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Shaw discusses Isabel Archer, a character created by Henry James for his novel, "Portrait of a Lady." She considers how motion picture director Jane Campion chose to render the character in her film adaptation of the novel, noting that Campion made Isabel Archer into a feminist instead of portraying her the same way in which James had.

One of the most finely detailed and individual creations in Henry James's splendid gallery of characters, Isabel Archer continues to intrigue readers more than a century after her initial incarnation. Her climactic decision to return to Italy and an odious husband rather than stay in England with the love of her life has always provoked controversy. Director Jane Campion (The Piano) ended the recent film version of the novel at the point where Isabel must choose. Though otherwise remarkably faithful to its source, Campion's Portrait has quite a different impact on the viewer, one that suggests that the director was trying to save Isabel for feminism.

Some critics, and the novelist himself, have referred to Isabel as a tragic figure. 1, on the contrary, agree with her insightful cousin Ralph that she was victimized by her own inauthenticity. On his deathbed, Ralph summed it up admirably: "You wanted to look at life for yourself-but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish.You were ground in the very mill of the conventional" (James 503). The following will chronicle her victimization by social custom, arguing that her submission to conventional values renders her a poor candidate for tragic heroine. It will also analyze the differences between the film and the novel, and contend that the former leaves an even less tragic impression than the latter.

Isabel Archer: An Innocent Abroad

Isabel enters British high society like a whirlwind. The orphaned relation of rich Aunt Lydia Touchett (who discovers the naive young idealist gathering, dust in a dingy corner of Albany), Isabel is an innocent abroad, who revitalizes the stale aristocracy with her vibrant energy. She immediately distinguishes herself by turning down the proposal of a highly desirable English lord. Lord Warburton has merit in her eyes:

His quality was a mixture of the effect of rich experience... with a modesty at times almost boyish; the wholesome savor of which-it was as agreeable as something tasted-lost nothing from the addition of a tone of respectable kindness. "I like your English gentleman very much." Isabel said to Ralph after Lord Warburton had gone. (James 59)

Yet his merit was beside the point.

Isabel refuses Warburton's proposal for what are apparently admirable reasons. Possessed of a high opinion of herself, Isabel does not wish to cave into conventional expectations, which she felt inappropriate for a woman of her caliber.

Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish then with, a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one the impression of having intentions of her own. (James 53)

Those intentions did not include living the sheltered existence of an affluent nineteenth-- century wife. Protesting that "It's not my fate to give up-I know it can't be (James 112). Isabel shocks everyone around her with her refusal.

In her explanation to Warburton, Miss Archer revealed a morbidity typical of late Romantics: "I can't escape unhappiness .... In marrying you I shall be trying to" (James 112). She wishes to face "the usual chances and dangers" that most people confront everyday, and from which she thinks such a marriage would shelter her. Her unexpected decision seems to free her from all custom, at least temporarily. As her aunt said, "I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything.... After that one needn't stand on trifles" (James 117). She already spurned the attentions of Horatio Algeresque's character Caspar Goodwood back in Albany, and she was not about to succumb to the more refined temptations of social reformer Lord Warburton either.

A proto-feminist at times, Isabel is acutely aware ol how men define women with their gaze, and their expectations. Being out of Caspar Goodwood's sight is a prospect that pleases her immensely: "If you were in the same place, I should feel you were watching me, and I don't like that-I like my liberty too much. If there's a thing in this world I'm fond of... it's my personal independence" (James 138). The question is whether she indeed becomes truly autonomous and independent.

One of Isabel's most impressive traits is her ability to stir feelings of love in virtually every man she meets. Cousin Ralph Touchett, the most sympathetic male character in the novel, also worships her from afar. He will neither own up to his passion, nor act on it, because of his deep conviction that cousins shouldn't marry and because he suffers from a soon-to-be-fatal case of consumption (tuberculosis). He thinks it unfair to saddle this dynamo with his dying self, so he becomes her protector rather than her lover.

In that role, he makes a decision that will seal Isabel's fate. He convinces his dying father to leave her a substantial fortune. Saying that he would "like to put a little wind in her sails," Ralph proposes that he split his inheritance with his cousin. He would like to make her rich, without her knowing: "I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination" (James 157). He had the best of intentions: "She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free" (James 158). But, ironically, it is this generous act that will prove to be Isabel's undoing.

