The Portrait of a Lady - Background and Resources

[Madge UK]

This snippett from The New Yorker when reviewing Gorra' book amused me:'.....it is surprising to read the reviews that “The Portrait of a Lady” attracted when it first appeared as a book, in both England and America, in 1881. “Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder.'

[Lily]

An amusing anecdote attributed to HRM Queen Elizabeth II, from a review of The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett:

"Blame it on the corgis. They discover a bookmobile parked near Buckingham Palace and get the Queen's attention when they start yapping. Since she is every inch a queen, HRH borrows a book, a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett even though she has previously left liking books to other people. Although she finds Compton-Burnett rather dry with the characters all sounding like each other, the fire has been lit. The Queen becomes hooked on reading; neither she nor eventually England will ever be quite the same in Alan Bennett's quietly humorous short novel THE UNCOMMON READER. The Queen discovers Jean Genet, Nancy Mitford, E. M. Forster, Emily Dickinson, Alice Munro, Proust, Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky. She has difficulty with Jane Austin because that writer is so concerned with social distinctions. She at first is put off by the verbosity of Henry James, something she has in common with any reader I have ever known ("'Am I alone,' she wrote, 'in wanting to give Henry James a good talking to?'" Later, however, James' "divagations she now took in her stride," opining that "'novels are not necessarily written as the crow flies.'" She even reads the memoirs of Lauren Bacall and is envious of her. In the beginning the Queen reads indiscriminately as one book leads to another, but she eventually becomes a very discerning reader...."
By H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin", November 2, 2007

Bold added.

http://www.amazon.com/ss/customer-rev...

[Madge UK]

Ah yes. Not Queenie in person but a quote from a novel by Alan Bennett about the Queen supposedly discovering a nearby mobile library and taking to reading in a big way;)

[Lily]

Madge wrote: "This is a review of Habegger's book which throws a little light on James supposed view of women..."

Spent a few hours with Habegger's book this morning. Pursuing critics on PoaL/James is a virtual rat-hole warren of twists and oft-times seemingly dead ends. Habegger arrived a used book this week, so quotations will be a pain. It is not easily summarized, so I will just try to capture a few tantalizing paragraphs here.

To start: "...his basic problem was not how to build a lengthy narrative around a young woman's development. There were already thousands of such narratives, and readers loved them The real difficulty was how to keep the reader sympathetic to a heroine intentionally endowed with the instability that leads to grave self-betrayals. James addressed that problem with all his adroitness and in the process produced a work of fiction as long on beauty as it is short on moral candor. In the end he produced a diminished picture of human freedom; Isabel's treacherous servility leads to a very conservative sort of responsibility, which finds freedom only in the acceptance of traditional forms." p159

Put off by "the moralizing commentary" of Eliot's Daniel Deronda, "In both its moral reflections and its story content, James's novel was to be the antithesis of its discursive feminine forebears and rivals. Not just tactful, it was to be a deliberately unforthcoming narrative, one that carefully veils its 'views.'" p159

[Madge UK]

Mmm..diminished picture...treacherous servility. Yes but why?

Tactful...unforthcoming. Yes = bland and disappointing. Not a patch on Eliot.

[Lily]

The more background I read, the clearer to me that, while Isabel may have been inspired by Minny Templeton, Isabel is in no way a re-creation or portrait of Minny.

In my writing seminar yesterday, we had to create a character based on a character's 1) first name, 2) last name, 3) "work," 4) location, 5) marital status, 6) a secret for that person, 7) age. I found myself asking: what would a card with those attributes handed to Henry James from hence he created Isabel Archer have said? (I perversely provided "Isabel" as a first name -- after others had added the remaining six attributes, for another writer in the circle, she became Isabel Merchant, a middle aged mother....) I offer this up only to provoke thoughts about how Henry James might have created Isabel.

[Madge UK]

I agree but do not understand why he (supposedly) used Minnie, whom he is supposed to have loved to create such a very different character, one whom he virtually killed off. Is he saying that society would also have destroyed the vivacious Minnie had she lived to go out into the evil world?

I think I read somewhere that Isabel just came into James' head and he formed the novel around her but of course he must have drawn on the women he had known, like Minnie.

[Madge UK]

PS: I read about it in the Preface together with a revealing anecdote about how Turgenev arrived at a story (James greatly admired Turgenev.)

[Madge UK]

This article about James, culled from his many letters, is very revealing about his character, his pretended illnesses and the eccentricities of the James family:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/colm-toi...

[Lily]

Madge wrote: "I agree but do not understand why he (supposedly) used Minnie, whom he is supposed to have loved to create such a very different character, one whom he virtually killed off. Is he saying that socie..."

Habegger writes to this topic, but so far I find him about as confusing and convoluted on it as PoaL is about Isabel. But still rather like fullsome, multi-layered, privileged lives with their particular eccentricities .

[Madge UK]

I don't see how anyone could write about James and not be confused!

[Emma]

Madge wrote: "This article about James, culled from his many letters, is very revealing about his character, his pretended illnesses and the eccentricities of the James family:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/colm..."

