"The discovery was tremendous": Sex, Secrets, and Selfhood in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

“Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was” (105), writes Henry James of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). What, however, is she? Is she “a young woman of extraordinary profundity . . . [and] a prodigy of learning” as her admirers think (103)? Or is she guilty of creating and inhabiting a fantasy life based in romantic ideals—“you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You’re not enough in contact with reality” (268)—as her friend Henrietta Stackpole accuses her? James writes Isabel as a series of images that refuse to coalesce into a singular figure with definitive motives, morals, feelings, and goals. In fact, Isabel’s main struggle is the development of a socially acceptable and therefore “cohesive” sense of self that is not formed relationally, that is, by and dependent on any given person—her uncle, her cousin, her best friend, her husband, his former lover, his daughter—or situation. In what follows, I address Isabel’s fragmented character development and the longstanding debate about whether James’s female characters ever achieve individuality and freedom from societal constraints. I question whether oft-valorized depictions of delineated individuality—in Lynn Huffer’s terms, an “overinvest[ment] in coherent narrative female subjects” (62)—should even be the desired goal. Engaging theories and conversations concerning what constitutes the subject—a self that is static, shattered, and/or split—I argue that Isabel Archer arrives at a fragmented, non-relational sense of self when she dwells in her emotions, decides to actively refuse the role of mother and thereby stalls the reproduction of a heteronormative future, and embraces the disintegration of her previous self-conceptions. In realizing her lack of desire for her husband, Gilbert Osmond, and in then choosing to weaponize her body in the emotional war he wages by refusing her role as vessel of reproductive futurity (i.e.,