On one level, the novel appears to revolve around Isabel Archer’s slow but inevitable reckoning with Gilbert Osmond’s duplicity, a process during which the complexities of Isabel’s inner workings are revealed. Isabel is cast in the mold of Daisy Miller, a Jamesian creation from an earlier effort which achieved enormous popularity abroad. As with Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady capitalizes on its protagonist’s putatively “American” traits: both women are impetuous, headstrong, independent but, more to the point, wealthy, beautiful, and eminently marriageable. The plots turn on the intrigues of courtship and, in the context of minutely detailed social settings where events unfold as artifacts of a particular character’s perceptions rather than as factual sequences, propositions and matrimony predictably ensue. The “twist” to these plots is that both sets of outcome turn to the detriment of the ladies.

Jonathan Warren observes that through readings implicitly supporting James’ “international theme” as well as references to Isabel’s “great promise” and “her potential,” traditional criticism appears to mistakenly assume that James has deliberately created a character through whom certain perspectives may be acquired or lessons drawn with regard to an identifiable set of circumstances. As such, these critics appear to invest the creation, Isabel Archer, with the power to convey, one is to infer—exclusively—through the workings of her thoughts and circumstances, the insights of the author [2]. Or, to quote the narrator’s remark on Isabel’s casual approach to study: “To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text […]”(110), and Warren correctly suggests that such a reading demands imposing an externality incongruent with James’ text.

Elizabeth Sabiston, however, seems closer to the mark in describing Isabel Archer as an “artiste manquée”:

(30)

It will be proposed that not only does James “use his heroine’s plight to convey […] his own aesthetic creed,” but that James attempts to distinguish “attitude” and “art” as enantiomorphic elements of the visual modality of consciousness. An anonymous reviewer of The Portrait of a Lady’s first edition observed that James “fulfills all the technical conditions” essential for the production of “a perfect portrait in oil, save those that are mechanical or manual, and manifests clearly enough how successfully the pen may compete with the pencil in the sphere of pictorial art.” [4] James further grounds “technique” in a philosophical system, by first rendering explicit the key structural device of the work—that of an assemblage of sketches more or less connected in a visual array across his “canvas”—he summons devices from the visual arts to illustrate an opaqueness and independence the creation invariably assumes—akin perhaps to the failure of language (or any artistic medium) to penetrate the subject. He then explains and, in part, justifies, the impermeability of the artistic end product through the voices and actions of his characters, thus yielding the hypothesis that the ultimate object of artistic and linguistic expression, consciousness, is elusive precisely because it is, to a fair degree, illusory—overall a borrowing from the radical behaviorism of James’ brother William, the pragmatist philosopher whose statement on aesthetics, in this regard, is most telling: that quality in a work of art can be judged by its ability to tell “all sorts of things to different spectators, of none of which things the artist never knew a word.” [5]

The Portrait of a Lady begins with a still life in which the presumed reader’s habit of tea taking is set against a backdrop of English upper class tradition, rendered lightly and sympathetically. James appeals to the largely feminine readership “of means” (the Victorian husband would typically be engaged in urban/urbane business affairs at teatime) by an amusing reference to “the regular votaries of the ceremony”—at once claiming to share this privileged detachment and transporting an otherwise common occurrence to the realm of the sublime—before proceeding to people his canvas, ending with marginalia on the scene he has just “attempted to sketch” (18). This light self-deprecation serves the more serious purpose of setting a pattern of intimacies whose end is to remind the reader that this is less an ordinary novel than a subtle discourse on the creative process.

The opening leads to a number of re-“screenings” of descriptions of places, events or conversations. The reader encounters this inventory, as it were, within the narrator’s self-referential mode, to be repeated at various intervals throughout the entire novel. The narrator tends to characterize his presence as that of an investigative journalist, historian, or biographer trying to sift through a mountain of depositions, diaries, eyewitness reports, etc., in an effort at uncovering the facts of the case: “Meanwhile, her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying.” (53) The language James employs to this end suggests spatial arrangement associated with shuffling or gathering together physical objects—again, the impression being that of an extensive police dossier. For example, the reader is quoted a letter Isabel receives, with the introduction: “this document proved short and may be given entire” (93). The narrator later states (107): “[…] at the end of three days, she wrote to Lord Warburton, and the letter belongs to our history.”