Thanks, what an interesting article - and what a complicated man James was. Interesting too to learn that he had his own manipulative and deceitful side, so possibly knew Mme Merle from the inside.

I wonder if he identified with the sickly Ralph? James didn't have a real, serious illness but possibly, from this article, wished he did...

[Madge UK]

I think he wrote himself into Ralph but as a kinder more compassionate person who cared about Isabel's fate, not as the author who let her be sacrificed on the altar of his puritanical father with his views about marriage being a holy, indissoluble sacrament (cf this letter by Henry James Sr to The Atlantic Monthly in 1875):-

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

[Lily]

Sidebar: I wish Henry James had been a contemporary as an author with Murakami rather than with Dickens and Hardy.

[Wendel]

Lily wrote: "Sidebar: I wish Henry James had been a contemporary as an author with Murakami rather than with Dickens and Hardy."

Why's that, Lily?

[Madge UK]

Here is an interesting article about James' attention to dress and fashion in his novels:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/47...

[Lily]

Madge wrote: "Here is an interesting article about James' attention to dress and fashion in his novels:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/47..."

Thanks! Wished for more, but enjoyed that much.

[Lily]

Wendel wrote: "Lily wrote: "Sidebar: I wish Henry James had been a contemporary as an author with Murakami rather than with Dickens and Hardy."

Why's that, Lily?"

Don't know if I can explain myself readily, Wendel. But it feels to me that James tried to nudge the world as strongly as Murakami does his. But James was or allowed himself to be constrained by the Puritanical and Victorian imposed cultural and social boundaries of his time. His background did not allow him to transgress the barriers he to some extent placed on himself, as if he dare not be his own views without veiling -- whether widow's or bride's -- at least in public.

It seems to me PoaL is a strong appeal, from a very different direction than say Hardy's Jude, for the need for different divorce and property laws than existed, for example. I see Galsworthy's Irene in a similar vein. But this is all a long way from the public issues of today, where I perceive James could have been comfortable.

Perhaps I say this because I know the distance my own life has traveled from its strict, conventional origins. I perceive I see James's struggle with what he may not even consciously recognize that he wishes he might say out loud, as Murakami can. And would goad James to do, if they were alive and writing concurrently? But two world wars and a post-colonial global economy do lie between the two men.

[Madge UK]

Great observations Lily. I too see James constrained by his background. It is as if his puritanical father is an incubus sitting on his shoulder when he writes about sexual relationships and marriage at this stage of his life. Was he less constrained after his father died I wonder? His family urged him to marry but no doubt he knew enough about his homosexual feelings to resist this. PoaL could be saying 'Look! This is what could happen to me if I marry!' Many homosexuals then did as Oscar Wilde did, marry for appearances' sake but James was perhaps more honest and was able to be so once he had left his family behind to live in Europe. James was a good example of the poet Philip Larkin's line 'They f*** you up your mum and dad':(

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

[Madge UK]

This extract from Wendy Graham's Henry James' Thwarted Love gives some fascinating insights into the James' family life (esp p80-84) and the struggles he had with his homosexuality. Those sad struggles make me feel thankful that, for the most part, we are more understanding today.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I-...

[Wendel]

If I understand you correctly, Lily, James had to censor himself - more than his contemporaries did. And that this turned out to be detrimental to his work.

I’ll keep that in mind, though, based on PoaL alone, I wonder. To me James seems rather a 'detached' than an 'engaged' author (and so does Murakami - based on KotS alone).

It's my impression that different family laws would not have changed Isabel’s fate. On the other hand, New England Puritanism is not likely to produce another Isabel today.

[Madge UK]

I think James was more constrained in this, an early work, than when he became successful and could afford to upset family and friends. But another serious constraint which dogged him most of his life was that he had reputedly decided that celibacy was the best way of dealing with his homosexuality. Not only would this have been psychologically damaging but it would mean that he had no actual sexual experience to pass on to his readers. All the main characters in PoaL are 'cold fish' except for Goodwood whose passion gets out of hand and who is the sort of macho male James disliked. It is this enforced celibacy and the fact that James was a 'cold fish' himself which IMO makes James a 'detached' author.

I think it is difficult for us in these more enlightened times to imagine what enormous constraints homosexuals were under in James' time when fear of exposure, ostracism and imprisonment haunted them every day of their adult lives. I can forgive James' a lot when I think of this and after reading the extract from James' Thwarted Love above.

[Lily]

Wendel wrote: "If I understand you correctly, Lily, James had to censor himself - more than his contemporaries did. And that this turned out to be detrimental to his work...."

Wendel -- I don't know that it was detrimental, but I think it made his texts far more circuitous. The language and structure itself had to hide even as it revealed. What a challenge to the mind and the words conveyed to the page to be printed and circulated and read! And yet the world itself probably needed and called forth those who could do just that. I think I am beginning to truly have a sense of why his novels are considered one of the transition points from the Victorian to the "Modern."

One silly example:

"...It was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic consciousness; but to many of the impressions usually made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed. There were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these latter, on the day he had sounded them his son would have thought less well of him."

