The prisoner

Abstract

With the triumphs of Roderick Hudson, ‘Daisy Miller’, and The American behind him, James was ready to write a new kind of novel. The Portrait of a Lady advances considerably the notion of realism represented by the Jane Austen-George Eliot school; to do this, James had to invent a hardier pioneer than had ever inhabited his fiction before. We can appreciate how much greater a vessel of consciousness than any previous Jamesian character his new heroine is if we compare the reactions of the good-hearted but limited Christopher Newman to Europe and those of Isabel Archer. When she visits Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the narrator notes that ‘her conception of greatness rose and rose’ and ‘after this it never lacked space to soar’ (p. 343). Everything she sees is new, even if she has already seen it; she visits the gallery of the Capitol with others to view the statuary, but when she re-visits it alone, even though ‘she had seen them all before … her enjoyment repeated itself, and it was all the greater because she was glad again, for the time, to be alone’ (p. 354). This may be contrasted with Newman’s dutiful visits to the great artworks of Europe and his complete willingness to adopt the attitudes toward them suggested by his Baedeker guide. Touring Greece, Turkey and Egypt with Madame Merle, ‘Isabel travelled rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cup after cup’ (p.374). And whereas Newman cheerfully forgets all the art he has seen, ‘Isabel … made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done, in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her handkerchief’ (p. 371).