"Unseen Place[s]," Unlifted Corners: Portrait's Narrative Gaps

Abstract

Abstract:James skips two significant temporal intervals of Isabel Archer's story: her formative year of travel, and the first three years of her marriage—the more studied ellipsis of The Portrait of a Lady. This essay takes the earlier ellipsis, James's sidestepping Isabel's year of travel—including her acceptance of Gilbert Osmond's proposal—as a case study for examining the novelist's use of both temporal and non-temporal narrative gaps, or ellipses and paralipses, to borrow the terms of Gérard Genette's narratology. James, I argue by reading (and re-reading) chapter 31 of Portrait, realizes his idea for the novel through its gaps.