At the end of Madame Merle’s introductory reflection on Osmond, including the much-quoted “[…] no past, no future, no anything,” the narrator editorializes by employing the image of a physical displacement of bits and pieces of discourse as objects “clustered” in space:

(172)

The narrator also embarks on extended recapitulations, punctuated by reminders of reader complicity in the recorder’s meticulous logging of detail. The impression, once again, is one of inventory, the gathering and sorting of bits of evidence, or of a simple accretion of events and traits as if they were isolated objects, incapable of transforming into greater, different substances, or of merging into a whole. The systematic cataloguing of elements in the evolution of the character and story line may be rendered through reference to direct sense impressions—principally the faculty of sight, the artist’s inner vision of the story he proposes as well as the textual material he creates, sets out before him, edits and arranges. There are also references to impressions of a second order, wherein a passage that the eyes have scanned is described in terms of corresponding images produced in the mind of the reader. Such references to the visual modality become fairly commonplace, and at times invite the reader to indulge in an almost conspiratorial intimacy:

(228)

Although one may interpret “follow” in its application to the process of comprehension, the reader seems placed in the physical vicinity of the conversation, within spaces where he may be invited (or not) to listen in on and follow the exchange. In this sense, the reader is sometimes lured into a sort of speculative voyeurism, watching furtively what in reality would be a “private” event: “That evening, however, an incident occurred which—had there been a critic to note it—would have taken all colour from the theory that the wish to be quite by herself had caused her to dispense with her cousin’s attendance.” (135) This helps characterize the “omniscience” of the narrator as a spyglass entrusted to the reader—a faculty of sight notably denied the heroine:

(432)

Having compiled, edited and collated an extended report on his characters, there begins to emerge a “picture” or at least preliminary sketches, which can now be assembled in terms of a collage of images which may or may not merge into a whole. James’ method thus comes to be expressed indirectly through composites of sketches from which particular states of his characters or stages in their development may be inferred. Sophia Andres has argued that the author’s use of space in the novel expresses a concern for the material objects “inhabiting” these spaces and, by extension, Isabel’s struggle with “materialism”: “[…] James discloses the detrimental effects of materialism and individualism even on intelligent, imaginative women—like Isabel—who resist the more obvious patterns of victimization.” [6] However, this analysis fails to account for Isabel’s and the other characters’ assuming mannequin-like objectifications—one thinks almost deliberately. James’ portrait tends to show her and other individuals posing motionless (usually self-consciously so) with reference to one another. Here, James will invest his actors with the ability to “speak for” the artist—in that they appear to exhibit an awareness of their role and that of others as dried splashes on a canvas: “Suddenly, just after he had called her [Miss Stackpole’s] attention to a charming Constable, she turned and looked at him as if he himself had been a picture.” (84) Later Isabel is described as “representation” or “advertisement”:

(330)

As Graham Greene once observed, the plot of the novel is “far from being an original […] a fortune-hunter, the fortune-hunter’s unscrupulous mistress, and a young American heiress caught in the meshes of a loveless marriage.” [7] More recently, Jonathan Freedman refers to Osmond as “faithfully” following the lines of a particular period stereotype (the standard Punch magazine caricature of the Depraved Aesthete) which focused “formulaically, even obsessively” on a number of characteristics. [8] Still, what distinguishes Gilbert Osmond—from, simply put, the stock “cad” or “bounder” in dime store novels—is his “profession” as painter, described by Madame Merle as a posture or imposture, a “sort of position” which could be interpreted as “personal statement” yet allows for the ambiguity of an unflattering taking up of space: “[…] he paints, if you please—paints in watercolors […] His painting’s pretty bad; on the whole I’m rather glad of that. Fortunately, he’s very indolent, so indolent that it amounts to a sort of position” (172). Osmond’s presence becomes as spatially determined as that of his own watercolors. And on page 310, the title of the novel dovetails neatly with the figure used to describe the posture (or imposture) the central character has achieved—again, frozen in pose: “[…] framed in the gilded doorway, she struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady”.

