Freedom that Costs Lost of Independence

“The Portrait of a Lady” concerns a young American woman, Isabel Archer, who comes to England after her father dies. Archer is ardent, vibrant, hungry for experience, and committed to her personal freedom. She forms a friendship with an older woman, Madame Merle, who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, the man Archer marries. Archer believes Osmond to be a man of impeccable taste with whom she can share an intense but liberated life. Instead, he turns out to be a cynical dilettante and very conventional. Eventually Archer learns that Osmond and Merle have been lovers and have plotted her marriage to get hold of her fortune.
Generally, the novel manifests Henry James’ principles and theories on novel written on his “The Art of Fiction” so that it can give a vivid picture on how one can achieve freedom through losing independence. Specifically, it demonstrates the life of Isabel Archer who, because being neglected in childhood years, longs and yearns for freedom and independence. However, the more she tries to reach it, the more she falls into a miserable and unhappy life. It explores the conflict between the individual and society by examining the life of Isabel Archer, a young American woman who must choose between her independent spirit or her freedom and the demands of social convention (the society). It also depicts the life of an innocent expatriate American among sophisticated Americans and so with their representations as innocent and decadence respectively.
To analyze and prove these statements, I used the thematic analysis (in a way of trying to bring forth the theme of the novel) and characterization (in a way of studying and analyzing the motivation and actions of the characters). Along with this analysis are some of the literary criticism approaches like feminism, psychoanalytic criticism, and basically, Henry James’ “The Art of Fiction” and psychological realism. By using the Feminism, I consider only some of its methodologies: (1) revalue women’s experiences; (2) examine power relations; (3) the role of women in the text; (4) the character and reputation of women in the story; and (5) the attitude of men toward women. By using the psychoanalytic criticism, I only pay attention to the unconscious motive of the character, as one of its methodologies. Then, Henry James as a great psychological realist believes that a text must be realistic, recognizable to the readers. In his “The Art of Fiction”, to have a realistic novel, an author must select, evaluate and use the “stuff of life” (the facts or pictures of reality). He also asserts that a work of art is organic (it has life of its own that grows according to its own principles and themes). Finally, this analysis includes his dominant and important ideas revealed through the downfall of Isabel Archer.
This novel explores the conflict between the individual and society by examining the life of Isabel Archer, a young American woman who must choose between her independent spirit or her freedom and the demands of social convention (the society). After confessing and longing to be an independent woman, autonomous and responsible only to herself, Isabel falls in love with and marries the evil Gilbert Osmond, who wants her only for her money and who treats her as an object (almost as part of his art collection). Isabel must then decide whether to honor her marriage vows and preserve social decency or to leave her miserable and unhappy marriage and escape to a happier, more independent life, possibly with her American suitor (Caspar Goodwood). In the end, after the death of her cousin Ralph, the staunchest backer and supporter of her independence, Isabel chooses to return to Osmond and maintain her marriage. She is motivated partly by a sense of social responsibility, partly by a sense of pride, and partly by the love of her stepdaughter, Pansy, the daughter of Osmond and his controlling lover Madame Merle.
As the title of the novel indicates, Isabel is the primary character of the book. Thus, the most important focus of the novel is on presenting, explaining, and developing her character (manifesting James’ work of art as organic). Henry James is one of America's great psychological realists, and he uses all his “creative powers” to make sure that Isabel's conflict is a natural product of the realistic mind, and not merely an abstract philosophical consideration. In short, Isabel's spirit of independence is largely a result of her childhood, when she was generally neglected by her father and was allowed to read any book in her grandmother's library. In this way, she managed her own haphazard education and allowed her mind to develop without discipline and order (a manifestation of James’ “stuff of life”). Her natural intelligence has always guaranteed that she is at least as smart and lively as anyone around her. In Albany, New York, she has the reputation of being a remarkable and impressive intellect. After she travels to England with her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, it becomes clear that Isabel has a woefully or unhappy formless and shapeless imagination, as well as a romantic aspect and element that suit her position as an optimistic, innocent American. Moreover, for Henry James, throughout the novel, America is a place of individualism and naïveté, while Europe is a place of sophistication, convention, and decadence. Isabel often considers her life as though it were a “novel”. She also has the tendency to think about herself obsessively and has a vast faith in her own moral strength (a manifestation of psychological realism). In fact, recognizing that she has never faced hardships, Isabel actually wishes that she might be made to suffer so that she could prove her ability to overcome sufferings without betraying her principles. When she moves to England, her cousin Ralph is so supportive and concern with her spirit of independence that he convinces his dying father to leave half his possession to Isabel. This is intended to prevent her from ever having to marry for money (because he is against Lord Warburton, a prominent wealthy man) but ironically, it attracts the treachery and deceitfulness of the novel's villains (Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond). They conspire to convince Isabel to marry Osmond in order to gain access to her wealth. Her marriage to Osmond effectively suppressed Isabel's independent spirit when her husband treats her as an object and tries to force her to share his opinions and abandon her own.