It is at the death vigil for the elder Touchett that Isabel meets Madame Merle, whose impact on our heroine's future will be so decisive. Merle is the model of cultivated taste and self-possession, a wholly social animal and a truly mysterious person. While apparently harmless, she is the spider that will lure Miss Archer into the web of Gilbert Osmond. Unbeknownst to Isabel, Merle was Osmond's lover several years prior to her arrival on the scene. Merle bore him the daughter he attributes to his dead first wife, and then was abandoned by him for her lack of funds. Merle quickly resolves to put Isabel in Gilbert's way, hoping that he will fall for her and make them all rich.

Osmond is the epitomal aesthete, a type that turned up often in novels of the period (e.g. in Room with a View and The Portrait of Dorian Grey). An expatriate American who has settled in Italy, Osmond has no profession, though he amuses himself with lithography. His only claim to fame is a remarkable art collection which includes several Old Masters. Marriage to Isabel furnishes him with the riches to realize his aesthetic vision; for her part, Isabel was uncomfortable with her newfound wealth, and was happy to put it in the service of such exquisite taste.

In the beginning, he truly found her fascinating. She was a rarity in her time: a beautiful woman who could think, and truly appreciate his collection. He remarked that "It polishes me up a little to talk with you-not that I venture to pretend I can turn that very complicated lock I suspect your intellect of being" (James 222). Indeed, though he gets her to marry him, he never really unlocks her mind or heart.

For her part, Isabel is attracted to Osmond's aesthetic way of life, so antithetical to Goodwood's business savvy or Warburton's reformer zeal: "Her mind contained no class offering a natural place to Mr. Osmond-he was a specimen apart" (James 225). Initially, she finds Gilbert's cultivated indifference to most of what appeals to the majority to be his most endearing quality. He is extremely attentive, graceful, and witty, with an ironic insouciance that distances him from the world of everyday cares and concerns. While Goodwood and Warburton are constantly driven to goal-directed activity, Osmond appears to sit passively and contemplate the beauties of life.

Almost every one of her acquaintances disapproved of her alliance with Gilbert Osmond. Even the Countess Gemini, his own sister, was inclined to warn her off, holding back only out of family loyalty. But Isabel welcomed such resistance; indeed, it may have been a decisive factor: "This dislike was not alarming to Isabel; she scarcely even regretted it; for it served mainly to throw into higher relief the fact, in every way so honorable, that she married to please herself' (James 305). While marriage to Goodwood or Warburton would have been found fitting by most of her friends, it was precisely their social acceptability that helped drive her away from them.

Isabel's decision to marry Osmond had questionable motives. That her attraction was only heightened by her friend's reservations proved that she was still in the thrall of convention, just as the adolescent who does the opposite of what he: parents command is simply a rebel. There are several points in the novel where it appears that Isabel's sense of self-- esteem and power stems from her ability to make others suffer, by violating what are usually their quite reasonable expectations. Recent James biographer Sheldon Novick described the function of Warburton as follows: "This attractive and desirable figure was made to fall in love with Isabel, and the reader was allowed to see her innocent pleasure in the exercise of power over him" (Novick 421). The omniscient narrator in Portrait called it: " the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of someone else" (James 306).

The novel next shifts to Rome, over three years later, where the Osmonds have set up rather extravagant housekeeping. Despite their Thursday evening parties being the talk of the town, Isabel is desperately unhappy. She and Osmond have opposing views on almost every issue, and he insists on her absolute submission. His ideal relationship is the one that he has carefully fashioned with Pansy, who follows his every whim like a dutiful daughter. Pansy is his ultimate creation, a virtual puppet with no will of her own. She doesn't know what to think about a thing until her father tells her. Though she loves Ned Rozier. a social climber reminiscent of Osmond himself, she is willing to marry Lord Warburton because it pleased her father that she make an alliance with a rich English Lord.

Cousin Ralph, always the catalyst in Isabel's life, arrives in Rome, worn out and nearly dead, accompanied by Lord Warburton. Soon after, Henrietta Stackpole enters the Eternal City with Caspar Goodwood once again in tow. Isabel would like nothing more than to get rid of them all as soon as possible, for the facade behind which she hides her desperation takes a good deal of energy to maintain. The anticipated proposal from Warburton to Pansy never materializes, once he realized in discussions with Ralph that he toyed with Pansy as a pretext for being around Isabel. Osmond is suspicious and cruel, accusing his wife of blocking Warburton's advances, and intercepting his (never posted) letter of proposal.

