait of a Lady
, and James himself came back to the issue in a later review of Cross’s biography. The conclusion of
Adam Bede
exemplified the popular belief that a story should end with
“marriages and rescues in the nick of time.”
Yet such incidents as Hetty Sorrel’s reprieve on the scaffold did not belong to nature, “by which I do not mean that they belong to a very happy art.”

The American recognized that George Eliot’s reliance on such forms of resolution grew from something deeper than mere convention. She thought of herself as a teacher, and believed that what she called
“aesthetic teaching”
was the highest form of instruction. She also thought, however, that if it ceased “to be purely aesthetic—if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram—it becomes the most offensive.” Any lesson she might offer must develop out of the picture itself, rather than precede it. At the end of
Middlemarch
, Dorothea helps another woman at what she believes will be the cost of her own happiness. That moment of charity, however, is not the point of the narrative, but rather its product. It proceeds from the logic of the character’s development, and George Eliot’s words imply that she would have failed if it looked as though she had worked the other way around. But James thought that she did sometimes lapse, that she stylized her picture of life in order to make it fit her lesson. He saw her as an idealist who had
“commissioned herself to be real,”
and his account points to both the risks and the peculiar genius of her narrative voice, to the often intrusive commentary, usually in the first-person plural, that she offers upon her characters. It is a voice at once earnest and shrewd, not quite omniscient but certainly wiser than any of us in canvassing the choices those characters face. Even as he acknowledged the perils of her style, however, James admired the way that her best work pushed beyond didacticism, and he praised her ability to combine her love of an individual character’s
“special case”
with the force of her
“generalizing instinct.”

His own books would be different. He thought she gave English fiction a claim to both rigor and respect that it had earlier lacked, but he did not simply want to fill her chair, and hoped his stories would
“have less ‘brain’ than
Middlemarch
but . . . more
form
.”
In
The Portrait of a Lady
he found that form by taking George Eliot as a negative example. James gave his own heroine the centrality he felt she deserved, and the novel comes to us without any rival plots or competing points of interest; he never allows our curiosity about Lord Warburton’s parliamentary career or Henrietta Stackpole’s newspaper to distract us from the subject of the portrait herself. Isabel isn’t always onstage, and she isn’t the only character whose mind James allows us to enter. But she’s what the other characters talk about, even, or especially, when she’s off the page.

James’s preface to the novel acknowledges what he owed George Eliot, but though he summons her heroines by name he also misquotes a line from
Daniel Deronda
.
“In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection”
; she had actually written, not “frail,” but “delicate.” Memory does that, though the slip might also point to James’s sense of both his debt and his difference. His early critics, Howells among them, had stressed that debt, linking Isabel to
Deronda
’s Gwendolen Harleth, comparing the difficulties each heroine faces in maintaining her independence of mind and spirit. And both Isabel and Dorothea are liable to the strictures that George Eliot herself laid down in her 1856 essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Written before she had ever tried a story of her own, the essay attacks what she calls the
“mind and millinery”
school of fiction, books in which the heroine dazzles with both her wit and her eyes; a girl whose nose and morals alike remain perfectly straight and fine. James’s Isabel has fixed her mind on bravery and beauty and truth. She sees herself as good company, she believes herself a pattern of consistency, and she longs for the chance to display what she never doubts is her own capacity for the heroic. Yet her story is not a silly novel, even if she does at first seem very young. The heroines George Eliot disparages never receive their comeuppance, but James knows that his own protagonist, with her scant knowledge and inflated ideals, would be an easy victim for a
“scientific criticism, if she were not intended to awaken . . . an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.”

“Scientific” is an Eliotic word, one we can associate with the author who in
Middlemarch
took her metaphors from physiology and optics. “Expectant” is, however, all James, the word of a novelist who asks us to wonder, with Ralph Touchett, about just what Isabel will do.

6.

