264 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900via the story of a charming but ingenuous American girl who is destroyed, first
socially and then literally, by her lack of understanding of her new European sur-
roundings. Part of the exemplary subtlety of the story comes from a symbolic
pattern it shares with The American and The Europeans: contrasting American
“brightness,” starkness, and simplicity with European shadows, secrets, and
complexities. Part of it comes from the adept use of a narrator, an observer whose
developing interest in Daisy, mingled sympathy and criticism, affection and
astonishment, and developing feelings and opinions enable the narrative to maintain
a delicate balance. Typically, the story offers not so much a judgment of Daisy and
all she comes to represent, as a series of essays toward a critical understanding of
both, a knowledge felt along the pulses. It nicely illustrates the remark of T. S. Eliot,
meant as a compliment although it hardly sounds like it, that James had a mind so
fine no idea could penetrate it.
That is even more finely illustrated by the major work of the first period, and
arguably James’s greatest novel, The Portrait of a Lady. It is, as James put it, the story
of “a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan
living in Albany, New York, is taken up by her Aunt, Lydia Touchett. She goes to
England to stay with her aunt and uncle and their tubercular son, Ralph. There, she
declines the proposals of both Caspar Goodwood, a rich American, and Lord
Warburton, an English aristocrat. Wealthy now, thanks to an inheritance from
Mr. Touchett arranged for her by Ralph, she then accepts the proposal of an American
expatriate, a widower and dilettante living in Florence, Gilbert Osmond. She is
introduced to Osmond by another expatriate, Madame Merle, and is impressed by
his taste and refinement. Soon after marriage, however, she discovers him to be
selfish, sterile, and oppressive. She also finds out that Osmond’s young daughter,
Pansy, is actually the daughter of Madame Merle and that this was the reason for the
woman’s introducing her to Osmond and promoting the marriage. Despite Osmond
forbidding her, Isabel leaves for England when she hears Ralph is dying, and is at his
side when he dies. Despite a last attempt from Caspar Goodwood to persuade Isabel
to go away with him, though, Isabel determines to return to Osmond. And the novel
closes with her accepting her destiny, or perhaps more accurately the consequences
of her choices, and preparing to go back to a home that is more like a prison. Stated
baldly, the story has strong elements of romance or fairytale, just like The Scarlet
Letter: the awakening of a sleeping beauty, the three suitors, a villain whose “egotism
lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers,” a heroine held captive in “the house
of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation,” the sick young
cousin who observes and admires her from afar before dying, the voyage of an
American Adam – or, rather, Eve – and their exile from Paradise. But what
distinguishes it, in the reading, is its adherence to the substantial realities of the
social life and the subtle realities of the life of the consciousness. Isabel Archer is as
much like the heroines of, say, Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda by George Eliot as
she is like Hester Prynne: the imaginative maneuvers of the book represent as much
an encounter between the American and the European as its story does. It is both of
and about a collision of cultures.GGray_c03.indd 264ray_c 03 .indd 264 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM