Henry James: Portrait of a Lady

[vison]

I got a lovely leather-bound gold-trimmed edition of this book at Value Village last week. From what I can see the book was never read, I don't think it had even been opened. Out of one of those fancy sets, I guess.

So I have struggled through the first chapter and I have to say, I hate this book so far. It's one I always thought I "should" read, but having said that, I'm not sure I can do it.

Was there a five-dollar way of saying a five-cent thing? If there was, James said it. He sure loved them big words. He sure loved to be indirect. He sure loved to be oblique.

He's a bore.

See, Trollope never bores me.

I will tuff it out, I expect. But I think it's going to be a long haul.

[Pearly Di]

I find Henry James completely indigestible.

I had to study 'What Maisie Knew' at university.

I don't know which I found more tedious, 18th century literature or Henry James.

[vison]

Well, I got to the part where Lord Warburton proposes and Isabel turns him down.

Now, see, I KNEW she was going to do that, since if she wasn't the book would have ended really quick. I gotta say this girl is incomprehensible: I do NOT mean that as a compliment to the writer having created a complex and interesting character, I mean she's incomprehensible as a human being whether "real" or "fictional". She makes no sense as a person, her motivations are a mystery but not in the way James evidently intended them to be a mystery.

Lord Warburton is a stick figure. Cousin Ralph is a ??? what? The guy comes across as being a drug addict, but I suppose he's not. Then we get to Henrietta Stackpole: this is bizarre. Another incomprehensible woman --- and, again, her incomprehensibleness is not a compliment to the writer but the exact opposite.

And I am so sick of this "America" vs "English" crap. Holy, holy, holy cow, talk about twee and pretentious and pointless. Trollope did it a little bit in The America Senator and again in the character of Isabel Boncassen in The Duke's Children, but Trollope did not go on and on and on and on and on about the yawning gulf of misunderstanding between the two great nations, yawn, yawn, yawn.

So, can any kind soul here satisfy my very mild curiosity? I did something I have done only once before in my life: I read the last pages of the book and guess what? I'm no wiser. It still makes no sense. I gather at some point Isabel married some guy named Osborne and that Lord Warburton is going to get married and then I gave up, I thought, for the luvva pete, this sux.

Can someone just give me a quick rundown of the plot?


And this is James' masterpiece, eh?

*sighs with disbelief*

[Primula Baggins]

<hauls down Oxford Companion to English Literature, also known as the Cheat Sheet>

SPOILERS FOR PORTRAIT OF A LADY

. . . Isabel refuses the offer of marriage of a typical English peer, the excellent Lord Warburton, and of a bulldog-like New Englander, Casper Goodwood, to fall a victim, under the influence of the slightly sinister Madam Merle (another cosmopolitan American), to a worthless and spiteful dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, who marries her for her fortune and ruins her life; but to whom she remains loyal in spite of her realization of his vileness.

I gather you would say she had it coming.

[themary]

Oh no Prim! I recently obtained a copy of Portrait of a Lady because I was on an obsessive mission to find a certain kind of book from Barnes and Noble that was discontinued.

I haven't started reading it yet and now I'm a little intimidated I hope it gets better *gulp*.

Speaking of Trollope I've read chapters 4 and 5 with complete understanding woohoo but there is another thread for that !!!

[vison]

<hauls down Oxford Companion to English Literature, also known as the Cheat Sheet>

SPOILERS FOR PORTRAIT OF A LADY

. . . Isabel refuses the offer of marriage of a typical English peer, the excellent Lord Warburton, and of a bulldog-like New Englander, Casper Goodwood, to fall a victim, under the influence of the slightly sinister Madam Merle (another cosmopolitan American), to a worthless and spiteful dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, who marries her for her fortune and ruins her life; but to whom she remains loyal in spite of her realization of his vileness.

I gather you would say she had it coming.

I never even thot of digging out the Oxford. What a sap. Well, I haven't quit yet, anyway. I'm in Florence and Madame Merle is about to introduce Isabel to Osmond.

