The Portrait of a Lady (Library Binding)

Isabel Archer is a young woman who reads German idealist philosophy in the locked office at Albany that occludes a view of the street; an overly theoretic, though wonderfully fresh and earnest self-realizer. Unlike Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer is booked to grow up, and on that development James stakes his epic attempt to write a novel that will be a great work of art. Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the basis for James' attempt. It should suffice to say that this is a novel of "felix culpa", the fortunate fall, much like the Genesis story and even more like Milton's rewriting of it. But just as in Milton's poem, everything is pointed towards a definition of freedom. The novel certainly concerns the unexpectedly far-reaching consequences of a character's inadequacies of perception, and in that it is wholly reminiscent of "Daisy". But here alone we have a full development of necessity and freedom, circumstance and free will, in which each may take on the appearance of the other. The novel's Edenic Gardencourt is a declining, drowsy Eden. Isabel renews the vitality of this fatigued Eden. But for Isabel herself, once she struggles to an understanding of Gardencourt's high values, she will have to transform the lost place into an aspect of her spirit and have it inform her actions.

Isabel is in a league with the tradition of heroines in the British realistic novel, all of them remarkable but self-deluded, in need of an encounter with the real. Isabel's final choice to return to her old life is her triumph. Intelligent readers should understand the logic of a fortunate fall. She no longer sees giving herself completely as "the deepest thing", but understands the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. This new formulation is a huge advance, as it is no longer self-referential, but acknowledging a world in which the self participates. Her decision has nothing to do with resignation nor with duty. The self is understood, with Hawthorne and against Emerson, as a result of accumulated experience. Isabel must return to Osmond, as Hawthorne's Hester finally must return to the Boston that victimized her, to affirm her identity amongst her awful relatives. This is where her life has taken place, and anywhere else would mark not a fresh start but a dissolution. And with her return come a cluster of Miltonic allusions, turned on themselves: "The world lay before her - she could do whatever she chose". Isabel discovers "a very straight path", home to her struggle, her business, her life. Earlier, she had envied a watery death, and mistaken the devil for an instrument for expanding freedom. But now she sees the danger of false Edens. Instead, Isabel chooses to make her world. The novel embodies the national myth: an ideal of freedom and equality hedged with historical blindness and pride.