9 The Portrait ofIsabel Archer

In order to see the ghost ofGardencourt, Ralph Touchett tells

his cousin Isabel at the beginning of The Portrait ofa Lady, "You
must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained
some miserable knowledge." 1 Isabel, who as "a young, happy,
innocent person" evidently does not qualify, nevertheless re-
mains eager to see the ghost; and by the end of the novel, on
the night of Ralph's death, "she apparently had fulfilled the
necessary condition; for ... in the cold, faint dawn, she knew
that a spirit was standing by her bed" (II, 418). 2 It is as though a
quest has been achieved: she has sought her suffering and her
miserable knowledge, and found them. Dorothy Van Ghent
has seen Isabel's quest as being for happiness, 3 and so it is. But
Isabel is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, like a true
American, she is ardently engaged in life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness; but on the other she is morbidly at-
tracted by their opposites, and devotes herself to death, and
immobility, and suffering. She is enamoured of the ghost of
Gardencourt. It is this side of Isabel that I want to explore.
Suffering is fatally desirable to Isabel for several reasons. It
is for one thing the perverse desire of a mind, otherwise
healthy, that is yet preoccupied with its own health. Then, as
we know, "the old Protestant tradition had never faded from
Isabel's imagination" (II, 349), and the Protestant sanctifica-
tion of suffering goes hand in hand with its sense of guilt in
pleasure and luxury. And again, as the subject matter of great
art, and as involving the enlargement of consciousness, suffer-
ing appeals to that side of Isabel that reflects the aesthetic
movement: she strives, in Pater's phrase, to burn always with a
hard, gem-like flame, to make of her life a finely wrought
creation. It is this common element in the psychological,
moral and aesthetic strands of Isabel's character, as I read the
novel, that determines and creates her destiny.
With one part of herself Isabel is strenuously determined to
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J. McMaster et al., The Novel from Sterne to James
© Juliet and Rowland McMaster 1981
170 The Novel from Sterne to James

be happy, to hold misery at a distance. She is even rather

callously irritable when her suitors inflict their sorrows on
her- "You may be unhappy, but you shall not make me so.
That I can't allow", she tells Lord Warburton (I, 421). (It is one
of Osmond's shrewd moves in his courtship that he does not
play the melancholy lover, but tells her that his love, whether
fulfilled or not, gives him pleasure.) She is even almost
ashamed of suffering: "I have mentioned how passionately
she needed to feel that her unhappiness should not have come
to her through her own fault" ,James reminds us (II, 281); and
she feels half guilty of giving in to it, for "She could never rid
herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease -
of suffering as opposed to doing" (II, 173). And yet soon after
this we hear that for her suffering is not passive but rather
passionate: "Suffering, with Isabel, was an active condition; it
was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a passion of thought,
of speculation, of response to every pressure" (II, 189). It is
apparently while suffering that she is most vividly alive and
aware, and the part of her that seeks, as Pater directs, "not the
fruit of experience, but experience itself", 4 expands and de-
lights in the enlargement of consciousness. And so, for all her
energy in the pursuit of happiness, she is simultaneously
fascinated by unhappiness, and pursues that too. James
suggests this element of perversity in her, I think, in his phrase
in the preface, where he speaks of her "affronting" her de-
stiny (I, xii). There is a suggestion there of deliberate insult, of
wanton destruction of a potentially fortunate life pattern. 5 In
the symbolic setting of the room in her grandmother's house
to which Isabel retreats as a child, there is a locked door which
leads to an "unseen place on the other side- a place which
became to the child's imagination, according to its different
moods, a region of delight or of terror" (I, 30). Those are
indeed the alternating paths of Isabel's consciousness. At
times she is conscious of this fatal tendency in herself: that is
why, when she contemplates the placid content of the Misses
Molyneux, she almost admires them for being "not morbid, at
any rate",- because she has "occasionally suspected it as a
tendency of her own" (I, 104). And she is frequently explicit
about being afraid of herself.
In the figure of Warburton, it seems to me, James has taken
pains to present a man whom we are to take as the right