(Note: This post will depart from previous forms of organization I’ve used and will be more free-form.)

In case the title of the post didn’t give it away, Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady is incredible. I have not had a more thrilling reading experience since I read The Magic Mountain. So I’m going to write about why I think it’s so great. But before I can do that, I have to spoil the book for everyone.

(Remind me to write a post at some point why I don’t believe in spoilers, least of all for novels that are nearly 140 years old)

I. Spoilers Ahead

The Portrait of a Lady is the story of Isabel Archer, a free-spirited American woman who effortlessly charms everyone she meets. At the beginning of Portrait, our heroine is plucked from obscurity by her deceased father’s sister, Mrs. Touchett, who informs her that she is a globe-trotting socialite whose family lives on a country estate in England. Isabel visits this estate, named Gardencourt, and charms and is charmed by her uncle, Mr. Touchett, and his son, the consumptive Ralph. Ralph is the quintessential “nice guy” archetype with a sense of true artistic refinement, so Isabel quickly consigns him to the friend zone. Meanwhile, she is pursued by Lord Warburton, a friend of the senior Touchett from a nearby estate, called Lockleigh. Warburton proposes to Isabel, and she rejects him. Her journalist friend Henrietta Stackpole, visiting her at Gardencourt to observe and absorb stories from the English gentry, conspires to have an old flame, American businessman Caspar Goodwood (seriously, his name is Goodwood), track her down during a weekend trip to London, where he also declares his undying love for her. Isabel summarily rejects him, declaring that she will never marry. Or, at least, that she will not marry until she has had a proper taste of independent life.

By the time we reach Chapter 42, Isabel has abandoned her dream of an independent life and has found herself married to Gilbert Osmond, an American who is an art collector outside of Florence. Osmond is a friend of the ultra-sophisticated Madame Merle, who takes Isabel on as her protege during a visit to Gardencourt near the beginning of the novel. It is Madame Merle, rather than Osmond, who seduces Isabel into her marriage.

Madame Merle seduces Isabel by appealing to her independence. Serena Merle is the picture of grace and sophistication backed by world-weary cynicism. She is able to travel around Europe on the charity of others primarily because she is such good company. The darkness we come to see in her later in the novel is that she is highly manipulative and has made such good “friends” because she has limited money of her own. In other words, she plays the social game so well so she can remain in high society, rather than be a subject of suspicion, derision, or disgrace, the latter of which would surely taint her if the truth about her past were divulged. But more on that later. (I highly encourage you to read this article to further grasp her character, as she is one of the great villains of literature.)

Madame Merle, unlike the rest of Isabel’s companions, shares her vision that the life of a woman should not be one of alienation to one’s spouse. The reasons Isabel rejects Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood are twofold: first, more obviously, she has youth to spend, and she insists on not wanting to be tied down; second, though not overtly addressed by James through the mouths of any of the characters at all, are the dismal lives of the women around her. Lord Warburton’s sisters are as lifeless as Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch, lives completely trivial and in monochrome, emptily going through the ritual of being English aristocrats. Mrs. Touchett, the other older female character in the first quarter of the novel, is estranged from her husband (who is a very sympathetic character to the reader), bankrolled by his fortune to gallivant across the Continent primarily to keep her from sowing discord at home. Isabel’s friend, the even more independent and ‘modern’ Henrietta Stackpole, is left out of this analysis since she is too American and Isabel’s aspirations are decidedly European. Madame Merle, by the time she arrives on the scene, presents herself as a widow - an independent, glamorous, sophisticated one, at that. To Isabel, Serena Merle represents the best of what she could become, something James’s narrator alludes to by telling us that Isabel thinks that Madame Merle’s “experience, however, had not quenched her youth; it had simply made her sympathetic and supple. She was in a word a woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order. This commended itself to Isabel as an ideal combination.” And later, in Chapter 19, our narrator tells us that Isabel had difficulty being intimate with anyone, yet:

Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and interesting figure than Madame Merle; she had never met a person having less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship — the air of reproducing the more tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one’s own character. The gates of the girl’s confidence were opened wider than they had ever been; she said things to this amiable auditress that she had not yet said to anyone. Sometimes she took alarm at her candour; it was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel possessed, but there was after all the greater reason for their being carefully guarded.

The remainder of the first two pages of Chapter 19 are just as dazzling as the above excerpt and it is awfully tempting for me to quote them in full. But perhaps I should still leave a reason for people to read this book.

The bottom line: Isabel comes to trust Madame Merle, despite her cousin Ralph’s loathing of her. In the chapter that she is introduced, Ralph says, with complete derision, “She does everything beautifully. She’s complete.” He follows that up by saying, “The husband of Madame Merle would be likely to pass away,” indicating his canny perception of her cunning.

