November 4: Henry
James's The Portrait of a Lady was
published on this day in 1881. Many commentators regard the novel as the best
of his early works, Isabel Archer one of his most engaging heroines. In his preface
to the 1908 New York edition, James discusses one passage from the novel at
length, because it is "obviously the best thing in the book" and
"a supreme illustration of the general plan" by which he hoped to
achieve his distinctive style of "psychological realism." The passage
in question is Chapter 42, in which Isabel stays up long after her husband, now
revealed to her as unsuitable and reprehensible, has gone to bed. In meditative
free-fall, she scans the events and emotions of recent months and years, hoping
to understand how she could have arrived at such a bad match:
It was as if he had had the evil eye; as if his presence
were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the fault in himself, or only in
the deep mistrust she had conceived for him? This mistrust was the clearest
result of their short married life; a gulf had opened between them over which
they looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange
opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed—an opposition in which
the vital principle of the one was a thing of contempt to the other. It was not
her fault—she had practised no deception; she had only admired and believed.
She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had
suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow
alley, with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of
happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could
look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity,
it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and
depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from
above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.
Sensitive to those critics who complained that there was not
enough "story" in his novels, James defends his attempt to "show
what an 'exciting' inward life may do for the person leading it even while it
remains perfectly normal. …[The passage] is a representation simply of her
motionlessly SEEING, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity of
her act as 'interesting' as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of
a pirate."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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