Now, see, I just find these people so unrealistic. I guess they existed, by all accounts James was one of them himself, but all they do is swan about and all James does is sorta admire them for swanning about. I, myself, would have thought that Osmond more or less had a "I am a Villain" sign tattooed on his forehead, but, as James would put it, "Isabel could not read the clouds that gathered about his grizzled head and the atmosphere of his rooms and the Spanish altar cloths bemused her . . ." I wrote to a friend and mentioned that I'm reading this and here's what my friend had to say: "nothing much happens, and if something does happen, it happens "offstage". No one gets anything they want, and everyone ends up being miserable for the rest of their lives." So far, she's absolutely right.

Isabel is an idiot. It's hard to think she is ever, ever gonna suffer enough to make up for her stupidity. Moreover, I don't think I am ever going to love her the way I love Lily Dale, for instance.

She makes Lily Dale seem very reasonable.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm more than a little tickled that my Oxford Companion to English Literature was my parting gift from the neurology research lab I worked in for six years in Los Angeles while earning my Ph.T. (Putting hubby Through) degree.

Particularly considering that what we actually talked about and listened to in the lab was "All My Children" and other soaps, on another tech's radio that received TV audio. We would listen to that while carrying out ticklish experiments with dangerous parasites (we doubled as a parasitology lab studying schistosomes) and radioisotopes. At major emotional crises we would step away from the bench and hold our hands away from everything lest in our excitement we should contaminate something we would then have to scrub for an hour.

Fun times, fun times.

Now that I think of it, we all probably had more fun than the richest Henry James lady going.

[Teremia]

There was a period when every time I was in the car with my own hubby, to speak of intellectual hubbies, I would have to listen to the next 7 minutes of Henry James on Books-on-Tape.

I would absolutely marvel at those sentences! those paragraphs! that wander around and get so abstractly, thoroughly lost! Henry James was an alien being, friends and neighbors: his mind was coded in some fundamentally alien way, and we will never quite comprehend what he was going on about.

That's my theory, anyway.

[vison]

I think your theory has a great deal of validity.

I am toiling along with this book. Toiling is the word. It isn't the worst book I ever read, but it's on the list of the hardest. He is just so WORDY. And yet, having used pretty well all the words available on any given topic, he still hasn't been able to explain it so a linear thinker like me, an ordinary human mortal earthdweller, can understand or visualize what he describes.

Rooms in shadows, full of "fine" things. He must use the word "fine" more than any other word but "clear". I bet one of those people who count words could say. And the daughter, Pansy. Sheesh!!! He keeps calling her a child, a little girl, but she's 16 for pete's sake!!! Is she a midget or something? She's "clear" and "fine". A blank slate, educated by nuns. She comes across as a simpleton.

Was there really this expatriate population lounging about Italy in those days? I suppose there must have been because they keep turning up. Even in "What Katy Did Next" they turned up.

And then Isabel is such a fool. I would have snapped Warburton up in a jiffy, or Goodwood. Poor Caspar. Names like Caspar weren't always funny. Ezekiel, Zebediah. Jethro.

Madame Merle. Now there's a character. The only one I can grasp, actually, reminding me of Lucinda Roanoke's aunt, can't remember her name. Mrs. . . .something or other, in Trollope.

Ya know. This book is getting to me and I do not like it.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

I read a book of short stories with a variety of authors, and to my recolllection, the only one I hated was the one by Henry James.

Oddly, the Henry James story was one that the editor singled out as approaching perfection in the short story form (or some such nonsense). The sentence structure was unnecessarily convoluted; the characters and their motivations were close to incomprehensible.

Almost everything else in the book was quite good.

Best Short Stories of the Modern Age (ed. Douglas Angus)

BrianIs AtYou

[vison]

Often the stories gathered in these collections are not the author's best work, as far as I'm concerned. They are sometimes chosen just to show off the editor's sophistication: "I'm smarter than you and have better taste and you think that was a good story by Mr. X and here's the one that's REALLY the best." Hm. Just like a Henry James character, come to think of it.

