The Portrait of a Lady 615jamES, HEnry The Portrait of a Lady
(1882)
The Portrait of a Lady is the story of Isabel Archer,
a girl from Albany who visits her uncle’s family in
Europe and eventually marries a wealthy compatriot.
After her arrival in 1871, Isabel soon receives two
marriage proposals: one from Lord Warburton, a
neighboring estate-owner, the other from Caspar
Goodwood, a businessman she has met in America.
Isabel turns down both suitors because she does
not want to commit herself yet. Some time later,
in Italy, her friend Madame Merle introduces her
to Gilbert Osmond, who is generally regarded as a
cold-blooded loafer, and to everyone’s surprise she
accepts his marriage proposal. The last part of the
novel opens in 1876, three years after their marriage.
In the meantime, Isabel has found out that Osmond
was interested only in her money; he is treating
her coldly and tyrannically. The turning point of
the novel occurs when Isabel learns that Osmond’s
daughter, Pansy, is actually Madame Merle’s child,
and that the former lovers plotted her marriage to
provide financially for Pansy’s future. Against her
husband’s will, Isabel goes to England, where the
novel ends on an equivocal note: Isabel turns down
Goodwood once more and seems to have decided
on returning to her husband, but her exact plans
remain unclear. Written in an elegant, realistic style,
The Portrait is an initiation story with the “interna-
tional theme” typical for James: a likable but naïve
American is confronted with the complicated world
of upper-class Europe.
Timo Müller
ambition in The Portrait of a Lady
Ambition is mostly considered a bad quality in the
James universe. It is often associated with narrow-
mindedness, egotism, and intrigue. In many of
James’s works, but especially in The Portrait of a Lady
and in his later novels The Wings of the Dove (1903)
and The Golden Bowl (1904), the plot is driven
forward by the ambitious scheming of one of the
main characters. This character always has villainous
traits, and none more so than Gilbert Osmond, who
is one of the greatest villains in 19th-century fiction.
His ambition is powerful and all-encompassing. Of
rather obscure origins himself, he wants to rise in
the social hierarchy of expatriate Italy by connecting
himself with wealthy and/or respected people. He
has forced his sister into an unhappy marriage with
a useless and disloyal Italian count just to associate
his family with the aristocracy. He marries Isabel for
her money alone, and in the last part of the novel
is bent on pandering his daughter to Warburton
(who is both wealthy and an aristocrat) even though
Warburton is still interested in Isabel, not in Pansy.
The scheme is revealing in several respects: Osmond
not only encourages a former suitor’s interest in his
wife, but also is willing to have this suitor around on
a permanent basis and to pander his own daughter
to a man who clearly doesn’t love her.
Osmond treats people like he treats his artifacts
and pictures, as objects to be acquired and show-
cased in pursuit of his societal ambition. He expects
his entire family to behave perfectly at all times in
order to maintain an aristocratic appearance. His
ruthless demands transform both Pansy and Isabel
into subdued, anxious, and altogether unhappy ser-
vants to Osmond’s ambition. Osmond does not shy
away from using the people closest to him in his
intrigues. He knows that Madame Merle is anxious
for her daughter’s future, so he has her befriend
wealthy girls like Isabel and introduce them to him.
Later on, he tries the same trick with Isabel herself
when he orders her to encourage Warburton’s inter-
est in Pansy. Unlike Madame Merle, Isabel refuses
to make other people pay for her mistakes. Instead
of propagating the determinism typical of natural-
ist fiction, James here indicates that the individual
can overcome his or her limitations and weaknesses.
The same principle is at work at the very end of
the novel, when Isabel refuses Goodwood’s offer of
an easy way out and returns to Italy to help Pansy
struggle against Osmond’s crushing ambition.
This is not to say that Isabel’s own ambitions,
which she voices early in the novel, are regarded
altogether uncritically. When Isabel comes to Europe
to be “as happy as possible,” she comes across as
rather selfish and superficial herself. She refuses to
listen to her friends’ advice when she sees her pur-
suit of happiness endangered, and it is this obtuse
ambitiousness that helps Osmond entrap her in his
marriage scheme. The other two contestants for Isa-
bel’s hand are also ambitious in a questionable way.