Literally, the novel is “about” what its title states: “the portrait” of this lady—specifically, “a” (possibly “any”) lady, or rather, about how the constituent components of the artistic imagination come together in the process of portrayal—a process about which, incidentally, James was relatively silent in his less self-conscious portrayal of Daisy Miller.

Isabel, Gilbert Osmond and others appear engrossed in the process of image-making—of making “one’s life a work of art”—either lost in fantastic images of self or absorbed in schemes to convey these images. As Osmond reminds Isabel: “[…] Don’t you remember my telling you that one ought to make one’s life a work of art? You looked rather shocked at first; but then I told you that it was exactly what you seemed to me to be trying to do with your own.’” (261) The novel thus rises by degrees to comment on characterization, on the paradoxical process involved in transforming the substantively ordinary into the more enduringly ornamental—“making one’s life a work of art.”

A telling comment, revelatory of the most, in a sense, a work of art or its constituent depictions of character and event may ever hope to accomplish, is “style”—marked as a “fact” which is “so high and unnoticed”—an elaboration of James’ artistic theory missing from the 1881 edition. Lyall Powers refers to the artist’s intellectual evolution in the intervening quarter century since the original version was published in terms of James having “devoted his efforts to the development of both the theory and the practice of the art of fiction” and he adds that James “attempted to refine and strengthen his depiction of Isabel Archer’s psychological makeup and to extend and sharpen his use of her point of view.” [9] Thus, it is a more artistically conscious and psychologically explicit Henry James who extensively revises this section of The Portrait of a Lady in order to render the following in the New York edition, published 27 years after the original:

(260)

It is style, the mature artist tells us, that distinguishes the likes of Isabel Archer, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, etc., from the countless lesser heroines available to public readership. Isabel Archer’s finest achievement, in this sense, is as expression of artistic style, and not in anything that might pass for her “realism”. Far from calling for a strict adherence to the dictates of “reality”, the narrator cautions that artistic control must often surrender not only to the characteristics of the medium, but the details of the rendering itself as well as meta-pictorial stylistic conventions. James marvels, on several occasions, at the opaqueness of his creations. The deliberate introduction of elements of the fatuous and unpredictable in the character of Isabel, for example, will invariably produce effects which, by virtue of the constraints the narrator articulates, will “coerce” him into “accepting” the consequences of having placed certain sketches in juxtaposition with certain others.

Style becomes a privileged perspective the narrator shares with “an anonymous drawing on a museum wall” and with the reader, as illustrated in the following attempt on the part of Edward Rosier, a social-climbing suitor of Isabel’s stepdaughter, to deceive himself about Pansy. James makes it known to the reader that Pansy lacks style “in a deplorable degree”—a defect which Rosier “would have been just the man to note.” However, it is “enough for Rosier” to deny her deficits by calling her qualities “by names of his own”:

(311)

This “rosier” view of Pansy as “a little princess” and as “delightfully old-fashioned” thus becomes another strikingly ironic Jamesian commentary on the standard storybook romance of his day.

The differences between Peirce’s pragmaticism and William James’ pragmatism are slight but by no means insignificant. According to each, the test of the truth of a proposition is its practical utility; the purpose of thought is to guide action; and the effect of an idea is more important than its origin. Each maintained that the meanings of ideas are found only in terms of their possible consequence—which is to say, if consequences are lacking, ideas are meaningless. James took the argument further by contending that this is the method used by scientists to define their terms and to test their hypotheses, which, if meaningful, entail predictions.

According to James’ pragmatism, then, truth is that which works. One determines what works by testing propositions in experience, and in so doing, one finds that certain propositions are, perhaps for a time only, “applicable” or “appropriate” but not “true” in the more traditional sense invoking universality and duration. An extreme application of these precepts yields a pluralistic, particularized universe in which the whole is never greater than the sum of its static, composite elements. On the level of individual experience, by extension, there cannot occur growth or transformation, just accretion.

