Eyeing the Beholder: Henry James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady

(\HLQJWKH%HKROGHU+HQU\-DPHV·V,PPDWHULDO3RUWUDLWRID/DG\ 0LFLDK+XVVH\ 7KH+HQU\-DPHV5HYLHZ9ROXPH1XPEHU6SULQJSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV '2,KMU )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by City University of New York (26 May 2016 17:28 GMT) Eyeing the Beholder: Henry James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady By Miciah Hussey, City University of New York In “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick maps the affective landscape of James’s “absorbed subjectivity” through a series of lexical pairings that occur throughout the prefaces to the New York Edition (40). Among them, she turns particular attention to the differentiation in the preface to The Wings of the Dove (1902) between the aesthetic forms of “picture” and “drama” for their “high instability and high mutual torsiveness” (46).1 Sedgwick’s identification of the charged energies in these radically mutable and contiguously shifting concepts in James’s work distinguishes them as pressure points in his novelistic rhetoric. The function of picture and drama as rubrics for figuring, understanding, and relating to his own work is to modulate the fluctuating and twisting relations between interior consciousness and the external world. Sedgwick’s attention to physical forces replicated in the rhetorical relation emphasizes the effects of pressure in this mobile dynamic, forecasting the play between erosive energies and excessive release in James’s novels. Sedgwick links two passages in the preface to delineate the relational dynamic between picture and drama. These differing perceptual modes engage one another in a tense manner strikingly similar to sibling rivalry: the odd inveteracy with which picture, at almost any turn, is jealous of drama, and drama (though on the whole with a greater patience, I think) suspicious of picture. Between them, no doubt, they do much for the theme; yet each baffles insidiously the other’s ideal and eats round the edges of its position; each is too ready to say “I can take the thing for ‘done’ only when done in MY way.” (46)2 The Henry James Review 37 (2016): 174–190. © 2016, Johns Hopkins University Press James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 175 In the preface, “picture” and “drama” possess a command of affect—jealousy and suspicion—that emphasizes the symptomatic differences that wear at the other until “the thing” can be taken as “done.” The tensions with which James endows these phenomena expose the representational dynamic in his writing as grounded in discursive relation between forms. The aggression and pressures surging between drama and picture amount to a squabble in the sister arts: it is no small step to read this “my way or the highway” stand-off as, at base, one between the static visuality of the image and the momentum of narrative. Though James, the “master” novelist and erstwhile playwright, quickly takes drama’s side in the spat, noting that the subject is seen “to show its fullest worth” through the narration of the scene, he still sees each doing “much for the theme” (Sedgwick 46). The distinction he draws between these concepts speaks to his belief in a discursive mode of representation in which “the thing” itself emerges from tense compromises. Despite any loyalties he may profess, James relishes this insidious baffling for the representational complexities it engenders. He admits that “Beautiful exceedingly, for that matter, [are] those occasions or parts of an occasion when the boundary line between picture and scene bears a little the weight of the double pressure” (qtd. in Sedgwick 46). The double weight of picture and drama on “the thing” goes further than merely distinguishing the benefits of these occasions. As James pushes and pulls the rhetoric of representation across different means of perception, the aesthetic forces create a beautiful excess that cannot be accounted for in the ontology of either form alone. I argue this dynamic of intrinsic excess produced from the tension between vision and narrative models the central conflict of representation in James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In the novel Isabel Archer is “the thing” that bears more than a little weight of these two modes of representation. The weighty rhetoric in the preface to Wings haunts the goals of the earlier work, which James articulates as: Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness . . . and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT—for the centre; put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself. (PL 10–11) As James’s subject, Isabel’s consciousness is the “single small corner-stone” of the novel that bears the heavy burden of vexing conflict between picture and drama (8). In making her consciousness the novel’s pressure point, James places her representation in tension between the titular portrait’s traditional anonymity and specific individuality, initiating confrontation between objectification and interiority. I argue Isabel’s relation to herself struggles against the forces of mise-en-scène, baffling the difficult interactions of image and narrative. Far from the fixed sticking point of the text, she troubles both the formal and social tableaux of the novel to emerge as an unfixed and formless beautiful excess. Considering James’s long engagement with the tropes of aesthetics to create conflict, character, and mise-en-scène that circulate around paintings, sculptures, collections, and artists, his literary project forwards an understanding of the self and its relation to the world that so beautifully exceeds the linguistic alone that it requires a contingent and potent visual imaginaire.3 The distinct functions of picture and drama elaborated in the