PROPOSALS

I
N THE OPENING
chapter of
Middlemarch
, George Eliot raises the question that shadows almost every heroine of nineteenth-century British fiction: “And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes.” Marriage is the expected fate of young women, or at least of young women in novels, the point toward which all narrative tends. Austen does it, Dickens palms a few cards to make it come right at the end of
Bleak House
, and we all know about
Jane Eyre
. Dorothea will prove no exception, even if her choice of a husband does betray that taste for extremes: a parched scholar, a clergyman more than twice her age. Yet those marriage plots are an English oddity, and don’t have anything like the same purchase in the Continental novels that James himself admired. Balzac’s women find their careers in adultery. For them as for Emma Bovary a wedding serves only to inaugurate a series of love affairs, and in Turgenev marriage remains ancillary to other longings, to a passion for justice or truth. James was impatient with the Anglo-American expectation that a book’s last chapters should provide a grab-bag of
“husbands, wives, babies, millions”
: impatient with both the reader’s demand for such treats and the writer’s willingness to feed it. That’s one reason he admired George Eliot. For Austen’s heroines a wedding may stand as an end to experience, but for Dorothea it is only the beginning. She marries for the first time in the book’s tenth chapter, and in both that novel and in
Daniel Deronda
, a part of Eliot’s greatness lies in charting the inner contours of unions gone wrong, of marriages that should never have been.

James had a different specialty. His early books are often about weddings that don’t happen, novels in which nobody ever quite gets to church. And he begins Isabel’s story by making her choose to have a story in the first place. She decides to go to Europe with her Aunt Lydia instead of allowing Caspar Goodwood to foreclose her fate. Still, it’s not immediately clear that this new plot will be any different than the one she’s escaped, and when in the summer of 1906 James paced out the tale of his own intentions, he found himself remembering his difficulty in giving her another kind of narrative.
“Millions of presumptuous girls”
might affront their destiny each day, and yet what were the possible fates that awaited them? He wanted a heroine who would be the novel’s
“all-in-all”
but that begged the question of what he could make her do.
“We women can’t go in search of adventures,”
George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth had said, can’t become explorers or go out to hunt tigers, and when James wrote the
Portrait
, he had
Daniel Deronda
very much on his mind. He knew that Isabel’s range of action was circumscribed by her sex, and knew as well that those actions might seem mild in comparison to the masculine world of
“flood and field . . . of battle and murder and sudden death.”
Even a trip to Europe looked tame—an event too familiar to be interesting. Yet James had found a solution, and in his preface the memory of it makes his prose grow tense with excitement. He could fix the problem by placing
“the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,”
by resting his gaze upon her ever-developing understanding of her relation to herself. Her adventures would lie not in the outward events of her life, but rather in her comprehension of them, in an inner drama that might, to her, seem as enthralling as any tale of pirates or caravans. To her—and to us insofar as James could make us care about her.

James here overstates his own originality. That attention to the unhistoric acts of ordinary life may not have featured heavily in the American romances of Melville or Cooper, but earlier English novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot herself had already put their narrative weight upon the heroine’s understanding of her own situation. James here bends American fiction in their direction, and his difference from them in the
Portrait
’s opening chapters is one of degree only. So we come back to a version of that question about Dorothea. Admit, with Ralph Touchett, that Isabel has intentions of her own: still, how should she not marry? She may have sent Goodwood away, but Gardencourt is the start of a new story, and when old Mr. Touchett tells Lord Warburton that he
“must not fall in love with my niece,”
it looks like a command to be broken. But as we hold this thick volume in our hands, we also know that his path, that anyone’s path, will not be smooth; we know that the drama will lie in
Isabel’s resistance to the plot
laid down before her.

