Kimmey, John. “London in The Portrait of a Lady.” The Henry James Review 5.2

(1984): 96-99. 

 Isabel Archer’s experiences in London have largely been ignored by critics. Yet an examination of them is basic to an understanding of what happens to her. James suggests as much in his Preface. He speaks of the “‘international’ light” (AN 58) and associates that light, “thick and rich upon the scene,” with Isabel’s impressions of  “the thick detail of London, which had always loomed large and rich to her” (PLNYE 114). As he notes in the 1881 edition, it is the “city of her imagination” (PL 117) and in effect represents for her as for James himself “the most complete compendium of the world” (NB 28).

There are three London scenes, each one marking a crucial stage in Isabel’s life. the first, in chapters 15 and 16, covers a day and part of a night and depicts her surveying the world and testing her freedom. It is the most expansive and carefree. The second, in chapter 31, concerns a late afternoon stroll and shows her participating in the world and enjoying her new freedom. The third, in chapter 53, involves her return to England from Italy and reveals her submitting to the strictures of the world and acknowledging the limits, if not the loss, of her independence. It is the most intense and the most disturbing. The first two take place in early and late fall respectively and find Isabel in a happy frame of mind, buoyant, bold, and naive. The last takes place in the spring and finds her in an introspective mood, weary, depressed, and disillusioned. In each instance the season has a paradoxical effect on her and this strategy accords with James’s use of contradiction to dramatize the conflicts of her divided self.2

The initial London scene is Isabel’s first excursion into the Old World outside of Gardencourt and consists of three episodes: her tour of the city with Ralph Touchett and Henrietta Stackpole, her conversation with Ralph, and her confrontation with Caspar Goodwood. ( P 96)

Later, when she and Ralph retreat to the Touchett’s house on Winchester Sequare and sit outside in the twilight to discuss her rejection of Lord Warburton’s marriage proposal, she announces her intentions in life. For her the present and future are here, the past is “across the water.” She does not want to marry until she sees Europe, and, as Ralph remarks, throws herself into the world. Such determination to seek her own fate contrasts with the melancholy spectatorship of her cousin and, more significantly, with the English past that lies all around her at the moment. The Southwark quadrangle was once the site of a twelfth-century manor house and courtyard, built by Bishop William Gifford, where Thomas a Becket stopped to visit before his fatal journey to Canterbury and where Lancelot Andrew died in 1626.3 Of course, Isabel, who in Albany told her aunt that she liked ‘“places in which things have happened—even if they are sad things”’ (PL 26), is unaware of this history. She is also unaware of the urban decay that has overtaken the area and of the slum children poking their faces through the fence of the enclosure to watch her and Ralph converse, a reminder of the children she kissed earlier in the day and now has forgotten. She is too caught up in the excitement of being at “ the centre of the multitudinous town” and talking about her future plans to realize exactly where she is and where exactly she is headed.

The third part of the first London scene occurs that night in Pratt’s Hotel. Here Isabel confronts Caspar Goodwood and makes explicit her desire for “personal independence” and the right to choose her own life, thus acting on what she had told her cousin that evening. Within a few hours she has come a long way, from declaring her independence to deciding on a course of action to achieve it. In addition, she demonstrates “courage,” a trait Ralph has just praised her for, in standing up to Goodwood, who is pressing so hard to marry her and rob her of that liberty she wants so passionately. When he leaves, however, she collapses on her knees, her head in her arms, her resolve for the moment shaken by the encounter and the challenge to her integrity. Darkness envelops her. Yet a “vague radiance” comes through the window of her room, and one recalls “her silver eyes” that shone in the dusk of Winchester square when she bade goodbye to Ralph. The chiaroscuro so much a part of her portrait thoughout the novel belongs principally to London, where she first discovers the immensity and variety of the world just as James himself did. Always for him “the great grey Babylon” is cast in “dusky-silvering.” As he observes in “An English Easter,” “Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions” (En 134). The same antitheses compose the ‘“international’ light” in which Isabel lives.

The second London scene begins at Euston Station almost a year and a half later. Isabel is saying goodbye to her sister Lily and her family, with whom she has spent the summer on the Continent. Instead of feeling sorrow at the farewell, she is exultant. Instead of being depressed by the dreary November weather, she acts like a free spirit. Turning away from the platform, the heiress suddenly is aware as she never has been before of the “absolute boldness and wantonness of liberty” (PL 297). Heading back to her Piccadilly hotel through the “foggy London street,” she realizes that all the world lies before her. She can go wherever she wishes, do whatever she chooses. Enhancing this sense of destiny and liberation is not only the allusion to Paradise lost but also the Doric arch of Euston Station, at the time “the first and finest of the monumental railway entrances, symbolizing the triumph of man over nature and the beginning of a new age.” What more appropriate place for her to initiate an exploration of the world on her own, an exploration soon to include Greece and Egypt. And what more obvious monument could James, a persistent prowler of London streets, find to enrich the scene. In his essay “London,” he writes enthusiastically of the railway stations of the city. They remind him of “our [Anglo-Saxon] energies and curiosities, and our being all distinguished together from other people by our great common stamp of perpetual motion, our passion for seas and deserts and the other side of the globe” (EH 37). The statement certainly applies to Isabel about to embark on “a little pilgrimage to the East” with Madame Merle, a trip which matures her to such an extent that on her return she believes that she is no longer “the frivolous young woman from Albany.” It is a tour that she undertakes with a kind of reckless abandon, “draining cup after cup” of experience, that cup which, ironically, she told Ralph in Winchester Square was “a poisoned drink.”

The walk through central London, then, is her plunge into the deep waters of the great world. She relishes the dangers and almost deliberately loses her way in order to feel the thrill of being lost and alone amid the turbulence. She becomes disappointed when an “obliging policeman easily” sets her right again. It is the same type of romantic behavior she exhibited in Kensington Gardens kissing the poorer and more handsome children. The difference is that now she is not merely a tourist; she is a participant excited by the “spectacle of human life” seething around her. The people, cabs, shops, stalls glowing in the damp dusk of the late afternoon arouse her imagination. She had always been “fond of seeing great crowds.” Now she revels in them. No longer simply “picturesque,” the city has become a place to risk losing her way in, to assert her independence. Isabel’s confidence and desire to challenge the conventional reach their fullest expression. More than anything she has done so far, the urban adventure marks a turning point in her life. It gives her the self-assurance to make the most momentous decision of her life, to marry Osmond.

The third London scene is a striking contrast in every detail. Returning the England to visit Ralph on his deathbed, she is carrying with her the misery of a bad marriage. Instead of enjoying the springtime freshness of the countryside on the journey across the Continent, she closes her eyes, indifferent to the Old World she once hungered to see and feel. She thinks only of how she had gone forth in “strength,” as she had during her solitary walk through London, and now comes back in “weakness.” Renunciation, suffering, aging, losing what one holds dear, “the destruction of precious things,” all these disturb her. Not that she has given up hope. She still clings to the idea that one day she might be happy again. But for the moment fear and helplessness overwhelm her as the train rolls into Charing Cross. Instead of standing for a gateway to new experiences as Euston did, the station looms as a cage in hell with its “dusky, smoky, far-arching vault” (PL 517).5 She takes no pleasure in the half light as she once did strolling through the streets. Now it is “strange” and “livid.” Nor does she respond to the people. They are a “dense, dark pushing crowd.” She recalls her walk through London five years ago and realizes that she no longer thrills to the “mighty spectacle.” Never could she venture forth alone again.

James makes clear that this return is a “terrible” one, her Inferno. And what makes it even more frightening is the need of assistance. She leans of Henrietta, who comes to greet her. Gone is the fanciful freedom and the airy self-confidence of the earlier London experiences. Everywhere she recognizes signs of her own inner turmoil. At the same time, when Mr. Bantling, who accompanies Henrietta to the station, speaks of Ralph’s being ill and unable to speak yet “jolly and funny all the same,” she is able to visualize his tragicomic nature despite the gloomy prospects. It is another sign of her divided self. Just as in Albany when a child she refused to look out of the melancholy office at the street, conjuring up a “region of delight or of terror,” so now she continues to contemplate an ambivalent image of a dying loved one despite the setting and her own agitation. In these trying circumstances, then, there are glimpses of a brighter world, just as in the earlier and more buoyant scenes set in the fall and early winter there are suggestions of troubled times ahead.

One further aspect of these London interludes is the way in which the persons associated with Isabel appear differently in subsequent scenes. In the first one, Ralph is a guide; in the last, an apparition of a dying man in the midst of the city he loves. Henrietta, who in the sightseeing jaunt acts jocular and mocking, shows up at Charing Cross as the sole person Isabel turns to for support. And Caspar Goodwood, who threatened her freedom in Pratt’s Hotel, returns to challenge her again, this time at Gardencourt. But now his self-confidence seems naive compared to her hard-earned wisdom. His comment to her that ‘“The world is all before us—and the world is very large. I know something about that”’ (PL 543) echoes her attitude in the Euston Station scene where Isabel is thinking about how “the world lay before her—she could do whatever she chose” (PL 297). Circumstances and her won mistakes and misconceptions have made her realize that though the world may be large, it is also a “fathomless” ocean. It is a place to drown in and lose your way as well as a place to explore and choose at will your course. And just as the earlier encounter with Goodwood ended in darkness and relief, so does this last meeting. The difference is that now her resolve is stronger, her choice clearer. She knows where she is going and what she has to do to survive.

Isabel’s London experiences are similar in certain respects to those of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl: each one during a lonely walk through the streets responds eagerly to the metropolis teeming around her. Such a venture is also a motif in several of James’s shorter pieces such as “A London Life.” it stems no doubt from the “habit and the interest of walking the streets” during his first year of residence in the capital (AN 59). For him at this period in his life, as he notes in 1881, the city represents “the biggest aggregation of human life… and if you learn to know your London you learn a great many things” (NB 28). Isabel certainly learns “a great many things” from her involvement with it. But none is more important than her realization that nowhere else does she find herself quite so free or quite so doomed. ( P 99)