Unfortunately, Ralph plays right into Madame Merle’s hands, by convincing his ailing father to modify his will to give part of his inheritance to Isabel, so she will be rich and thus be free to control her own destiny — that is, avoid being tempted into marrying for money.

This inheritance, unfortunately, makes Isabel an attractive target to Gilbert Osmond, Madame Merle’s best friend from Florence. Osmond is a single man, an art collector living on the outskirts of the city. He has a daughter, Pansy, who he sends to be educated in a convent. Osmond, like Madame Merle, is an American expatriate, and has pretensions to ascending in status; he is an aesthete who wants to be appreciated as much as his favorite works. The one thing he does not have is money, which is preventing him from gaining entree to high(er) society. It is humiliating to him that his vapid sister is a Countess by marriage as he feels he is the true aristocrat of his family.

Everything, and everyone, is an object to Osmond. They only exist to suit his purposes, and he expects them to be static. He continues to send his daughter Pansy back to the convent even though it is clearly stunting her development. To me, of all the women in the novel, Pansy Osmond is the most disconcerting figure, endlessly demure and submissive, with little sense of self. She represents yet another example of the way that women’s lives are dominated by paternalism, and Isabel feels pity for her.

Why, then, does Isabel marry Osmond? We are led to believe that this is due to two reasons. The first is that Osmond turns on the charm after Madame Merle tells him that Isabel has a fortune. James’s narrator makes reference to how, when he wants to, Osmond is the most perfectly charming companion. Like Madame Merle, he always knows the perfect thing to say, and calculates his every move to leave a positive impression. The second reason is that Isabel saw Osmond as an “original”, defying the stereotypes of suitable matches that previously proposed to her. Ironically, by setting her free to not have to marry for money, Isabel chose to marry for what she thought was love and respect. Which brings us to Chapter 42.

II. Chapter 42

In Chapter 42, for the first time, we are granted an extended look into Isabel’s internal monologue. One of the curious things about The Portrait of a Lady is that we are not given this direct look inside of her mind during her courtship of Osmond. This is something that James obscured even more for his 1908 “New York Edition” of the novel, where some allusions to Osmond’s dark side were omitted. In fact, the novel entirely skips Isabel and Osmond’s wedding, and moves a few years into the future. We pick things back up with Isabel after she has comfortably assumed the role of Mrs. Osmond, and the narration stays removed from her inner life until we are dramatically plunged into her internal monologue in Chapter 42. This makes it all the more powerful, as we finally can see what Isabel thinks of her marriage, only after it has crashed upon the rocks. It is a despairing, desperate diagnosis.

Chapter 42 is filled with metaphors of Isabel being trapped in darkness: at one point, our narrator describes her as being in a labyrinth; in another, “it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one"; and in still another, in one of James’s more famous turns of phrase, she describes the home that she has made with Osmond as “the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.”

Early in the chapter, Isabel finally admits to herself the reason for her terrible marriage:

The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily deepened, and if now and again it had occasionally lifted there were certain corners of her prospect that were impenetrably black. These shadows were not an emanation from her own mind: she was very sure of that; she had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the truth. They were a part, they were a kind of creation and consequence, of her husband’s very presence. They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing — that is but of one thing, which was not a crime. She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her.

Isabel, later on, juxtaposes Osmond’s “greatness” — the greatness of his mind — to his utter contempt for her and everyone else, aside from the “three or four very exalted people whom he envied.” His egotism and arrogance have placed everyone else in the world beneath him, and he sits in his ivory tower and judges them. He was not born into the aristocracy, but makes Isabel behave as if he had, and wraps her in the mores of mummification, life reduced to stiff formalities of how one must be.

What makes this so terrifying to Isabel is that, without any obvious transgression on Osmond’s part, she has no way out of her marriage. But, more to the point, in shirking an arranged match, Isabel did not choose its opposite: a love marriage. Instead of having a partner who would actually love her, she ended up with a man who only cared for what she represented, the same as any arranged marriage. And, for Osmond, Isabel’s willingness to marry him is the ultimate ratification of his being: a charming, beautiful, fiercely independent, wealthy American woman broke her own vow to never marry — after declining two very promising suitors! — to marry him, Gilbert Osmond. He only had to pay court to her for a short time, and she fell into his lap, aided by the whispers of Madame Merle.

The problem with Osmond’s calculation is that Isabel was a human being, not just a possession like a painting or an ivory box. She was not able to conform to the stillness required of a mere object — and she disappointed him through her reluctance to shed her self. Osmond had hoped for a pliant, subservient wife, a shell, just like his daughter Pansy, whose spirit had been prevented from blooming under his crushing control. His inability to break Isabel’s spirit after they got married is an insult to him. He resents that she will not fold under the duress of his contempt.