Of course, Austen gives us many heroines who refuse a suitor or two, and yet none of them seem suspicious of marriage in itself. James’s heroine does, and he links her opinion of it to her admiration of the happily self-sufficient Henrietta. Isabel thinks the subject vulgar—vulgar to worry over, to be eager for, or even to think about. She believes
“a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.”
None of the men in this book can be fairly described as coarse-minded, though James was perfectly capable of creating such figures; Morris Townsend in
Washington Square
is perhaps the best example. The term belongs to Isabel, and points to her conventional understanding of the difference between the sexes. What’s less conventional is her apparent willingness to accept the consequences of it: if that’s what one thinks about men, then why not stay single indeed? Isabel also believes, however, that “if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely.” Yet she cannot hold that image of surrender steady. It always ends by frightening her, and her belief in that light paradoxically serves as a warning. It reminds her that experience has its costs. For she could give her self—could relinquish not just the body but the soul.

That, however, is the price her society expects her to pay. To Goodwood she at first makes Europe seem a mere postponement of decision, but the new possibilities of this larger world will carry new threats as well.
“It’s just like a novel,”
she says as she steps onto the lawn at Gardencourt, as though her life had been written already, and a new episode in that life opens when she drives over with Ralph and his mother for lunch at Lockleigh, the nearest of Lord Warburton’s half a dozen houses. She meets his brother, the Vicar, and his two unmarried sisters, and when they wander through the park after lunch, Warburton tells her that he hopes she’ll soon pay him a more extended visit. It will be a few chapters yet before he falls to his metaphoric knees, but Isabel has heard such words before and doesn’t like them. She turns the subject as quickly as she can and speaks instead of her desire to improve her mind; a mind that Warburton describes as being already “
a most formidable
instrument.”

The scene ends with Warburton murmuring that he will come see her at Gardencourt. Isabel’s answer is cold—“Just as you please”—and yet her coldness isn’t that of coquetry. It comes instead “from a certain fear.” James will make us wait for the sequel—or rather he made his first audience wait. The scene falls near the end of the book’s second serial installment, and for readers of the
Atlantic
the proposal lay a full month in the future. Before moving to it, however, we need to clarify the nature of Isabel’s fear. Today we usually see it in sexual terms, and for decades now there’s been a lively critical conversation about Isabel’s apparent timidity in the face of carnal experience. Some readers have even described her as frigid, and the fact that in 1906 James revised a description of her from “cold and stiff” to
“cold and dry”
would appear to give them a point. Yet that debate has always seemed to me reductive. Many young women of Isabel’s background and period feared an experience about which testimony was hard to find, and that was often presented as an obligation of marriage. And while most scholars do favor the novel’s later version,
an alternate line of criticism
has made a strong argument in favor of its first one, its account of Isabel’s hesitation to marry in particular. “Cold and dry” may reflect James’s changing understanding of his character’s situation, but emphasizing Isabel’s sexual reticence makes her desire for independence seem but an aspect of her fear. It turns her into something like a “case.” I see it the other way around, and take that fear as an incipient political position, an aspect of her prior desire for self-sufficiency. This can doubtless be overstated. Nevertheless, James’s account of Isabel’s self-conception does in the book’s early chapters link her to the “woman question” of Gilded Age America, to a time when professional opportunity and higher education for women had begun, however tentatively, to expand.

I say in the “early chapters” advisedly, for even in the 1881 edition James will move away from such social questions and into a concentration on the drama of Isabel’s consciousness. And yet this reading is too broad to stand even there. It may justify her reluctance to marry Caspar Goodwood, whose energy does appear to drain her freedom; but then he if anyone is the source of Isabel’s fear. For Lord Warburton we will need a further layer of explanation.

W
hen Henrietta arrives at Gardencourt, she brings along a bit of news: Goodwood too has come to England, and apparently for the sole purpose of renewing his suit. The reporter makes our heroine recognize that she had indeed encouraged him, but she also sees that Isabel herself has changed. James’s heroine no longer believes in the necessary truth of her own earlier opinions and yet is more confident than ever in her engagement with the larger world around her. She may not yet know just where she fits in, but she has now begun to see beyond both Albany and America itself. So Henrietta’s news gives her a sense of alarm, and sets her to wandering through the park in a funk. Eventually she drops onto a bench, and as she sits there fuming, a servant arrives to hand her a letter. She recognizes the writing as Goodwood’s, and James gives us his letter entire. It’s our first direct impression of him, and we quickly see that the mill owner’s words have force but no logic. They insist, they protest, they assert, and his assertions are all couched in negatives. He does not accept his dismissal, he does not believe he is disagreeable to her, and he now hates America because she isn’t in it.
“May I not,”
he writes in conclusion, “come and see you for half-an-hour?” Isabel has just folded his letter when she looks up to find Lord Warburton standing before her.