Peirce’s less radical approach yields the possibility of a perpetually “revising self”—consistent with Peirce’s belief in an objective (and possibly eventually “knowable”) reality—in which one may posit some potential, idealized realization of consciousness which in principle may be achieved but never is in fact:

These distinctions figure in the following analysis, by Dana J. Ringuette in her article “The Self-Forming Subject: Henry James’s Pragmatistic Revision.” [14] On the evidence of the revisions this work underwent in the American edition in addition to James’ own remarks regarding these changes—James believed, it should be noted, he had not only revised the novel “but had literally rewritten it” [15]—Ringuette proposes that Henry James attempts to give expression to a theory of consciousness as itself a process of constant reconstitution, or revision.

The claim made is that this approach comes closer to the Peircean notion of an amorphous, evolving seat of consciousness—evolving towards some “true” or “ideal” version of the self, hence an individual in the continual process of becoming. By contrast, William James’ opposition to absolute metaphysical systems took the form of an argument against monism, a doctrine that maintains that reality is a unified, monolithic whole. From this followed his theory of consciousness which proposed that consciousness, or the self, is an aggregate of the particular sense impressions which make up the individual’s experience—consciousness tends more to be a static, relational transition or nexus of moments of experience which engineers the products of experience into a continual pragmatic refinement of the workings of the outer shell. As such, consciousness is not a single entity but a continuous interplay, described as a “function,” of the various discrete units constituting this collectivity of experiential data. In his Essays on Radical Empiricism, to which Peirce refers in a 1905 article in The Monist, [16] William sets out his epistemological coordinates as a distillate of ideas first elaborated in his 1892 Psychology: Briefer Course and rendered more explicitly in Pragmatism, published the same year as The Portrait of a Lady’s New York edition:

Consciousness as function rather than entity informs the impression cast by Isabel on Ralph Touchett, some time after “framed in a gilded doorway,” she has struck Rosier as “the picture” of a gracious lady. Ralph observes Isabel as having become a mere “representation” of Osmond—void of self and, one would assume, consciousness—reduced to a simple function:

(331)

Interestingly this observation mirrors Isabel’s own, three chapters later, that Gilbert Osmond’s aspirations for her were to render him mechanical service as extension of his ego: “Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.” (362) Isabel’s perception of his designs is marked by a disingenuous sense of almost self-congratulatory victimization: “[I]t was because she was clever that she had pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank he had flattered himself that it would be richly receptive” (362). Henry articulates William James’ sense of inchoateness and isolation as extended to subjective states through Madame Merle’s discourse on the self:

(175)

Henry James’ explicit rendering of the craft of character and plot drawing thus seems to be poised between the literal exposition of the dynamics of novelistic composition and the mythic presentation of a radical theory of experience and knowledge. A representation on canvas strikes the eye the way sense impressions strike the brain. And radical empiricism, in keeping with the dicta of John Locke, holds that the mind is as blank paper and knowledge is acquired only through experience.

This is borne out by Isabel’s ready acceptance of Osmond as a man described by Merle as having “[…] no career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything.” (172) She appears willing to cast herself into the void of sheer experience, little caring for history or consequence. The notion of “tabula rasa” is raised in several references to Pansy as well:

(221)

(238)

Even the artist himself is held back from penetrating the opaqueness of brute sensation. And this heightened character instability and tenuousness in the face of abrupt sensory experience—the better to develop James’ sophisticated theory of consciousness—is illustrated in passages where James feigns ignorance of character motivation, justified in one instance through the conceit of giving information to the reader “as I see it,” thus implying once again editorial constraints imposed, this time, by the logic demanded by a particular arrangement of sketches set out before him:

(489)