There is a beautiful section that describes how Isabel comes to the conclusion that she did not know Osmond fully before she married him, and he did not fully know her either:

There were times when she almost pitied him; for if she had not deceived him in intention she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now — she saw the whole man. She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the whole.

This is, of course, a hazard in any intimate relationship, and why the sensible among us stress that prospective partners live together before they commit to marriage: it is only through living together that there will be enough opportunities for the masks that each partner wears to slip, exposing the true person underneath. After this paragraph, Isabel goes on to describe how she was not wrong in her assessment of Osmond, that “he was better than anyone else.” But her unique plight is that Osmond’s superiority lies only in his capabilities — his exquisite taste, his quick wit, his always saying the “perfect” thing, his memory, in general, his brainpower — and not his actual behavior in the role of a husband. It is one thing to love someone for the person they are, solitary in the world. But it is a non-trivial task for them to mold themselves into the role of a husband, or a father.

What makes this frustrating for the reader is that Isabel should have known better, if she had noticed how Osmond treated Pansy. Perhaps she thought she would be granted higher status because she would be Osmond’s wife, not his child. But Osmond’s arrogance manifests itself in his patronizing, contemptuous attitude toward everyone. He is able to play the worldly man with infinite charm when nothing is at stake, but will revert to cold calculation whenever his interests are in play. In other words: the “half of his nature” that Isabel saw during their courtship was merely the product of the other half, the dark side obscured from view.

And, if we think back to the context behind Chapter 42, we can see that Osmond approaches Lord Warburton’s courtship of Pansy the same way he approached his own courtship of Isabel. He is only concerned with getting the best outcome for his daughter, a staunch traditionalist who rubs his hands in glee (figuratively; Osmond would never do anything as gauche as that) at the prospect of his daughter marrying an English lord. He is furious with Isabel for running interference on Pansy’s behalf by informing Warburton that Pansy is in love with Ned Rosier and is better left alone.

Just like with Warburton later, Osmond was drawn to Isabel’s fortune. And Isabel had a touching view of how her fortune could be put to use in her husband’s hands. On page 423 of my edition, Isabel describes Osmond as a

sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea. It was in all this she had found her occasion. She would launch his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be a good thing to love him… As she looked back at the passion of those full weeks, she perceived in it a kind of maternal strain — the happiness of a woman who felt she was a contributor, that she came with charged hands. But for her money, as she saw to-day, she would never have done it.

Isabel continues on, thinking about how her money was a burden (she uses that word) and that she had partially washed her hands of the unsavoriness of her fortune by marrying him, someone who could put the money to great use. What is interesting about Isabel’s past self’s thinking is that there was no distinction between a great utilitarian use of her fortune (such as, donating to a hospital or some other aid for those less fortunate) and Osmond’s aesthetic ends. To be straightforward, Osmond is “great” merely because he has great taste.

I’ve tried to put some of James’s more inspired language in this post so I can give the reader a taste of why Chapter 42 is so powerful. This woman, who we spend so much time with, is an enigma to us during the most critical period of her life, and the curtain is finally opened. It is said of Portrait that we, the reader, are supposed to fall in love with Isabel, and I don’t think it can happen until we see her comprehend the tragedy that her life has become. In her darkest hour, we see her at her best: she is deeply earnest in a way we have not been able to perceive up until this point. Before Chapter 42, we are told a lot about Isabel by her friends and acquaintances, but we cannot see for ourselves into her character until this point. If Chapter 42 is about revealing Osmond as the villain, it also shows Isabel as a hero.

III. Isabel’s Choices, Considered in Light of Middlemarch, the 21st Century, etc.

My main reason to write this post was to have an excuse to sit with Portrait for a while and understand why I loved it so much, despite it being a sometimes frustrating read. Late James is heavier on symbolism and is less direct in dialogue, which, as a first-time reader of his, I found an acquired taste. (While the novel’s first edition was written in the 1880s, the New York Edition was conceived in the first decade of the 20th Century, and James’s edits introduced much of his late style to the novel)

But allow me to riff on a few items, so I can more explicitly point at the relevance of The Portrait of a Lady to us moderns. If you’ve made it this far, I doubt that my analysis below will convince you to read the book. What should convince you are the excerpts I referenced above. James’s reputation as a stylist is well-earned.

There are certainly a lot of lessons to draw from the example of Osmond. He is a great example of what not to do as a husband. A large part of my interest in him is because his deficiencies could not be understood outside of a deep dive into Isabel’s psyche.