If that wasn't pressure enough, Goodwood makes another appeal, and has to be repulsed. Then Ralph decides it is time to leave for England, so that he may die at his boyhood home. Henrietta, and a reluctant Caspar (at Mrs. Osmond's request) join Ralph as his traveling companions. A guilty Isabel, who, at her husband's insistence, had seen little of Ralph while he was in Rome, promises to come if she is summoned to his deathbed.

Aunt Touchett does so as the crisis nears, and Isabel promptly departs. though her husband explicitly forbade her to go. She has a confrontation with Madame Merle, during which time "It had come over her like a high-surging wave that Mrs. Touchett was right. Madame Merle had married her" (James 401). Merle intimates that she has had everything to do with Isabel's fate. Then the floodgates are opened. First Countess Gemini tells her that Pansy is the daughter of Madame Merle. Then, encountering Merle at Pansy's convent on her way out of the country, the last piece of the puzzle falls into place when Merle surmises that cousin Ralph is the one who made her rich.

Isabel finally realizes that a velvet trap had been set for her. As NYU professor Tenley Williams put it in a recent critical summary of the novel: "Isabel realizes that her marriage to Osmond had not been her own choice, after all. That choice had been arranged by Madame Merle" (Bloom 26). Certainly the extent of the fraud perpetrated on her mitigated her obligation to uphold her vows.

At Gardencourt, Isabel is frank with Ralph for the first time since her marriage, which he vehemently opposed. She admits how unhappy she is, acknowledging that Osmond only married her for her money. They reconcile in a touching scene, which is closely followed by his death. After Ralph's funeral, Caspar Goodwood takes his last shot. His love has been as constant as the North Star, and he begs Isabel to leave her husband and follow her heart. Their long awaited embrace, on the next to last page of the novel, is electric:

His kiss was like white lightening, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. (James 515)

Yet Isabel leaves Gardencourt the next day, without a word for poor Caspar, departing for Rome on the following morning.

Isabel's decision to return to Osmond has generated a good deal of critical ink. Is it really so unexpected? She was never much of an iconoclast; her friend Henrietta Stackpole shocked her with relatively mild unconventional ities. When Isabel became acquainted with Lord Warburton's reformist views, she was nonplussed. He fought for the future; Isabel had another opinion: "But if I were he, I should wish to fight to the death: I mean for the heritage of the past. I should hold it tight" (James 63). This profound difference in their attitudes may be another reason why she refused Warburton's proposal. She was far more conservative than he.

One of the aspects of the novel that tends to make it tragic is the inevitability of Isabel's choice. J. I. M. Stewart may have exaggerated the case in Eight Modern Writers when he claimed that "The subject of The Portrait of a Lady is Isabel's illusion of freedom, where actually the whole course of her life is determined" (Stewart 91-92). But his basic insight that her choice followed in a probable or necessary fashion from what went before is a sound one. I also agree with Stewart's observation that"... she thinks she is laying hold on life. But really her cultural heritage-including the simple fact that she is a lady-is laying hold on her" (Stewart 91). Ultimately, and inevitably, Isabel must be seen as bowing to convention.

When Isabel first lets down her guard to Henrietta, and admitted her misery, Miss Stackpole reasonably suggested that she should leave Osmond. Isabel responds with the most sincere statement of her motives to date:

I don't know whether I'm too proud, but I can't publish my mistake. I don't think that's decent. I'd much rather die .... I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't change that way. (James 426, emphasis added)

It is revealing to note the subject term in her last statement.

Martin Heidegger has observed that, when people wish to talk about themselves in a conventional fashion, they use the locution "One" ("das Mann" in German) (Heidegger, 149-69). It is an inauthentic ploy in his eyes, a depersonalization of choice that avoids confronting the radical freedom that we possess as autonomous individuals. If Isabel cannot change in that fashion, then her remaining true to her commitments is of no moral significance. It is precisely because she could choose to do otherwise that her return to Osmond and Pansy has moral worth. For Heidegger, however, the question of whether an action is authentic (eigentlich) is prior to the question of whether it is moral. To run away from autonomous choice is inauthentic, for it shrinks from confronting our real human potentialities.

Isabel treats her vow to return to Pansy rather flippantly. When Henrietta asks her why she promised such a thing, Isabel admits, "I'm not sure I myself see now"(James 493). By her own admission, there is little Isabel can do to ameliorate Pansy's unhappiness, as long as the girl is adamant in her submission to her father's will. Henrietta presses her for her reasons, finding it incomprehensible that Isabel would be willing to return to such a hellish world. Again, Isabel's response is tepid: "In default of a better, my having promised will do" (James 493). This is far from the statement of a passionate commitment; indeed, that way of putting it seems rather to be an expression of a reluctant bowing to convention.

We must speculate about the impact of Goodwood's kiss on Isabel, as we are not allowed a glimpse of her thereafter. I suspect that her feelings were intensely ambivalent: her attraction to his electricity is evident, but she must have feared his potential power over her as well. Isabel describes the impact of the series of associations that the kiss triggered as follows: "So had she heard of those wrecked and under waler following a train of images before they sink" (James 515-16). It does not sound as if she relished such a loss of control.

In spite of Gilbert Osmond's best efforts, Isabel retained her individuality and independence within their marriage. She would not submit to his will, nor did she favor him any longer with her love. If she was miserable, he was at least unhappy. Gilbert had an inordinate need to be worshipped, which his wife did not fulfill. Returning to her husband was ultimately a safe choice, precisely because she did not love him, though continuing to live with him might well turn out to break her spirit in the long run.

With Caspar Goodwood, on the other hand, she was in danger of losing herself in passion. His will equalled her own, as his desperate four-year vigil demonstrated. He neither gave up nor had given in, and, in the moment of their kiss. she finally had to confront the attraction she had denied for years. Her prompt flight from the scene suggests that she was as much concerned with getting away from Goodwood as she was with returning to Pansy and honoring her promise.

As to her marriage to Osmond, surely the collusion between him and Madame Merle introduced an element of deception that made Isabel's choice less that perfectly free and deliberate. If she had known beforehand the extent to which her wealth motivated Gilbert's proposal, and had she recognized what a narrow and domineering fellow he really was, she would never have married him. More than anything else, it was her inability to publish her mistake to the world that stopped her from suing for divorce.

It was in this sense that she had been ground in the very mill of the conventional. An erstwhile iconoclast, Isabel could not bring herself to violate social convention in such a public fashion when the chips were down. She no longer cared for Osmond, and her commitment to Pansy has been shown to be quite tenuous. So her true motivation must have been a combination of her constitutional inability to flout social customs and her deeply ingrained tendency to flee from Goodwood's passion, and his gaze.

Neither of these motives is particularly noble or laudable, in my estimation. Rather than carrying out her project of garnering the greatest breadth of experience possible, and becoming who she was in the process, Isabel ran away from many of the risks that an authentic life had to offer, and settled for a narrow and severely constricted horizon of choice. Most suitors initially put on a deceptive facade to impress their beloveds, and Madame Merle was only subtly persuasive in setting up the match. Merle and Osmond are no lagos, and theirs is a comparatively run-of-the-mill brand of subterfuge and evil, that does not mitigate Isabel's responsibility as much as lago's masterly deception mitigates Othello's. Like many people, she got what she settled for.

Isabel chose her cage, and admitted as much to Ralph in the exchange that triggered their estrangement. Noting his failure to congratulate her on her betrothal, he explained, "'I think I've hardly got over my surprise,' he went on at last, `You were the last person I expected to get caught.' 'I don't know why you call it caught.' `Because you are going to be put into a cage.' `If I like my cage, that needn't trouble you,' she answered" (James 298). It is at the end of this discussion that she vows never to share her troubles with him again. She only breaks that vow on his death bed.

So, what I have been arguing is that Isabel Archer/Osmond remains a pitiable figure throughout the second half of Portrait of a Lady. Most of her suffering is due to her bowing to conventionality, a character flaw that does not cast her in a noble light. Rather than remaining true to her project of garnering the greatest breadth of experience possible, Isabel settled into a quiet and secluded little corner of the world, safely ensconced within the narrow confines of Gilbert's dilettantism. While she did not find love, she did not experience true heartbreak either, though I suspect that her spirit would eventually wither under the incessant displeasure of Gilbert Osmond.

As such, Isabel remains a pitiable character, for the waste of her life's potentials is mostly her fault, and could have been avoided had she dared to become who she was. Rather than a feeling of esteem for her resolutely carrying out her obligations, I simply feel sad that she could not break free of social mores and demonstrate the courage of her unconventional convictions.

Campion's Portrait

Fresh from the smashing success of The Piano, New Zealand director Jane Campion took on the Moby Dick of the woman's novel, The Portrait of a Lady. Critical reviews at the time were less than laudatory, and, save for a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Barbara Hershey (Madame Merle), the Academy pretty much overlooked her efforts as well. But Campion's version of Portrait is remarkably faithful to the original, using more of James's original dialogue than any such adaptation with which I am familiar.

Unlike The Piano, which was an original story by Campion, most of the audience for Portrait had already read the book, and formed their own mental pictures of the main characters. Furthermore, this director was unwilling to conform to the highly realistic conventions followed in the Merchant-Ivory treatments of literary classics. She used many jazzy cinematic techniques, including canted frames, Charlie Chaplin-style silent movie excerpts, and even surrealistic dream sequences. Some worked, some didn't, but all such departures from Hollywood realism were jarring to most in the audience.

But it is not the critical and box office failure of the film that will be the subject of this section. The present analysis will focus on a single question: is the film version more or less tragic than the original novel? I will argue that it is strikingly less tragic, because it short-- circuits the feeling of inevitability that is so crucial to tragedy. But first let me rehearse the main differences between the novel and Campion's adrirable film.

Campion opens the film with a series of precious voice-overs from contemporary Australian teen-agers about their romantic attitudes. She then cuts directly to a scene not in the novel, which has Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant) expanding on his proposal to her while she sits under a tree at Gardencourt. The scene, and the casting, is rather curious. Warburton is described in the book as an energetic and handsome member of the aristocracy, who would be more appropriately embodied in my estimation by a healthy Christopher Reeve. Richard E. Grant has usually played rather prissy and smug decadents (a fashion designer in Ready to Wear, Anais Nin's compliant husband in Henry and June) that were hardly the embodiments of vigor and vitality.

In so doing, Campion stacked the deck in favor of Isabel's rejection of Warburton. Without being introduced to her, we are forced to identify with her refusal of a kind of smarmy English lord who is concerned whether she likes the moat around his estate. Her decision becomes far less controversial as a result, and appears less difficult than it should have been. By contrast, the choice of Viggo Mortensen (described in Microsoft Cinemania as having a "handsome, yet edgy, even threatening, European appearance") to play Caspar Goodwood makes him a more attractive alternative than he is in the novel (where Isabel described him as "ugly"). In the performance of her career, Nicole Kidman does surprisingly well in capturing the torment of Isabel. But somehow, the tragic aspirations of the novel are largely lost.

Another problem is how undeveloped Osmond is in the film. John Malkovich has made a career out of playing bad guys since Dangerous Liaisons, and so it is hard for the audience to understand how Isabel overlooks his connivances. We are allowed little insight into the basis for Isabel's attraction, grounded as it is in his aestheticism. While it may be true that Hollywood-conditioned audiences are not ready for discourses on medieval bibelots, it is crucial to his appeal that he impresses Isabel with his superior aesthetic taste. As a result, in the words of Roger Ebert, "In the novel, Isabel marries him because she is an idealist, but in the movie, because she is a masochist" (Ebert). While that masochism is surely present in her character in the novel, it is not the most prominent element in her choice. If Campion made Warburton too easy to reject, she made Osmond too hard to accept.

In the previous section, I contended that Isabel doesn't make a particularly good tragic protagonist, because she bows to the conventional mores of society rather than carries out her authentic project. But her choice to return to Osmond does have two aspects that are characteristically tragic: 1) It follows in a probable or necessary fashion from her character as we have come to know it up to that point; and 2) she chooses, at great personal cost, to carry out a commitment she had previously made. She certainly falls from happiness to misery as a result. I can't escape the feeling that James himself approved of her decision to return, from a moral point of view, and that we are meant to esteem her mature responsibility. Unlike Flaubert's Madame Bovary, who came in for James's moral disapprobation, Mrs. Osmond (expectably) does the right thing.

Campion's film, however, ends prematurely. Caspar Goodwood meets her at the same tree under which Warburton expanded on his proposal in the second scene. Ever resilient, he once again protests his love; she begs him to leave; they kiss, and she runs away through the snow. The jerky slow motion that has become so popular in Hollywood of late kicks in, and the last shot is of a rather bemused looking Isabel in freeze frame, standing in the door-way to Gardencourt (where Ralph has insisted she remain after his death), considering her options.

To a viewer who had never read the novel, the natural assumption would be that Isabel could go either way, back to Osmond or away with Goodwood. Campion makes it appear as if Isabel is in control of her fate, when, in reality, she had to return to Osmond to remain true to the character James had created. While she made the right choice in terms of Victorian morality, it has always given feminists trouble as an unliberated and inauthentic decision. Like Nora in A Doll's House, they would have had her storming out some time earlier. In saving Isabel for feminism, Campion sacrificed her tragic patina. The Isabel of the film version could very well decide to go with Caspar Goodwood, and that's precisely the problem.