Major Points:

1.          The homoerotic reflection between William and his elder brother

2.          The suspended ending scene to suggest Isbel’s death drive

3.          James compensates his own fate with Isabel’s independence from her parents

A Small Boy reveals James’s indulgence in what Freud would call Family Romance.2 “I seemed to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else” (SB 175). In Freud this exchange involves replacing father and mother with such figures as the King and Queen. Young Henry James closest to this classic version of the fantasy when he describes with empathy and even envy the Prince Imperial, the baby son of Napoleon III, “borne forth for his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and beside which the cent-gardes, all light-blue and silver and intensely erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked” (SB 332). The nursing breasts and the cocked pistols represent well the Imperial Parents of fantasy. They do not, however, constitute the staple of James’s family romance. He is more bizarre. ( P 95)

     Henry James understood what recent feminist scholars have insisted upon – that gender is socially produced. When his society equates business with life, it is defining “presence” in a way appropriate to bourgeois patriarchy: “man” = business = life = presence. Thus “woman” = pleasure = death = absence/ negation. This is why I say that “woman” as a gender construct is a social fate available to persons of either sex. In James’s America, a male who is not in business is feminine in gender because he is signed by, is singled out for, nonexistence. “Castration” makes not the anatomically female sex but a culturally effeminated group. ( P 99)

     The “gaze” is not exclusively masculine in The portrait, as it is in so much of Western culture.18 When Merle says to Isabel, “‘I want to see what life makes of you’”(Chap. 19), she foresees direct entertainment for Osmond and indirect profit for herself. Both sexes are unable not to treat human beings as objects because both sexes sense their own essential reification. Without a positive sense of one’s own subjectivity, one cannot value the other as subject, as sacredly other. Being essentially negated is what expatriation represents for both sexes. “‘If we are not good Americans we are certainly poor Europeans; we have no natural place here’” (Chap. 19) ( P 108)

     Economic naivete is only one aspect of Isabel’s psychic economy, however, because she functions in The Portrait as more than a replication of Henry James. She is also the wish-fulfillment which assures him compensation. Isabel is thus endowed with a childhood free of the anxiety over paternal incoherence and financial uncertainty which scarred Henry’s own youth. “If he [Mr. Archer] had been troubled about money matters, nothing ever disturbed their [his children‘s] irreflective consciousness if many possessions”(Chap. 4). Wish-fulfillment then persists into adulthood. Isabel avoids the financial anxieties that James knew in his twenties and early because The Portrait Persists – apparently – a fairy tale solution to such anxieties. First a good witch whisks Isabel away to Henry’ s cherished refuge, England. Then an ideal father-surrogate absolves her of all financial worry. Isabel has achieved maternal independence without having to grub for it in business. ( P 110)
   

 What makes the ending of The Portrait so difficult is that wish-fulfillment proves finally incompatible with fairy tale. If James were writing a storybook romance, the now-rich princess would marry her prince charming and live happily ever after. Instead Isabel marries disastrously. To understand how such an anti-fairy tale can function compensatorily as a wish-fulfillment for Henry James, we must understand why his protagonist chooses a prince uncharming. “I am marrying a nonentity … a person who has none of Lord Warburton’s great advantages – no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It is the total absence of all these things that pleases me’ ”(Chaps. 32, 34). Part of the attraction here is Isabel’s power to launch Gilbert’s boat, the “maternal” power to make him, which many critics have noticed. But as the words “nonentity” and “absence” and all the negatives indicate, there is more involved. Or rather, less. ( P 111)

 Osmomd is for Isabel the quintessence of absence, the essential nullity. And why would that attract her? “Of all liberties, the one she herself found sweetest was the liberty to forget ” (Chap. 21). Here is where the freedom of the orphan leads ultimately: not to action but to nana. James knows well the limitations of his family romance of extirpation. It is at best a local, provisional solution, because the ultimate threat is not external, not familial or even social, but internal. What is mortal about us is our own mortality; we will die even if no one kills us. Thus for a person obsessed with vulnerability, the only way to deal with the fear of being killed is to kill it. This means to kill the self. In the animal world, the dog bites the wounded paw that is wounding him; in the human world, thanatophobia leads to suicide. Isabel Archer expresses Henry James’s desire to escape from suffering altogether. Gilbert Osmond constitutes the ultimate nana. He has expressly defined his life to Isabel as a negative surrender. “ ‘Not to worry – not to strive nor struggle. To resign myself’ ” (Chap. 24). That these words do not in fact characterize competitive, emulous Gilbert is irrelevant to Isabel’s charmed reception of his words. What Gilbert offers her is what she wants, negation. And she is willing to pay a high price for it. “It was not that, however, his objecting to her opinions; that was nothing. She had no opinions – none that she would not have been eager to sacrifice in the satisfaction of feeling herself loved” (Chap. 43, my italics). ( P 111)