Proposal scenes in fiction are in themselves a genre, and therefore have rules. The successful ones are usually brief, and almost never give the actual words of concord. Maybe there’s a lightning flash, as at the end of
Middlemarch
; maybe we’re told, as in Austen, that the characters said just what they should. But Isabel will decline this offer and the scene can therefore take up the entirety of the book’s twelfth chapter, ten pages of nervous comedy set on the most splendid of summer afternoons. Lord Warburton doesn’t storm like Austen’s Mr. Darcy. His manners are at their bashfully perfect best, and he even apologizes for coming down on her with
“such a thumper.”
He recognizes that they have spent barely a full day together, and hopes she won’t object to Lockleigh;
“some people don’t like a moat, you know.”
But Isabel delights in everything old, and his house—his several houses—are not an issue. Or are they? Lord Warburton has the sweetest voice she has ever heard. She understands that however abrupt his offer there is nothing frivolous about him, and yet doesn’t hesitate in asking him to leave her. She promises to write, but she already knows the burden of her letter, knows in the face of every novel she has ever read that the idea of marrying a viscount doesn’t correspond to her own image of happiness.

At Lockleigh, Isabel had been afraid of his proposal even before she knew that Caspar Goodwood was in England. The letter she has just received doesn’t affect her decision, but it does affect the story she tells about that decision, the explanation she gives herself about just why she cannot marry Lord Warburton. She wonders that
“it cost her so little to refuse a great opportunity,”
and it’s true her passions do not seem engaged. The light has not shone, yet though she tells her aunt that she doesn’t love the man, she admits to her more congenial uncle that she likes him well enough. So let’s bracket emotion, and take seriously something that Warburton himself says:
“I’m afraid it’s my being an Englishman.”
Or at least a particular kind of Englishman. Isabel may delight in a moat, but she doesn’t want to marry one. She feels no threat from him personally, as she does from Goodwood, but she also has an idea that as “Lord Warburton” he isn’t so much a person as a
“personage.”
She has never known a personage, and until now has thought of individual eminence in terms of character, of
“what one liked in a gentleman’s mind and in his talk.”
Isabel likes Warburton’s mind—and yet he also looms as a set of possessions and powers that can’t be measured in such familiar terms. She can’t forget that he has a seat in Parliament as Mr. Touchett has one at his own table, she feels his hereditary force and his 50,000 acres, and she resists the idea of being pulled into his orbit. The very splendor of his offer seems a confinement, and in refusing him she stakes a claim to her own autonomous existence. Or as she says to her uncle,
“Imagine one’s belonging to an English class”
; the whole point of being an American is that one doesn’t.

Three years after finishing
The Portrait of a Lady
, James wrote a piece called “The Art of Fiction” that both synthesizes and corrects a series of Victorian assumptions about the nature and purpose of the novel. The essay makes no single argument but stands rather as a manifesto, a claim that fiction has the same importance as poetry or painting; a claim that now seems commonplace but that in James’s own day struck some readers as presumptuous. Fiction was popular but no more than an amusement; not serious, not improving, and too worldly. So its sterner critics felt, and in many ways James agreed with them. For the novel—the English novel in particular—had too often failed to take itself seriously, and in defining just how it might James produced an essay that has the same high place in the history of criticism as Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” or Wordsworth’s preface to
Lyrical Ballads
. In his prefaces to the New York Edition, James would write with greater rigor about some central issues in his own
oeuvre
. But he never matched the breadth and wit of these early observations about the form as a whole.