This is the thematic background of Portrait of a Lady, and James skillfully intertwines the novel's psychological and thematic elements. Isabel's downfall with Osmond, for instance, enables the book's most sharp and keen exploration of the conflict between her desire to conform to social convention and her fiercely independent mind. It is also perfectly explained by the elements of Isabel's character: (1) her haphazard upbringing has led her to long for stability and safety, even if they mean a loss of independence; and (2) her active imagination enables her to create an illusory picture of Osmond, which she believes in more than the real thing, at least until she is married to him. Once she marries Osmond, Isabel's pride in her moral strength makes it impossible for her to consider leaving him because she once longed for hardship, and now that she has found it, it would be hypocritical for her to surrender to it by violating social custom and abandoning her husband.
In the same way that Henry James unites his psychological and thematic subjects, he also intertwines the novel's settings with its themes. Set almost entirely among a group of American expatriates living in Europe in the 1860s and 1870s, the book relies on a kind of moral geography, in which (1) America represents innocence, individualism, and capability; (2) Europe represents decadence, sophistication, and social convention; and (3) England represents the best mix of the two. Isabel moves from America to England to continental Europe. At each stage, she comes to mirror her surroundings, gradually losing a bit of independence with each move. Eventually she lives in Rome, the historic heart of continental Europe, and it is here that she endures her greatest hardship with Gilbert Osmond. In this novel, Henry James explores the difficulty negotiating between individual liberty and the constraints of social conventions. He locates these opposing forces in America and Europe respectively. However, the equation isn’t as simple as that (America equals liberty while Europe equals social constraint). James divides Europe in his moral universe. England constitutes the middle ground between the ungrounded freedom of America and the extreme restraint of Italy. It is no mere chance that James chooses a woman as the protagonist of a novel with such a moral landscape since women are so much the “storehouse” of the social values of a culture, functioning both to enforce social norms and to reproduce them.
In the narratives, Henry James uses many of his most characteristic techniques in Portrait of a Lady. In addition to his polished, elegant prose and his dignified, slow pacing, he utilizes a favorite technique of skipping over some of the novel's main events in telling the story. Instead of narrating moments such as Isabel's wedding with Osmond, he skips over them, relating that they have happened only after the fact, in peripheral or sideline conversations. This literary technique is known as ellipses. In the novel, he most often uses his elliptical technique in scenes when Isabel chooses to value social custom over her independence: (1) her acceptance of Gilbert's proposal, (2) their wedding, and (3) her decision to return to Rome after shortly leaving for Ralph's funeral at the end of the novel. He uses this method to create the sense that, in these moments, Isabel is no longer accessible to the reader. In a sense, by choosing to be with Gilbert Osmond, Isabel is lost.