He is also more. He is compensation for the terrible year of 1878 to indulge through The Portrait his homoerotic love for William, Henry must do more than switch from male to female protagonists and invest Isabel with aspects of himself. He must also project aspects of William onto Gilbert. This is easy enough to do, for in his most recent big novel, The American (1877), Henry had already portrayed unflattering aspects of his elder brother, both in the coldness of the elder Bellegarde, and (as William himself recognized )21 in the hypercritical morbidity of the little American tourist, Rev. Babcock. The recurrence of these features in Osmond is not therefore surprising. What is startling is how much more obvious and extensive the portrait of William becomes by 1881.

He was a man of forty, with a well-shaped, upon which the hair, still dense but

prematurely grizzled, had been cropped close. He had a thin, delicate, sharply cut

face of which the only fault was that it looked too pointed; an appearance to

which the shape of his beard contributed not a little. (Chap. 22)

Born in 1842, William James is on the threshold of forty in 1881. Although his hair would not grizzle until later, the other features of Isabel/Henry’s portrait of Gilbert are accurate enough. The well-shaped head; the hair cropped close; the face thin, delicate, and sharply cut; its pointed quality emphasized by the beard: these features are well suggested in the two illustrations I have included – the photograph from 1865 and the self-portrait (sans beard) from about 1868. ( P 113)

    Freedom abides finally for the adult Isabel where it did for the orphan Henry: not in relationships, but in isolation. What is usually said about Isabel’s final state is that “she has gone back to her husband.” In fact, The Portrait ends not with Isabel having gone back to her husband, but with her going back. By setting the last scene of the novel on the morning of Isabel’s departure from England – rather than, say, on the next day, when she would already have reached Rome – James leaves his protagonist suspended between departure and arrival, poised between separation and commitment. Isabel is neither with the pair who represent the bondage of advocated adultery – Caspar and Henrietta – nor with the pair who represent the bondage of conventional domesticity – Gilbert and Pansy. Isabel is alone, yet not solipsistic, neither exposed nor dead. Her train ride is a timeless suspension. Like the figures on Keats’ s Grecian urn, Isabel is preserved in midmotion: “…do not grieve; / She cannot fade… forever young; / All breathing human passion far above” (ll. 18-19, 27-28). In her railway coach Isabel enters this state on her ride out to England. ( P 117 )

    To cease utterly. To give it all up and not know anything more – this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. She had moments, indeed, in her journey from Rome, which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret, that if her spirit was haunted with sudden pictures, it might have been the spirit disembarrassed of the flesh. There was nothing to regret now – that was all over. (Chap. 53)

Freud called it the Death Drive, the organism’s determination to return to the condition of nonexistence. But suicide cannot be countenanced as the resolution of either James’s novel or his family romance. “‘Dear Isabel, life is better; for in life there is love. Death is good – but there is no love’” (Chap. 54). Henry James believes this. Thus his lifelong dilemma is Isabel’s now: how to love, and yet maintain enough distance to escape the exposure inevitable with intimacy; how to remain in life, but not of it. ( P 118 )

    Like Sigmund Freud, who studied our species’ drive toward death, James explores our instinct for exclusion and reclusion. He attests to this instinct’s strong operation within himself so that we readers will have to recognize what our world of marrying and begetting is determined – in its own wish-fulfillment – to pretend away. Our unions are rarely more than mutual violations. When Henrietta says to Ralph, “‘You are not in love with her [Isabel], I hope,’” and he quips “‘how can I be, when I am in love with another,’” Henrietta speaks to us all when she snaps, “‘you are in love with yourself, that’s the other’” (Chap. 13). That each person wants to be both lover and beloved in order to deny the very possibility of any true other is a self-nagating propensity which Henry James chronicled more extensively, fiercely, delicately than any novelist in our language. If life, like Isabel’s Rome, threatens to end up “nothing but a void full of names” (Chap. 28), James’s portraits of “nothing” help fill that void with an enduring presence. ( P 118 )