preface to Wings provide a structure for James to discuss the fraught 176 The Henry James Review representation of consciousness in Portrait. The novel exemplifies Leo Bersani’s call to explore “how art can in effect position us as aesthetic rather than psychoanalytically defined subjects within the world” (164). Positioning Isabel as a subject squarely in the teeth of the aesthetic structures of vision and narration, these structures produce a tension between interior experience and exterior social forces (especially class and gender) that seek to frame her as an object, both a portrait and “a Lady.” Following Bersani’s concept, the representation of Isabel’s consciousness—as emerging from the pressures of picture and drama—is contingent on the formal relations of the novel (including spatial, visual, and narrative devices James employs) rather than psychic drives. Using this concept, I explore how Isabel’s interiority emerges in excess to her relations with a world that demands objectified representation. In this way, the force of sticking to Isabel’s relationship to herself as the center forecasts the narrative momentum toward her eventual release—“affronting her destiny” that demands her use-value in the economy of the object world (PL 8). The title itself, with its telling correspondence to the long history of anonymous female subjects in the canon of painting, evokes the argument that James laid out in the preface to Wings, foreshadowing the tensions between image and scene as a powerful energy in the novel. It announces Isabel as a thing—a portrait—defined by the demands and desires of others. As Nancy Bentley, Michael Gorra, and others point out, Isabel’s body—beginning with her textual entrance and carried on throughout the novel—is elaborately rendered through a discourse of objectification, whether by the narrator in her initial appearance standing in the threshold at Gardencourt or in Ned Rosier’s vision of her later in the text as “framed in the gilded doorway . . . the picture of a gracious lady” (PL 310).4 As Bentley comments in her essay on the novel’s translation into film: James’s “self-conscious attention to the medium” in the title “presents his readers with an implicit analogy, a sort of titular riddle; how is a novel—this novel, anyway—like a painted portrait?” (128). Bentley finds the insidious baffling that James describes in the preface to the later novel as characteristic of the narrative of Portrait. The novel engages an “implicit” questioning of the text’s own ontology, forcing readers to confront (and perhaps leave unsolved) the riddle that resides within the narrative portrait of Isabel Archer. The mystifications surrounding identity in the art-historical tradition of portraiture conflict with James’s professed aim of representing Isabel’s consciousness, preceding what Bentley sees as “a structuring tension” in Campion’s cinematic adaptation (141). The tension between the novelistic phenomena of picture and drama in the preface is not only the double weight that Isabel comes to bear but furthers the central conflict that structures the narrative. Bentley’s reading of the film adaptation reminds us that the medium carries with it a history that reinforces the female body as an overt object for scrutiny. I suggest that it also may exist as a potent place of release to reimagine representations of female selfhood. Using film and aesthetic theory, I argue that this discursive tension between image and the text—like the double pressure that James notices between picture and drama—wears down the freighted boundary to open a complex representation of Isabel Archer’s consciousness. She marks that discursive occasion of release where the double weight of picture and scene gives way for her consciousness to exceed so beautifully. Placed at the center of the novelistic frame, it engenders the riddle or structuring tension that Bentley notices, simultaneously baffling the coherence of representational tropes and social expectations. James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 177 In emphasizing Isabel’s representation as its subject, the novel interrogates the formal strategies that picture and drama use to portray selfhood. The title makes obvious her vulnerability to the objectifying dangers of the purely visual economy of pictorial forms, styles, artists, and well-known works of art in advance of the aesthetic rhetoric piled around her. The object world bears much of the load of signifying Isabel in the novel’s aestheticized realm, from Madame Merle’s assertion that “things” are the “expression of self,” to Ralph Touchett comparing her to a “Titian, [received] by post, to hang on my wall,” and most crucially in the control Isabel’s husband Gilbert Osmond exerts over her (175, 63). Jonathan Freedman turns his attention to Osmond as a particularly insidious caricature of a dandy who sees his rich wife “as he views everyone in his narrow world, as an objet d’art, a potential ‘figure in his collection’” (153). Aestheticism becomes a challenge that Isabel faces in her relations with Madame Merle, her cousin, and husband, with each, to varying degrees, only able to recognize her through the limited expression of objects. Freedman contends that the novel frames this conflict between the material views of Aestheticism and the possibilities of Isabel’s immaterial consciousness. He recognizes the irony that emerges in James’s emphasis on the centrality of Isabel’s consciousness in a novel that makes her so vulnerable to the possession of others. Yet, this irony is only a screen covering the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of representing consciousness. Bill Brown discusses “the indeterminate ontology” of consciousness in James’s work claiming, “the work of the mind as a great thing in excess of things, as it were, which can hardly