James, Henry (2011-02-07). Complete Works of Henry James (Illustrated) Chapter 5 of PoaL. (Kindle Locations 34070-34073). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

In the long, rambling meditative like passage of father about son of which this is the latter part, I found myself laughing when I reached the last sentence, wondering if a virile man of Victorian England whose wife was clearly not regularly part of his daily life, wasn't expressing his unwillingness to share with his loved, upright, but ill, son his own use of prostitutes to serve the sexual needs of his life. Do I make this up? Perhaps! But because this is James, I rather doubt it. We know the straightforwardness such a topic might have today. Yet the caring about a respected relationship with son has something so fetching about it. All captured, or at least hinted, in a sentence that is throw-away in terms of the overall arc of the story.

[Madge UK]

Thanks muchly Lily. To what does the second quote refer? Is it referring to old Mr Touchett and Ralph? I cannot for the life of me see the analogy with prostitution in that chapter.

Can we attribute the transition to 'modern' to James when his circuitness was due more to his personality/orientation than to a conscious effort to create a new style. Joyce was experimenting, I am not so sure that James was.

[Lily]

Madge wrote: "Thanks muchly Lily. To what does the second [?] quote refer? Is it referring to old Mr Touchett and Ralph? Puzzled.

Yes! The quotation is from Chapter 5 where elderly Daniel Touchett is rambling on about himself and his son Ralph -- I don't know the proper writerly term for the "voice" James is using here.

Can we attribute the transition to 'modern' to James when his circuitness was due more to his personality/orientation than to a conscious effort to create a new style. Joyce was experimenting, I am not so sure that James was."

I don't know that James deliberately tried to create a break or new style. But that subtle mind of his went places the (recent) past had been unwilling or unable to go or at least acknowledge openly, and it felt the strain of those cultural boundaries and barriers, but tried to express itself within those constraints, even perhaps to reconcile. That may be a bit grandiloquent, but it is kind of what I am trying to say. Joyce and Lawrence, a few years later, were willing to overturn the tables and challenge more directly the hypocrisy.

(Personally, there are elements of my background and personality that make James [sometimes] more fun to probe and analyze and revisit than Joyce. Then again, I lose patience with either of them.)

[Wendel]

Lily - I think I see what you mean. But James' struggle may be more noticeable in the details of the narrative, than in the design of the novel (or the characters). Yet, details are becoming more important in PoaL than they were in earlier novels (I found myself often thinking of Proust, who seems almost exclusively occupied by details).

Madge - I’ve been fooled too often by authors writing about things which they were unlikely to have experienced themselves. So I am not convinced that the lack of passion in PoaL should be attributed to James' sexual preferences. On a more abstract level however, I can accept the idea that his ironic distance has something to do with sexual homelessness.

[Madge UK]

Wendel: His lack of passion etc is well documented by his contemporares so I was drawing upon that plus his repressed upbringing.

[Lily]

From Mary's review of Gorra's book:

"But more than just a story about a story, Gorra's book presents Henry James and his writing as truly ground-breaking, paving the way for the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence in the 'original' use of a character's self-consciousness, and in the presentation of a novel not as a series of events that toss the characters here and there, but as the study of 'character' that must respond to, or act upon, life as it happens -- choices that are made that spring from the person's character."

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Madge UK]

The first user of the stream of consciousness technique was supposedly the French novelist Edouard Dujardin in a short novel published in 1888, Les Lourier sont coupes. James Joyce wrote that his own style of 'interior monologue' owed its influence to works by Dujardin.

The phrase 'stream of consciousness', was coined by William James, who wrote Principles of Psychology in 1890. Henry James worshipped his elder brother and was obviously influenced by his study of psychology.

'By calling consciousness a stream, James meant that human consciousness is something fluid; it is an unbroken current of feelings, impressions, fantasies, half-formed thoughts, and awareness in general. Consciousness is a continuity like time, and it is independent of time. At any given instant of time, an individual’s consciousness may not be entirely concerned with the present. He may be living through an experience of the past or fantasizing about the future. The clock of subjective consciousness is independent of the mechanical clock-time. The stream-of-consciousness novelist tries to render the consciousness of his characters in its fullness (not excluding even its pre-verbal component) without the least authorial intervention and without ordering it into logical, lucid, and even grammatical narrative.' (Wikipedia.)

However, IMO, the 'stream-of-consciousness' novelists are much more indebted to Freud and Jung than to James or Joyce. Freud’s theories of sexuality, unconscious, repression, and dreams, Jung’s of collective unconsciousness, myth and archetype created the right environment for the ideas which nurtured the stream-of-consciousness novelists. This is a classic case of all 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

Freud had a great influence too on the psychological (Oedipal) themes in the novels of both Dosteovsky and Turgenev both of whom he met in Paris and Henry James was a great admirer of Turgenev to whom there is a tribute in the Preface of PoaL. There are critics who see Isabel's bildungsroman in the novel as an Oedipal conflict. Certainly James himself had Oedipal issues which seem to have influenced his writing.