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Henry James's the Portrait of a Lady Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 11 | 2015 Expressions of Environment in Euroamerican Culture / Antique Bodies in Nineteenth Century British Literature and Culture Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus Value and Surplus Enjoyment Jacques Sohier Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/7229 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.7229 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Jacques Sohier, “Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus Value and Surplus Enjoyment”, Miranda [Online], 11 | 2015, Online since 20 July 2015, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/7229 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ miranda.7229 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus ... 1 Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus Value and Surplus Enjoyment Jacques Sohier 1 The germ of this article comes from a reaction to a shift in language. The French translation of the title The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James is Portrait de Femme.1 And Jane Campion’s 1986 film in its French version has retained the same title. James who was a self-conscious writer with a love of French literature and language would have frowned on this inadequate translation because it not only tones down the artistic banner he chose for his novel, but it also alters the problematics of the novel. A lady can only be in French une grande dame, someone “clever, cold, self-possessed, ineffably elegant” (James, Literary Criticism 64), as the master himself wrote in a critical paper on Balzac. 2 The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of ladyhood in order to grasp Henry James's artistic vision. A lady is a woman, necessarily, and as James imagines her, she goes through cultural and ontological processes that turn her into a lady. These processes that imply sacrificing oneself to high ideals, ultimately give the lady a Christian aura. As we shall see, elaborate social and religious apparatuses akin to the famous state apparatuses described by Louis Althusser are involved in the formation of a lady. A series of ideological constraints conspire to fashion a lady of substance, and subtle distinctions are to be made as is suggested by the quotation from the novel, “‘The ladies will save us,’ said the old man, ‘that is the best of them will—for I [Daniel Touchett] make a difference between them” (23). The saving grace of the lady entails a working through of experience on the part of the individual. Dorothy Van Ghent has called this process “an ordeal of knowledge of evil” (680), whose end product is artistically and religiously an assumption. We may say a true lady rises to glory. She does so by undergoing a transfiguration, a metamorphosis. She also rises to glory in the Miranda, 11 | 2015 Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus ... 2 eyes of the beholder who places her on a pedestal to be adored as the untouchable “Thing,” in the Freudian sense, that is to say someone who is taboo and can only be admired from a distance. 3 To analyze James’s ideal of ladyhood, I shall begin by underlining the contrast he draws between the jeune fille and the American girl to show that James defies expectations by constructing a New World lady with Old World attributes. Then, I shall highlight the differences in various portraits of women the better to distinguish the characteristics of the fledgling lady. Lastly, I shall concentrate on the matrix of discourses that Jacques Lacan has delineated. I mean to show that these discourses, in their own different ways, function like ideological straitjackets, and contribute to fashioning a lady and eventually impose standards of behaviour and ethics on her. La jeune fille 4 When James uses the term “la jeune fille” (238) it seems at first sight that he has in mind someone like Pansy Osmond who is, in the words of her father Gilbert Osmond, “a little convent-flower” (220). These convent flowers are nurtured in secluded places. They are pressed dry in the negative space of the convent, as suggested by the wax flowers under glass that are an ornament of Pansy’s convent. Kept out of the world, Pansy has received a very strict education, carried out by “the ladies of the sisterhood” (456), a group of Catholic nuns who inspire complete obedience to the father in their pupils. Since Pansy wants to marry Ned Rosier who is not as glamorous as the immensely wealthy Lord Warburton, her father sends her back to the convent for the so-called “finishing touches” (442). In keeping with the metaphor of life as a script that is written in advance, the lady is perceived as a work of art that requires completion to conform to an ideal. 5 For young ladies, it is in the convent that the ontological finishing touches are to be achieved. Osmond has it that, “The Catholics are very wise after all. The convent is a great institution; we can’t do without it; it corresponds to an essential need in families, in society. It’s a school of manners; it’s a school of repose” (442). The authority of the Church and that of the father are complicit in the creation of submission in young ladies. James describes the outcome of this upbringing in striking terms: “She was evidently impregnated with the idea of submission” (202). Pansy is made pregnant with an ideology, that of the father’s will, since “Osmond wished it to be known he shrank from nothing” (443). The father as tyrant delegates to the convent the power to perform something akin to moral torture. As the narrator euphemistically states, the father plays “theoretic tricks” (442) on the delicate sensibility of his daughter. However, if Pansy has had the education of a lady she will not become a genuine lady in the Jamesian sense of the term. Pansy has become “ineffably passive” (313). She is obviously under the control of patriarchal ideology. The dutiful daughter is perceived as “a blank page” that can be written over with “an edifying text” (268), presumably the text programming ladyhood. Pansy has all the potential of a lady, including a great capacity for waiting which is evoked by her willingness to wait endlessly for Ned Rosier’s proposal of marriage. But she has not completely surrendered her personality to her father’s will, as she manoeuvres to keep Lord Warburton at a safe distance. 6 If Pansy is not the ideal Jamesian lady it is above all because James is interested in Pansy as a “satellite” as he says in his preface to the novel (11), projecting a light on the Miranda, 11 | 2015 Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: The Figure of the Lady Between Surplus ... 3 main heroine. Pansy’s history and character form a sharp contrast to the characteristics of the American jeune fille. Writing Pansy’s life would only have meant fictionalizing the lived and felt lives of European ladies like Madame de Sabran whose correspondence James reviewed in 1875. James noted that Madame de Sabran, “married with the usual docility of the young women of her country” (James 1984 649).2 Instead of writing about the misfortunes of a lady at the hands of an abusive husband, James seems to perform a cross-breeding of traditions between European traditions and American traditions. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James rewrites the typical historic formula in a variation on his Daisy Miller story. In “Daisy Miller, A Study” (1878), James kills the young American girl who flirts with the fortune hunter Giovanelli. Daisy Miller catches the "perniciosa" (malaria) at dusk in the Roman coliseum and never recovers from flouting European conventions (James, “Daisy” 79). The novella ends with a reference to “a report that he [Winterbourne], is ‘studying’ hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady” (James, “Daisy” 81). James takes up this story again in The Portrait of a Lady where he is most interested in a very clever American lady and fervently resumes his studying. James was so shocked by the death of his beloved cousin Minny Temple in 1870 that he tried to imagine what her destiny might have been. Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer are both case studies that show James's fascination with independent, self-assertive female characters. Isabel Archer, however, is a much more complex character than Daisy Miller or even Pansy Osmond. For instance, Isabel has a “virginité savante.”3 She is “savante,” or she thinks she is, in the sense of being self-educated since along with her sisters, “They had had no regular education” (40). She is reputed to have read the classics in translation. She is also a virgin as the numerous references to her fear in front of the “images of energy” (194) Caspar Goodwood or Lord Warburton testify. And she admits “she believed in such a thing as chastity” (362). She is given a complex personality whose features are presented by an analytical narrator. The character's intellectual capacity is undermined by the narrative discourse. For example, Isabel Archer is credited with having “a reach of intellect,” but it leads to arrogance since “this encouraged an impatience that might be easily confounded with superiority” (53).
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