266 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Isabel’s perilous voyage between the possibilities represented by her first two suitors
and the alternatives they vigorously embody: America, with its devotion to individual
initiative, enterprise, and possibility, and Europe, with its adherence to mannerliness,
custom, and tradition, the rich fabric woven out of the past. Isabel’s voyage is a literal
one, to begin with, when she leaves New York for England: landscapes that here, as
throughout James’s fiction, have a symbolic as well as a literal application, with the
starkness and simplicity of the one contrasting with the opulence and grandeur of
the other. But it becomes an intensely symbolic one when Ralph Touchett tries, as
he puts it, to put some “wind in her sails” by arranging for her to receive a bequest
from his father.
Isabel, too, tries to put wind in the sails of someone else. She is drawn to Gilbert
Osmond precisely because she believes she can help him fulfill the requirements of
his imagination. With Goodwood or Warburton, she would, in a sense, be embark-
ing on a ship that has already set sail, committing her destiny to one that had
achieved full definition before she appeared; she would, perhaps, be resigning herself
to the authority or at least ambience of another. But with Osmond, she believes, it
would be she herself who would enable the voyage, create the destiny. “He was like a
sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward
yet not putting to sea,” Isabel observes of the man she eventually marries. “She would
launch his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be a good thing to
love him.” In fact, it is not “a good thing” at all. Osmond, as it turns out, had just as
firm a notion that he would be her providence, when he married Isabel. “Her mind
was to be his,” Isabel bitterly reflects after she has come to know her husband, “–
attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer park.” What all this adumbrates
is a theme interwoven with the contrast between Europe and America, and dear
to the heart of Hawthorne as much as James: the human use of human beings. The
complex interplay of character focused in the figures of voyaging reminds us that to
declare oneself may be to deny another. To enable is also to authorize, to will the fate
of someone else; there is only a thin membrane separating freedom from power and
power from what Hawthorne called the unpardonable sin.
James’s response to the problem he opens up, as he examines his characters’
attempts to negotiate their freedom, is a dual one, and is typical in the sense that it
involves what happens in The Portrait of a Lady and how it is written. What happens
is that Isabel decides to go back to Gilbert Osmond. To run away with Goodwood
would suggest that Madame Merle had been right after all, an admission from Isabel
that the “envelope” of her unfortunate circumstances was influential enough to
make her evade the consequences of her own actions with a man she never loved. To
return involves an acceptance of those consequences, and a fulfillment of a promise
made earlier to Pansy, Osmond’s daughter, that she would come back. It marks her
victory over circumstance and over the naive ideal of freedom she had brought with
her from America. That ideal had identified freedom with limitless power, the
boundless pursuit of her own needs. Pursuing it, she married a man who has
sought to extinguish her. Abandoning, or rather refining, it, she now sees freedom as
conditional on knowledge: being clearsighted enough to choose the right courseGGray_c03.indd 266ray_c 03 .indd 266 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM