The Portrait of a Lady

This section of the novel opens with the scene in which Madame Merle suggests Isabel as a prospect for Gilbert, which reintroduces The Politics of Marriage. The scene is a departure from the majority of the novel to this point, because it does not include Isabel. Instead, the narrator opens with the image of Gilbert, Pansy, and the nuns who have brought her home from the convent. The narrator also indicates the passage of time, “some six months after old Mr Touchett’s death” and suggests that the scene “might have been described by a painter as composing well” (231). This narrative distance from Isabel is important because this is the scene that begins to determine her fate. The fact that she is removed both from the conversation and by narrative distance highlights her lack of determination over her own destiny.

The Countess also speaks to Madame Merle about the potential marriage between Gilbert and Isabel, and she plans to warn Isabel of it because she knows her brother’s poor character. She suggests that Isabel is going to be sacrificed and that her brother is “very hard to satisfy[, which] makes [her] tremble for [Isabel’s] happiness!” (275). James thus suggests the gender politics of marriage by representing the institution as negative for women and aligned more to duty and obligation than happiness.

The Interplay Between Freedom and Gender also appears, as Isabel continues to be charmed by her experience of Europe. James prefigures the contrast that will appear in the next section of the novel, after Isabel’s marriage to Gilbert: between her initial freedom to experience the world and her later domestic suffocation. In Rome, the narrator notes, “From the Roman past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field” (290). The passage connotes both the openness of the future and flight, and ominous circling that suggests vultures. Of Florence, Isabel thinks that “to live in such a place was […] to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake” (250). The New York edition (See: Background) foreshadows the shift from freedom and interest to imprisonment. However, this is an instance in which the revision made the text more suggestive and removed an explicit reference to entrapment. The first edition included Isabel’s reflection that “At first it had struck her as a sort of prison; but very soon its prison-like quality became a merit […] the spirit of the past was shut up there” (589). This is an example of James’s revision moving from explicit reference to oblique suggestion.