Going back to the characterization, Isabel Archer is one more of the many innocent Americans with whom writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves preoccupied. Her innocence is the primary element of her sense of her freedom. In other words, Henry James seems to be saying that Isabel only thinks she is free and capable of living her life freely. In America, she can nurture these fantasies. She has spent a childhood being neglected by her father, neglect that is embedded in terms of freedom. She has been free to read anything in the library and she has done so, but she has been unable to balance freedom and the discipline necessary to get through the formal education. Sent to school as a young girl, she decided quickly that it was not the place for her and she was allowed to stop going. In her adult life in America, she seems to have no place to go besides marriage to the ever-stiff Caspar Goodwood. She sits alone in the little-used library of her grandmother’s almost abandoned house. Both of her sisters have married quite conventionally despite their free childhood. There’s no reason to think Isabel wouldn’t have done the same if not for her aunt’s timely rescue. In the American scene then, Henry James demonstrates that unrestrained freedom will lead the protagonist nowhere: (1) she will be isolated and bored; (2) she will not progress in her studies because she will have no direction; and (3) she will be wasted on a marriage to a man so inarticulate who cannot express feelings in any terms other than proprietary ones. In England, Isabel is indulged by the kindly Mr. Touchett, his kindly son Ralph and their kindly neighbor Lord Warburton to express all the ideas she can gather and collect. In England, she sees two kinds of women. One kind is represented by the sisters of Lord Warburton who are so restrained and so tamed that they seem almost insubstantial. Despite her own beliefs that the free life is the best life for a woman, Isabel is attracted to these women and finds their life a lovely one. For their part, the Misses Molyneux finds Isabel perfectly charming and seems to find in her a kindred spirit. The second kind of woman represented in England for Isabel Archer is Mrs. Touchett, an American ex-patriot who lives in Florence, Italy, and visits her husband for a month out of each year in England and who has not been accepted by the English aristocracy as her husband and son has. While she lives according to the strictest observance to established social proprieties, she has made up so many of her own social proprieties that she doesn’t fit into English society. Aside from Henrietta Stackpole, Mrs. Touchett is the most independent female character in the novel and she is so depicted that the reader is not encouraged to see her as a possible model for Isabel Archer to imitate and to be followed. When Isabel gets the chance to make England her home, she rejects it, imagining her life as the wife of the eminent Lord Warburton to be life in a gilded cage. Even Mr. Touchett doesn’t think Isabel should marry Lord Warburton.
In Isabel Archer’s downfall (his marriage with Gilbert Osmond, resulting into miserable life), Henry James reveals several of the dominant ideas present throughout his fiction. First, it is quite clear that the English country house estate is the best of all possible worlds for the author. In leaving Gardencourt for a tour of Europe, Isabel was stepping out of the world which perfectly balanced rational conventionality and indulgence of liberty. She was moving into a world of such severe social constraint that good sense and good fellow feeling were regarded as provincial sentimentalities. Second, it seems impossible for Henry James to imagine a good marriage (1) that of the Touchetts is functional, but it makes Mr. Touchett unhappy and Mrs. Touchett an unconventional; (2) that of the Countess Gemini is dry with self-indulgence and trapped “meanness”; and (3) that of Madame Merle who is also dreadfully unhappy (while marriage seems to be the only respectable occupation for a woman, it is one which certainly ends her career as a semi-free agent). The best example of this notion is what happens to Henrietta Stackpole, the most courageous of the “Jamesian” version of feminism in the novel. While her prospects for happiness with Bob Bantling are brighter than any other character’s in the novel, her plans to marry strike Isabel Archer as a sad capitulation, a giving up on the part of her adventuresome friend. The third and most important element of James’ ideas which is revealed in Isabel’s downfall is that social constraint always wins out over the impulse to freedom, that freedom is only an idea which, as soon as put into practice, fails utterly. The best possible world for the balance between individual liberty and social constraint is the English country house life where liberal politicians like Lord Warburton retain their country estate while theorizing the need for its dissolution and where ex-Americans like Mr. Touchett can become connoisseurs of English country houses and English teas.
Therefore, throughout the novel, James’s principles and theories like “the stuff of life”, “work of art as organic” and his “psychological realism” have been obviously and noticeably present. He uses real, logical, believable and recognizable experiences to give vivid pictures of life and reality. In addition, he shows the characters, actions and emotions to the readers to create a greater illusion of reality rather than telling about them. These methods are used to convey the process of achieving freedom through losing one’s independence. Then, eventually and ultimately, results into a miserable and unhappy life.