Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 265One reason for the subtle but substantial reality of Isabel herself is that James
focuses on her. “Place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own
consciousness,” James tells us, in the preface, he told himself when he was writing
the book. “Stick to that – for the center.” As for the other characters, he explains, his
aim was to “press least hard” on “the consciousness” of his “heroine’s satellites,
especially the male,” so as to “make it an interest contributive only to the greater
one.” James wanted to reveal the full implications of the developing consciousness of
his protagonist. So the reader experiences a lot through her, and shares the lively
animations of her mind on the move but, in addition, sees her from the outside,
through the comments and often critical commentary of the narrator – and through
the observations of characters like Ralph Touchett. We understand her sense of
herself, her moods and changes, but we also take the measure of “the whole envelope
of circumstances” in which she is implicated. Characteristically of James, the strategy
is part of the debate. That phrase “the whole envelope of circumstances” is used by
Madame Merle, who has adapted to a European vision sufficiently to believe that self
and circumstance, the human being and his shell, are indivisible. “One’s self – for
other people – is one’s expression of one’s self,” she insists. Isabel disagrees. Sub-
scribing to the American romance of the self, she believes in freedom as an abso lute
and the individual as somehow separable from conditions and circumstances.
“Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me,” she insists; “everything’s on the
contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one.” James wryly complicates
the debate by intimating that his heroine’s profound belief in herself, her “fixed
determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion,” may
itself spring from circumstance. She has grown up in a world, the new world of
America, where there have been few forms or authorities, no rigorous or rigidly
enforced social practices, to challenge that belief. But that complication is further
complicated by the clear admiration that Isabel’s “flame-like spirit” inspires in the
narrator, observers such as Ralph Touchett, and the reader. There is candor and
honesty here, a fundamental integrity and capacity for wonder as well as innocence,
an openness that leaves her vulnerable – and, by some measures at least, humanly
incomplete.
With the characters surrounding Isabel, some are quietly developed, the reader
comes to know them gradually – sometimes for good, as with Ralph Touchett, and
sometimes, as with Osmond and Madame Merle, for ill. Others, like Lydia Touchett,
are flatter and deftly summarized when they are introduced. All, however, contribute
to our understanding of the heroine and the representative character of her transat-
lantic encounter. A minor character such as Henrietta Stackpole, for instance, another
young American woman abroad, helps the reader place Isabel further; so do the
sisters of Lord Warburton, “the Misses Molyneaux.” Henrietta is self-confidence and
independence to the point of bluster: “Henrietta ... does smell of the future,” Ralph
observes, “– it almost knocks one down!” The Misses Molyneaux are compliant and
decorous to the point of vanishing into their surroundings. The character of Isabel is
mapped out using such minor characters as coordinates, in a manner James had
learned from another novelist he admired, Jane Austen. And it is mapped out, too, inGGray_c03.indd 265ray_c 03 .indd 265 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM