One might assume from this that Minnie was incomplete because she died young, or

was ill and confined, or was prevented from traveling to Italy, or some such thing, and

that in his novel James imagined what her life might have meant this, but he also

altered circumstances. James may have meant this, but he also meant something quite

different and more grandiose, as his next sentence hints. “In truth every one, in life, is

incomplete, & it is the mark of art that in reproducing them one deels the desire to fill

them out, to justify them, as it were.”22 This suggests that Minnie’s incompleteness

had less to do with her personality or early death than with a defect endemic to all

humanity. By the same token, James’s desire to reproduce her, to fill her out, had

nothing do with his peculiar nature and relationship with her. Instead, he claimed to be

enacting an impulse characteristic of artists in general – the impulse not so much to

create an imaginary person as to perfect, and thus “justify,” an actual one.( P 61)

     If we compare James’s heroine to what we can reconstruct of his cousin, it

becomes clear that he had cause to feel uneasy about his highhanded art. Isabel

embodies a drastic reinterpretation of Minnie’s character from a definite point of

view. Although to author, no matter how realistic, has an obligation to reproduce his

models accurately, the alterations he chooses to make can be extremely revealing

about the nature of his imaginative work. ( P 62)

The closer one looks at James’s transformations of Minnie, the more one wonders if he was justifying, one her, but a mysterious and powerful drive to take over her life. The remarkably uninhibited letters he wrote his mother and older brother after learning of Minnie’s death bespeak some such desire. “The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought. There she may bloom into a beauty more radiant than our dull eyes will avail to contemplate.” “Translated” – it’s as if Minnie had become some kind of text. “She was at any rate the helpless victim& toy of her own intelligence – so that there is positive relief in thinking of her being removed from her own heroic treatment & placed in kinder hands.”42 In this eerie sentence Minnie is remembered not as a creature, a being in nature who has died, but as the author of herself – writer and heroine together. Her mistake, than of the too-ambitious young artist, was to dream of too heroic a treatment of herself. Now, happily, the uncompleted manuscript has been transferred to a more indulgent writer, who will allow Minnie the gentle feminine development she spurned. ( P 68)

What should James’s betrayal of Minnie Temple mean to us as readers and interpreters of The Portrait of a Lady? To answer this question, we must strive to plumb the soul of the heroine’s possessive cousin. I mean not only Minnie’ s cousin Henry but Isabel’s cousin Ralph, the spectator and secret arranger of her life. This strange man, who bears a special, nonerotic love for her and slowly dies from a lingering illness during the four years the novel covers, surely reflects in some devious way the author’s own private state.49 Just as surely, the differences between James and Ralph illuminate James’s own appropriation of Minnie. ( P 70)

My point is that James’s career as a fiction writer began, not with any sort of direct transcription of his experience, but with just the opposite – a remarkably polished effort to his own experience totally out of the question.57 The early fiction sets in operation a severe and dignified program of transformation. That is one reason why the early dying-soldier stories have such a conspicuous conservative rhetoric. Writing in clear opposition to the current trends in women’s fiction. James wanted to demonstrate that things would unravel if women renounced their sacred pledges. Both “The Story of a Year” and “A Most Extraordinary Case” declare that the modern American woman’s abandonment of her redemptive mission – her refusal to be affectionate, faithful, refined – will destroy the man who trusts her, especially if he is a traditional man still loyal to the claims of honor in war and in polite society. ( P 76)

James’s impulse to punish women’s restless heroines was becoming less obtrusive. At times his outrage would moderate into a project to rehabilitation: The Portrait shows how a rather thoughtless girl turns into a noble lady precisely by enduring the miserable marriage that Grane’s and Alcott’s heroines couldn’t stand. The uncanny thing is that James announced this general project n the text of “A Most Extraordinary Case.” The doctor says of Caroline Hofmann: “She looks as if she had come out of an American novel. I don’t know that that’s great praise; but, at all events, I make her come out of it.” Ferdinand’s prescient response: “You’re bound in honour, then… to put her into another.”64 ( P 78)

It would seem, then, that Ralph embodies a vital phase of the author’s own developing imagination. The passionate cultivation of a glowing picture of Isabel reproduces James’s own early quest for a female champion. But there is this difference: Ralph is impaired, only half a man. He lacks his marker’s deep suspicion of female independence, suspicion that counteracted James’s identification with female heroism and bright Minnie Temple and thus saved him from being Ralph Touchett. Behind this suspicion stood Henry Sr.’s conservative doctrine on sexual difference – a doctrine Henry Jr. endorsed three times the year Minnie died. ( P 80)

The whole opposition between Ralph and Osmond is one of the richest and best worked out elements in The Portrait. Their antagonistic relationship is presented with far more mastery than Ralph’s unconvincing bond with his father. Ralph could not care less about establishing an identity before others, but Osmond, who depends on the illusionist’s art for his place in the world, cares about little else. ( P 83)

Of course the novel insists that the Daniel–Ralph relationship is loving and the Gilbert–Pansy one cruel and vicious. But we may safely question Henry Jr.’s authority in making this distinction. He too worshipped his father-philosopher and found it difficult to tell the difference between paternal love and authoritarianism. Even while the remorselessly exposed the emptiness, isolation, cruel will, and magic arts behind Osmond’s quiet parental facede, James showed no awareness that Ralph’s subjection, the filial author did not question Ralph’s fondness for tending his empire-building father and his dream of dying with him. If we ask what kind of novelist could possibly ask us to accept this idyllic father-son bond, the answer is irresistible. He must have been a Pansy. ( P 86)

James sensed that behind the benign mask the philosopher of marriage was a male Madusa. The only way a faithful son could gaze at that face was through fiction – the magical reflecting surface that turns a familiar object into something safely alien. The face that flashed in the mirror was Osmond’s. The creative power that fused The Portrait came, precisely, from James’s effort to confront, in the mirror, his father’s authoritarianism – the authoritarianism that has sent Alice to spend a winter with an antifeminist physician specializing in women’s troubles, just as Osmond sends Pansy back to the convent. At one and the same time Osmond is the great evil presence and the spokesman for the most solemn and ultimate truths. He and Isabel are “indissolubly united.” She does have too many ideas (“theories” is the author’s word), and she grows conspicuously more elegant, thoughtful, honest, and responsible by entering and then choosing to reenter the house of bondage. ( P 86)

Predicated on Henry Sr.’s dogmas about women and marriage, The Portrait is the artifact of a brilliant but uneasy pansy. The conclusion, structured in such a way as to show Isabel rejecting passionate love and reaffirming her marriage vows, endorses Henry Sr.’s much repeated revelation: “love is a great reality to experience, but is so little and end of human life, that I have no regard for it save as ministering to marriage.”70 Separation or divorce might make sense to practical Henrietta, but Isabel belongs to a higher order and thus swears allegiance to the sacred bondage that constituted Henry Sr.’s essential message to the world:

The law is …just, and even good, though it slay me. Yes, death at its hands

were better than life at the risk of its dishonor at my hands. So I abide by my

marriage bond. I see very well that the bond ought to be loosened in the case

of other people….But as for me I will abide in my chains.71 ( P 87)

James betrayed Minnie Temple in The Portrait not because he feared or resented her. He was extremely fond of her, not only wishing her well but entering deeply into her experience, as Ralph does with Isabel. But James had been vigorously instructed by his father not to believe in Minnie’s or anyone else’s free intrepidity and he himself was often passive, absorbing life at second-hand. It was just because of this spectatorial orientation that he both adored his cousin and discounted her love of liberty and the high integrity of her “pet theory.” When she died, he became convinced in a moment of electrifying power that he had known a genuine overreaching heroine, one whose brilliant potential must have come to nothing, and he began thinking his way toward The Portrait. He figured out how to combine the precocious girl and middle-aged lover from women’s fiction with his own heartless Diana and dying soldier. Yet the energizing insight that gave his imagination a once-in-a-lifetime impetus was based on a final refusal to imagine that his cousin could have survived on her own terms. James was able to write his greatest novel to date precisely by ascribing to Minnie his own private defeat, stabbing her image with the paternal steel that had been driven deep into his own soul. The Portrait is the book of a supreme artist in deep and unconscious subjection. That is why, in betraying Minnie Temple, James also betrayed himself. In taking over her image and then transforming her into someone so different, he transformed himself, as keeper of her flame, into the manipulative middle-aged guardian-love he detested. (P 88)