be measured by any logic of possession or possessive individualism” (137, 140–41). As opposed to the notion that a self can only be considered when reified and thus possessed, Isabel’s consciousness hovers in tension to the object world, as that “great thing in excess of things,” mirroring the intangible phenomenon that James considers as “beautifully exceeding” the stable ontologies of image and text. Surrounded by characters that confine her through objectifying gazes and miseen-scène that reifies her in aesthetic terms, Isabel’s portrait is not placed in the ideal light to reveal a true representation of herself but rather transforms her into an object. Her thwarted position stems from forces that precede even this specularization. Art historian Rosalind Krauss analyzes “visual form” as a “function” of “verticality,” using Gestalt theories to show how “fronto-parallel” orientation, of the kind between a viewer looking at a portrait on a wall, allows an object “to cohere, for it to organize itself as” legible (164). Krauss’s analysis examines verticality as a precondition for visual integrity to emphasize how orientation promotes an illusion of coherence. Isabel—framed in doorways, figured as a portrait from the beginning—is always “frontoparallel” toward omnipresent viewers, whose point of view creates a projection legible to their desires. This flattening production of form, on one register, dovetails with the demands of a social tableau for a coherent representation of a subject. In effect, form produces the anonymous lady of the portrait making visibility contingent to the availability of others’ agency. The portrait as a form troubles James’s own program of placing the novel’s center in Isabel’s consciousness. Its vertical orientation redirects the subject away from her own relation to herself and toward the desires of others to possess, control, and use her. This conflict of representation stemming from a center that cannot hold unless reinforced by external objectification, provides the stress that makes Isabel’s subjectivity the eventual site of textual deconstruction. 178 The Henry James Review These insistent formal and spatial relations also frame the vexed representation of Isabel’s interior consciousness. At the start of the novel, she “carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world” (PL 41). The “great fund” of vitality at her core establishes the center of both herself and the novel as a relation between self-discovery and knowledge of the world. The spatial figuration of her interior life—voluminous amplitudes of desires, moving engagements—must be constrained to the shallow surface of a portrait, reconfiguring Isabel’s fullness of being as the source of her affronting nature. Isabel’s desire for movement between her own soul and the vibrations of the world structures this relation as the actualization of an interior life that stands in contradiction to the static and objectified portrait. As she moves to Europe, acquires an unexpected fortune, and meets Osmond, Isabel internalizes his flattening structures of vision: The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her soul by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty that might gather one’s energies to a point. She had told Ralph she had “seen life” in a year or two and that she was already tired, not of the act of living, but of that of observing. . . . It simplified the situation at a stroke, it came down from above like the light of the stars, and it needed no explanation. (297) Her previous “unlimited” desire to feel the commotion of the world for herself is foreshortened into the belief that she has already “seen life.” After her travels she no longer possesses the previous depth of field. Rather, now vision, instead of “things,” becomes the enervating and arbitrary restraint on the success of her “private duty” to support Osmond. With a single stroke, she feels life to be done, just as an artist completes the painting with a finalizing gesture. Nancy Bentley argues that in both the novel and the film, James and Campion stage these moments as rehearsals of Isabel’s death, in keeping with realist tradition that will “often resolve vexing questions about a woman’s subjectivity (what does she want? Is she free to act?) by locating a social explanation—or at least a social closure—in her death” (141). This slow death grips her when Isabel realizes that the starlight Osmond provides is nothing more than a “dusk [that] at first was vague and thin,” only growing darker as he “[puts] the lights out one by one” (PL 356). Isabel’s relations with her husband enact a cruel dynamic of diminishing returns, with a masochistic edge wherein giving up is reconfigured as “giving,” and the internalization of deadening aesthetic vision supersedes infinite desires (297). The structures of objectifying vision collapse into patriarchal demands for self-abnegation, in which Isabel, like Rosier’s sold bibelots, only has value through exchange. As Isabel accepts a more delineated destiny, the pressure to affront it grows proportionally to her recognition that her fate is in conflict with her own consciousness. While the realist marriage plot is the vessel of social death in Bentley’s reading, its dissolution in the later parts of the book restages a metaphoric death as release into Jamesian beautiful excess. This reification of Isabel into a thing—not as a means of self-expression but for the use of others—seems to violate James’s original goals, yet this contradiction stems from his own conflicted conception of his character. Prior to her existence in the text, as James recollects in the preface, he envisions the character of Isabel as having been James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 179 “placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends” (8). Initially, James