The first is, when you worship quality for the sake of quality — fine things for the sake of fine things — you may as well build a tomb and surround yourself with your prized possessions. This sounds like a banal anti-materialist statement, and it is. But what Osmond’s character highlights is what happens when there is no enjoyment or joy to be had in things. Osmond simply must have them because he believes that he is entitled to them. Beyond that, though, he sucks the life out of them and everyone else around them. We find our parallels to modern life in the pretensions of the upper-middle class: that we live in the age of The Wirecutter, CNET, RTINGS, and all these other ratings websites that tell us which consumer goods we should buy in an age of endless choice. I’m not going to act like I don’t do this, only that the sense of entitlement still lingers. Whereas Osmond wants to sit contented in his home that is perfectly of his design, we have to contend with having perfect use objects — tools, really.

This goes beyond the realm of materialism and extends to Osmond’s relationships as well. Madame Merle is supposed to be a great friend of his, but each time we find him in conversation with her, he is demanding and cold. As I mentioned above, I think Madame Merle is an excellent villain — and she’s an excellent villain because I could easily see myself becoming her friend, but keeping her at arm’s length to avoid corruption. People who are great company are hard to find. Osmond, as we see him in Portrait, is unavoidably stiff, whether with his friends or great works of art he claims to admire. Stiff appreciation is no substitute for joie de vivre. And when joie de vivre finds itself in competition with his vampiric approach to life, joie de vivre — Isabel — loses.

The next is Osmond’s complete erasure of the other women in his life. We never hear about the original Mrs. Osmond, and he pretends that Pansy is her daughter, not Madame Merle’s. Madame Merle herself is kept at arm’s length, despite her previous status as his mistress and, it seems, his only true friend. Pansy is disappeared to a convent to learn the virtues of silence and piety. His sister is an object of scandal and contempt, though there is great irony in Osmond, the man who had a child out of wedlock, finding his adulterous sister disgraceful. We never observe Osmond doing anything in a loving manner, and it is horrifying to think about how he ever impregnated Madame Merle or Isabel; again, he seems to me too reptilian and remote to ever tarnish himself with carnal pleasures.

But Osmond’s lack of warmth is something engineered by James for us to notice from the point he is introduced. If there ever was a time where Osmond would be warm — the honeymoon period — it is kept from the reader’s sight. He is certainly not portrayed the way Ralph Touchett is. What we can learn from Osmond is how quickly love can die and how consciously someone can “turn out the lights” on those around them. And once they’re out, they are not coming back.

Osmond’s lack of warmth is very similar to Middlemarch’s Mr. Casaubon, as I mentioned up above. (Note: I am re-reading Middlemarch right now and there will be posts about it! Soon!) Osmond seems much more villainous than Casaubon, who is merely tragic and cringe-worthy in his ineptitude. The reference was intentional — James himself had many reservations about the novel, calling it “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels.” I wholeheartedly recommend reading James’s entire lament, as it captures his inimitable style and is a valid critique. But I want to draw attention to how he points out that the drama of Dorothea Brooke, Middlemarch’s heroine, is wasted. It is no coincidence that Portrait is devoted to the story of Isabel Archer, James’s incarnation of Dorothea: American, bright, loyal, full of faith to a conception of life she does not understand. And in Portrait, as my wife is fond of saying: there’s no B-plot! James, in other words, plotted Portrait as a response to Middlemarch. However, James’s artistic approach is very psychologically opaque up until Chapter 42. If Eliot had written Portrait, Chapter 42 would not need to exist; we would already know all that there is to know prior to getting there, as she writes with startling penetration in every scene. Eliot’s narrator gives us a window into every character’s heart even as it is hidden from their interlocutors.

I think James succeeded in having Isabel Archer be a stronger character than Dorothea Brooke was, and it is in large part due to the novel’s focus on her. I’ve spent most of this post discussing her tragic marriage. But I think Portrait is a wonderful depiction of Isabel’s agency. She has enough strength to refuse Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton on multiple occasions — Goodwood kisses her after her cousin Ralph’s funeral — and ultimately falls for Osmond in part because of Madame Merle’s schemes but also because of her desire to pursue an unconventional path. Despite her despair in her marriage, she is able to walk away from Osmond, at least temporarily; the ending is ambiguous, as all we know is she returns to Rome. Whether that is to rescue Pansy by making a deal with the devil or make a final break with Osmond is left to us. Isabel strikes me as the type of person who could accomplish both: finesse some freedom from Osmond for herself while not leaving Pansy to suffer under his thumb. Knowing Pansy’s mother’s identity gives her some leverage, and it’s probable she would be willing to give up her fortune if it kept Osmond from interfering. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s where James had to leave off to make the story coherent. At this point, the loose ends for the other characters have been tied off, and all that remains is Isabel’s choice to make a break with the life she built for herself over the course of the novel.