It is we, we come to know, who invest these otherwise impenetrable characters with animation and temporality. We do so by occasionally ignoring the grand designer’s pedagogical conceits—his “lessons” in painting and writing as it were—and plunge into, to the point of identifying with, the perspective of the heroine. Otherwise, Isabel remains exactly what she is: a flat representation, a simple set of spatial coordinates, distributed across a canvas in various postures, which receives and catalogues impressions of other similarly displaced objects, herself incapable of consciousness and transformation, an impregnable particle juxtaposed with others similarly constituted. She exalts in her particularity, her “atom”-like insignificance, in her “nothingness”:

(252)

(441)

(444)

The repeated references to nothingness have been associated with James’ attempt to bring the character into the here and now—Isabel radiant and full of joy as spontaneous and immediate present being: “Ten minutes before, she had felt all the joy of irreflective action—a joy to which she had so long been a stranger.” (446) However, an impulse or a sense impression which is not laid bare or “reflected” by the light of awareness and thought remains particular, discrete and unconnected to the whole. Upon the chance discovery of an intimacy between Madame Merle and Osmond, for example, Isabel’s momentary sense impression leaves a trace which is not wholly “seen” or fully apprehended by her intellect:

(342-43)

The tension between visual impressions and what is “seen” occurs both on the level of immediate sense impression and on the derivative level of comprehension throughout the novel: “[…] Don’t you see what I mean?’ […] Isabel was not sure she saw, and she answered that she was very bad at following arguments.” (220) She is a static object distributed across James’ canvas in varying postures so as to give the other characters form, but she cannot invest them with understanding.

The expression of the resistance of sensation to full comprehension tends to engage James’ use of darkness and light. In this respect, the role of darkness in the following “grand exit” deserves some commentary:

(489-90)

What, in darkness so underscored by the parenthetical aside, can she be looking at if not “all about her” in terms of the character’s self-appraisal. There appears to be a tension between Isabel’s perceptions and knowledge: Isabel “sees” nothing at the end, but although “she had not known where to turn,” she “knew now.” Again, she does not “see” the “very straight path,” it is simply “there”—in the darkness—it seems in fact to be the darkness.

This darkness, it may be argued, is the chiaroscuro of bare outlines from which all grand colorful canvases issue, as do of course, grand works of writing. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it—this straight line could easily represent the preliminary marks of a pencil or charcoal on drawing board. She is, after all, returning to a Roman villa called Roccanera—“black rock” in English. If one may, as many have, develop out of this the theme of a tragic return to the scene of infertility, the lifelessness of her relationship with Osmond, [18] why not also the related scheme of a return to the “fertile void,” the black rock thus representing “primary matter”—the designer-writer’s crude lead from which gold, in this case, the “so high and so unnoticed fact” of style, is alchemically transformed by the skilled hand of the artist?

In her aspect as portrait, Isabel exalts enjoyment for its own sake, is complete and self-contained, and is terminal, not merely instrumental to other purposes—traits her creator denies her as a putatively real human being.

In Ringuette’s analysis, the following passage illustrates Henry James’ affinity for Peirce’s notion of the progressive expansion and “reformation” of awareness, and by extension “self,” through revision and addition of experience. Isabel’s disappointment over Osmond amounts to an “addition to her beliefs” which is instrumental in reforming her self:

(466)

Evidence for Isabel’s heightened awareness is provided by her admission of “a certain grossness”:

The admission to a “certain grossness,” adds Ringuette: “is certainly something that Isabel would not previously have done […] and the admission underscores the struggle of inquiry to attain belief.” But this observation is not entirely true. Two hundred pages earlier, as she prepares to meet Osmond for the first time, we find Isabel fretting over the following:

(226)

It is this awareness of her own “grossness of perception” which helps resolve the ambiguous juxtaposition between “the joy of irreflective action” and “cold, dark mist” in the following:

(446-47; my emphasis)