too reduces Isabel into an objet d’art, holding her in the ontological limbo of a backroom cluttered with other “odds and ends.” Here, James ironically mirrors Touchett, as Freedman contends: Isabel transcends all the mental structures Ralph erects to define her, all the images he conjures up to describe her. But he is not able to sustain this vision of Isabel for long. Soon, he subtly but unmistakably metamorphoses her into that which he had previously claimed she transcended—a work of art. (154) Ralph’s vision of Isabel evokes Brown’s remark that James is “eager to describe the physical object world yet eager to chart a kind of consciousness that transcends it” (141). James, too, wishes Isabel could transcend all mental structures and evade the delimitations of self imposed on her by the perceptions of others (including himself). Seemingly at odds with his aim to portray Isabel’s consciousness as the novel’s center, James’s desire that her consciousness might live beyond the frame further foregrounds this tense conflict. As opposed to the idea of Isabel as a mental tchotchke, James recognizes her in a remark made by Turgenev where the Russian novelist said that a novel began not with the germ of the plot but with the vivid image of a single character (4). James sees Isabel in Turgenev’s “intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilité” (5). This notion of Isabel’s “availability” positions her in advance of the plot.5 For, as James recounts Turgenev’s thoughts, he saw these disponibles as subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves. The idea that the movements of other characters and the events of the plot proceed from Isabel’s “being” calls into question her conceptual function and effect before James brought her out in “the most useful and favourable” sense for his novel. Hovering between idea and object, Isabel seemingly hangs caught in tension between two very different conceptions of her subjecthood—as the central consciousness and then as the produced image. As an image en disponibilité, Isabel forces a disjunction between her intangible interiority and the external relations that “bring [her] out.” This view of her as available, a concept or phenomena existing in advance of the text, vexes the seamlessness of her representation as emerging concomitant to the formal structure of the novel— the plot and her position to other characters. It opens her presence to the kind of interrogation Bentley sees as implicit in the text: Who is this stray figure who excites James, if she is only made visible through external forms? Perhaps Isabel’s affront to her destiny is the result of a spatialized patriarchal system that cannot sustain the 180 The Henry James Review coherence of its significations with a female subject at its center. And yet, what is to be her destiny: the social expectation or self-actualization? Isabel strains to transcend the mental structures only to fall victim to the limited understanding of object and form. However, James’s conception of Isabel in the preface remains an enigmatically potent way to rethink how her fated release stems from the formal tensions produced by “doing” her. James remarks that Isabel embodies how this disponible image “[appears] more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould” (PL 7). Nonetheless, to think of his protagonist only in such a simplifying and sentimental cliché of individuality—the one who broke the mold—obviates what Isabel’s “latent extravagance” invokes. While Turgenev’s term speaks to Isabel’s availability in being placed in a novelistic situation—much as James envisions her as an object waiting in the heterogeneous back-shop of the mind—it also recalls her potential as a figure to exceed beautifully as a fund from which James could draw to fulfill possibilities other than those this narrative provides. Her availability for representation makes her vulnerable to the manipulations of others in the text, but it also grants James the occasion to draw out the benefit of picture and drama. Throughout the novel James invokes Isabel through depth as opposed to the surface area that bears the strain of picture and drama. The phrases that render her interiority spatially (e.g., “Deep in her soul—it was the deepest thing there,” or “Deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite”) not only reinforce the leitmotif of depth as signifying Isabel’s consciousness, but the repetitive insistence—in both comparative and superlative degrees—further represents the presence of vitality, conviction, and faith in herself (PL 56, 466). Depth not only figures Isabel’s subjectivity as inwardly sourced, but it also runs counter to the externally directed forces that nullify her agency to act beyond superficial relations. Frustrating the surface reading of frontoparallel orientation, depth and its recesses break down the gaze that Krauss queries. She interrogates surface orientation as seeking to summon, again and again, if not the completeness, the formal coherence, and the verticality of the visual. How does the fetish act if not to veil, through masquerade, all threats to this wholeness? And what is fundamental to the operations of the veil if not its fronto-parallel orientation to the upright body? (206) Krauss’s view of the verticality of the veil aligns the illusion of wholeness that Touchett and Osmond project onto Isabel with the fetish, as a mask obscuring their vision of her consciousness. More important, this veil replicates the flattened surface of an image, obscuring insight into Isabel’s consciousness. Isabel’s fullness, extravagance, and depth of character threaten to burst these formal bounds, marking the intersection of forms as the crucial—and yet ambiguous—space of her consciousness. The “latent extravagance” of Isabel’s availability and excessiveness recalls the kind