Towards a Reparative Reading of “Portrait of a Lady”

Abstract

Controversy over Eliot’s representation of women and his treatment of them in life has only increased over time and will likely continue with the publication of his letters to Emily Hale. Many critics have examined Eliot’s misogynistic portrayal of women. Lyndall Gordon draws upon biographical materials to illustrate the stereotypes of femininity in Eliot’s writing: “Eliot chose to write about women as a baffling and alien creature, frozen in an image.”1 She summarizes the feminine stereotypes in Eliot’s Bostonian early poems as “the gushy romantic, the dangerous enchantress, the languid socialite.”2 The lady in “Portrait of a Lady” seems to fit into such gender stereotypes—a Bostonian socialite who goes to concerts and expresses gushy romantic views about music. The speaker in the poem despises her and tries to detach from her. Like Gordon, Rachel Potter also points out that Eliot associates bourgeois femininity with romantic egotism and that he also mocks “the cadences and sentiments of pretentious Boston drawing rooms.”3 Eliot’s portrayal of the lady appears offensive and misogynistic to many readers. However, Cyrena Pondrom approaches the gender issue in “Portrait” from another perspective and comes to a different conclusion. She argues that critics like Gordon have assumed that the portrayal of the lady in this poem is completely reliable while the lady’s sentimental and pretentious image is constructed simply by the male persona in quotation marks.4 Pondrom further argues that Eliot “refuses to ally with either figure in