One American writer who is just NOT given his due is John O'Hara. His novels, by and large, are simply not as good as his short stories. His short stories are wonderful. But he's not admired by the people who decide these things. He wasn't a very nice man. But then, neither was Tolstoy.

But there is no doubt that of those writers still writing, Alice Munro is the Queen --- no, the Ruler of All the Short Story universe. She cannot be matched, let alone beat.

[Jnyusa]

Wow, I must be from Mars. I like Henry James a lot.

... but to whom she remains loyal in spite of her realization of his vileness.

This is possibly his most recurring theme; that people inherit these burdens of class, status, expectations based on gender and they feel they must remain loyal to them, even to the point of destroying their own lives. The characters are drawn with deliberate artificialness, I think, because James' point about them is that they are artificial and try as they might to be real they never quite manage it.

There are two stories of his that I particularly like. One is entitled "The Real Thing" about a married couple who are aging, impoverished nobility trying to find means of subsistence in a class system that will not allow them to work. The other is ... "Madame de Mauve" (?) about a woman who marries a philaderer, and even though she manages to defy convention and follow her own notions of honor, she finds that her own notions become as much a prison as the conventions that she broke.

Yes, he's verbose, and the English-American thing wears thin as a plot device, but I think he has a rather nice, wry eye for turn of the century class strictures.

[vison]

Well, as I said above, the book is telling on me. Like water dripping on a rock.

There are a few nice bits.

But I prefer Trollope, on the whole, who covered a lot of the same ground.

Trollope's women - women of that era generally, remained "loyal" to their rotten menfolk. In novels, anyway. Some went so far as to refuse to SEE the rotteness, most saw it and took it as their share of "for better or for worse" and "still loved the guy". Or Lily, who never even married the brute, still loving Crosby.


It's awfully hard to make out what Isabel thinks. To say that the whole book is taken up with that very subject, I never feel for one second that I can enter her mind. I believe this is not a failure of imagination on my part, but the truth that the reader must repeatedly bash her head against the stone wall of Jame's thick prose until eventually some inkling pops up. Is it worth the suffering? I guess I won't know until I finish it.

But my goodness. My friend was right when she said "nothing happens and when it does it happens off stage". This is why it is so frustrating, because, yes, I know that we are to see things through the filter of Isabel's sensibilities, etc., but she doesn't TELL us anything, even in the most indirect fashion. We have to try to read her thoughts in the steam rising from the coffee her servant brings her in the garden . . . and because James' style is so turgid and thick and dense with underbrush under the underbrush, it is easy to miss something important! I had to go back to find out when Isabel went off for a year. And I am a fairly attentive reader.

Obviously, however, he has succeeded in drawing me in. Yet, why should I care about Isabel? She is not an attractive girl, like, say Elizabeth Bennet. I remember when we were reading Pride and Prejudice that MariaHobbit said she just couldn't be bothered reading about such "useless" women, and I wonder what she would say if she met Isabel Archer?

What is her life? She was "poor". No, she wasn't Poor. She was not rich, which is a different thing. Then she got rich. And then she married. She married a man whose life consists of liking pretty things and thinking he's too fine for the common run of humanity, and she enters open-eyed into this marriage, actually proud of the fact that this creep doesn't do anything. There are so many hints that Osborne's sexuality is "off". And not even in her own country, where presumably she could have had a life of some kind. Oh, no. America is not good enough for these people, and I should like to know why, beyond the obvious. There is NO beyond the obvious --- they are sensualists, shallowminded, fond of pleasure, have nothing to do and all day to do it in. No perfection of "their rooms" (a phrase I loathe, btw), no perfection of style or knowledge of old laquer, can endow these people with worth. And silly Isabel, with her highmindedness and energy and intelligence fell for the very first one who set a trap for her.

In some ways she's much like Alice Vavasour in Can You Forgive Her? but at least Alice came to her senses before it was too late.

btw: I think it's one of the biggest differences between then and now, not to state the obvious: that conviction that you had to stick with a bad marriage.

[baby tuckoo]

for vison and her potent observations . . . as aways.