The understanding usually given to “irreflective action” is action unmediated by thought, study, understanding, etc. “Irreflective action” is thus interpreted to mean the object term “action” as not reflected on by the agency of thought. However, in James’ phrasing, the word “action” doubles as agent as well as object of the act of reflection. This interpretation brings to bear James’ aesthetic of portraiture—arising from the physical process of “reflection” itself, that is, as a visual impression emanating from surfaces of colors and wavering forms caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the light source moves. But reflection requires light and an object and cannot occur in the nothingness Isabel frequently induces for herself: “Isabel gave herself no time, no thought, to appreciate the careful cynicism of this declaration. She simply went on quickly, full of her own intentions […].”(444)

Thus the “joy of irreflective action” refers to the opaque and rough fundamental of sensation. It is the immediacy of experience which casts no light and reflects none. The transformation of action into “slow renunciation” illustrates the shift from agent to object action—to action which is not reflected upon—and it is this recognition that becomes the engulfing “cold, dark mist,” the honest awareness that what she reflects upon is generally brute, dark sensation—the grossness of her perceptions.

It would appear that Isabel’s self-awareness has always been equally, one may add, admirably, frank and acute. The tendency for her to detect without actually seeing, experiencing sense impressions without bothering to filter them through thought and understanding, is a frailty of which she has been for a long time aware. Her perspicacity, however, appears to have been systematically blunted by her spontaneity, the “joy of irreflective action,” and thus ultimately presents problems in terms of assigning any sort of growth or reformation of self. In other words, awareness of that “certain grossness” has produced little change in her behavior. She has always felt she was “too valuable, too capable” for suffering. Even on the occasion of the death of her child. Ringuette also fails to quote the passage in its entirety: “She should never escape; she should last to the end,” is followed in the original text by “Then the middle years wrapped her about again and the grey curtain of her indifference closed her in.” (466) As conclusion to the cited paragraph, this statement on its face offers, if anything, an ironic affirmation of Isabel’s “grossness”—possibly originating, we are now informed, in her basic “indifference” to the world—likened to a “grey curtain” this time rather than a “cold, dark mist.”

Lord Warburton’s critical assessment of Isabel early in the story bears mention in this regard. “You don’t care,” he tells Isabel, “you only care to amuse yourself.”(77) Hers is an indifference which can be taken for some form of resilience or courage in the face of adversity. But most of the time she responds to the vagaries of whim and circumstance with an eye towards self-gratification and thus undermining the very possibility of remorse since, in any case, she will have amused herself.

In what is often regarded as the novel’s pivotal chapter 42, Isabel comes to an awareness of Osmond’s true feelings towards her. Her thoughts flow in the form of an extended inventory, again a recapitulation, of prior events. This process involves a sort of re-ordering or re-positioning of artifacts in her experience and the new combinations result in a different retrospective appraisal of her thoughts. But the anticipated accompanying growth or transformation of self fails to occur. She remains unflinchingly optimistic and “forgiving”—not as a means of achieving a moral distance which embraces a newly synthesized perspective—but as a means of denying the possibility of change such a perspective would normally bring. Once again, it is the convenience of indifference which is her hallmark. She flees caring, in the form of a full appreciation of hurt and betrayal, and distracts herself in mindless, self-deceiving activity. It takes the form of a pretense to Ralph. Her egoism will not admit of defeat, and for this reason she feigns gaiety—unsuccessfully, one must add—in the form of an elaborate ruse she convinces herself is a “kindness”—a kindness should its recipient have been as callous as Isabel or, put bluntly, “for a single instant a dupe”:

(364)

As with Rosier’s self-deception with reference to Pansy, Isabel denies the evidence of her senses in order to avert pain and embarrassment. And as with Rosier, the outcome suggests that such self-imposed, self-interested “grossness of perception” effects to demonstrate in itself a “deplorable lack of style.” To conclude on this point, James develops less a consciousness than a theory of consciousness in The Portrait of a Lady—engaging the reader more in the particularities and mechanistic superficialities of his characters’ fictional and hypothetical being than in their potential as whole, evolving figures. Finally, as with two dimensional canvas representations in oil, every real event as well as each individual tends to be static, contiguous but not continuous with the environment and hence impermeable. It thus becomes a story of human posturing in which the line between life and art is erased.