of signification that Roland Barthes describes as “the third meaning.” In his essay of that name, Barthes notices that certain stills from the films of Sergei Eisenstein possess another level of meaning beyond the merely informational or even symbolic. He recognizes in these stray moments stopped from the persistent thrall of the moving image what he describes as an obtuse meaning: James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 181 something “‘in excess,’ as a supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive”; and as “greater than the pure perpendicular, the trenchant, legal upright of the narrative. It seems to me to open the field of meaning totally, i.e. infinitely” (Responsibility 44). While elusive, contradictory, and outside language, the third meaning “possesses a theoretical individuality” that permits only “a poetic apprehension” (43). Barthes’s “third meaning” recognizes the residue of other significations latent in the still and made available to perception only when disengaged from diegetic time. The still hovers between static picture and moving scene, related to each but contending with the double pressure of both forms, opening the single frame up to the beautiful excess of the third meaning. These imbued fragments—infinitely inscrutable—command an understanding that is only subjective interpretation: the meaning lingers, ever desirable, but never settles into clear fact, objective being. This other meaning is obtuse because it remains available to an infinite structure of signification. The motion picture film holds to its illusion of being complete, flattening alternative potentialities in the production of legibility. It leeches the possibility of other meaning just as Osmond drains Isabel of her desires for “unlimited expansion.” Barthes explicates this active and unbounded reading of the arrested image as occurring during the passage of another time—a non-diegetic time—that he describes elsewhere as akin (fittingly for the discussion of a novel) “to [reading] while looking up from your book” (Rustle 29). What Barthes’s theories bring to the text is a method of understanding the structuring tensions of narrative that Bentley noticed, embracing subversive possibility through a sustained subjective interrogation of Isabel’s representation. The third meaning occurs in this formal tension, hovering between James’s picture and scene, and opens an excess of significance within the text. In their shared theoretical individuality and poetic apprehension Barthes’s third meaning has kinship with James’s “image en disponibilité.” The connection is apparent in James’s description of Isabel in the preface: My dim first move toward “The Portrait,” which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; WHICH, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. (PL 7–8) In this passage Isabel is a single unit in the novel’s structure—like the single cinematic frame in the construction of a film—and the central concept that flows across its entirety. James’s description of his “possession” of her shares resonance with Barthes’s reading of Eisenstein’s shot of Ivan the Terrible’s face through the arrested shower of gold. While this notion may appear contradictory—Isabel is “in transit” yet in focus, whereas Barthes sees the obtuse in still images—both recognize a figure “disponible” 182 The Henry James Review to the infinite play of meaning. Isabel remains strangely “vivid . . . in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle” that impresses and constitutes identity (PL 7–8). The film still for Barthes beguiles because it too remains “available to be filled with meaning” while “[maintaining] itself in a state of perpetual erethism” (Responsibility 56). It is this erethism, meaningful excitement, or formal baffling that keeps Isabel poetically “vivid” and in possession of the “theoretical individuality” that urgently torments James well after he limits her to a single fate among her many narrative possibilities. The lens of Barthes’s third meaning helps to restore Isabel to image en disponibilité: her availability subverts the text through its interrogation of her representation. With latent excess that strains the legal upright narrative, she troubles the narrative forces that attempt a fixed linear trajectory. Exceeding the bounds of each contingent register of “picture” and “drama,” she, like Barthes’s still, becomes the single figure with the potential to restructure the text. Despite James’s realism—socially and psychologically—and his exacting novelistic architecture, there are moments when Isabel “hovers, inextinguishable”—a portrait of that stray figure who pre-exists in possibility before the plot (PL 11). In these moments—partially broken off from and yet still within the confines of the narrative—Isabel’s consciousness becomes available to a representational agency that subverts objectifying gazes. James ruptures narrative in staging scenes where Isabel’s “absorbed subjectivity” grasps a poetic apprehension of herself in excess of the representations charted by external forces. The most famous occasion of picture and scene’s double pressure opening Isabel’s consciousness to the excess of her “inward life” is the “landmark” scene of “extraordinary meditative vigil” after realizing Osmond’s deceptions (14). In his preface, James refers to the success of this scene in terms strikingly similar to the tensions Barthes sees inherent in the film still: Reduced to its essence, it is but the vigil of searching criticism; but it throws the action further forward than twenty “incidents” might have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity of incident and all the economy of picture. She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionlessly SEEING, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity of her act as “interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. (PL 14–15) Like the still that holds other “films” in possibility, Isabel’s physical stasis contains some “twenty” unseen and unwritten incidents suggested in the “extraordinary activity” of being “assailed by visions” (364). James’s construction of exterior stillness belying interior expansion corresponds to the tension between picture and drama. It further echoes the discursive possibilities of the film still’s “palimpsest relation” to the film as a “second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment” (Barthes, Responsibility 61). The narrative of these incidents, like the still’s second text, never exceeds the bounds of Isabel’s consciousness. Yet, in this crucial scene, “designed to have all the vivacity of incident and all the economy of picture,” James stages the formal issue occasioned by the double pressure of picture and drama as the latent narrative potential enclosed in a still moment. James captures the beautiful excess James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 183 as Isabel emerges from the static portrait of the title and into the amplitudes of inward vision. Her “motionless seeing”—hovering between posed composition and self-reflection—moves her into an immaterial state of being. In conflating image and text, James seizes the opportunity to render his image of Isabel’s consciousness as available to herself in a visionary state exceeding the fetish of legible representation. Here, the portrait rendered by the artist’s hand, so far symbolic of Isabel’s objectification, gestures toward an index of individuality beyond the novelistic frame. The reemergence of Isabel’s consciousness in such a pivotal moment engenders a structural transgression, restoring her as an affronting vision to codified patriarchal gazes. As soon as she embraces her own assailing visions, she cannot stop them. In these moments, Isabel’s visions skid against the narrative of her expected destiny and toward an unknown path within. Freedman reads this scene of Isabel’s release from the mystifying objectification of selfhood as a victory over those who wish to treat her as if she truly were a Titian sent by post. He states: “[u]nlike Osmond, Isabel achieves a moment of her own vision experienced in, of, and for itself . . . that is fully detached from the world of objects but that helps her to understand that nature of that world” (163). The visionary aspect of this scene draws Isabel closer in relation to her own immaterial consciousness and away from understanding through a circuitry of things. With Isabel’s moment of introspection rendered as still as a portrait, James presages the famous scene in Wings wherein he places a self-aware consciousness in a relational paradigm between art object and viewer. Yet, unlike Milly Theale who must be confronted by the Bronzino portrait to understand her own mortality, Isabel’s twilight meditation is “detached from the world of objects” and thus becomes completely figured as intersubjectival. This communion with the self not as object but as interior phenomenology reveals to her, at last, a visionary understanding of her world. She recognizes in herself what fascinated James—“she was, after all, herself—she couldn’t help that” (357). Vision is freeing for Isabel as a site of self-reflection while vision itself is freed from the demand to possess. In detaching herself from the world of objects, she is able to transcend her situation—not by “[effacing] herself” as she had when she first met Osmond, but by at last availing herself to her own consciousness (357). Collapsing vision and insight, subject and object, this scene is the climax of Isabel’s affront to her narrative destiny and a return to the strangely vivid figure-at-large of James’s preface. The astounding act of James’s portrait of Isabel Archer is how her eventual freedom complicates his own novelistic rhetoric by dismantling the “right” narrative relations to restore her “disponibilité.” During her vigil, Isabel first conceives of consciousness through the weighted relations that smother her. The private duty that wedding Osmond provided—and that she welcomed for its simplification of life—came at the price of finding the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of failure. (356) 184 The Henry James Review The language in this scene—of the confining abjection of being buried alive—not only recalls the death that Bentley sees in the novel but also upends the vertical orientation that had made Isabel into the very portrait of a lady beheld by her observers. Narrowing her desire for unlimited expansiveness brought her “downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and . . . failure,” granting prescience to her cousin Ralph’s judgment that “You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue—to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly someone tosses up a faded rosebud—a missile that should never have reached you—and down you drop to the ground” (291). The “drop to the ground” and yet deeper into the earth’s soil not only denies Ralph seeing what Isabel would make with her life but also stymies her social transcendence with abject failure at the slightest touch by a decadent and enervated projectile. However, the insistent downward and horizontal images are not entirely damning for Isabel—they also offer her an escape from her formal plight. The abject caused by the stress of the double weight of picture and drama also ruptures the freighted dynamics of objectifying gazes. In her reading of verticality and form, Krauss uses the “Centerfold” photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman, in which she photographs herself as various “Miss Lonelyhearts” characters in supine abjection across horizontal compositions that evoke the format of a pornographic centerfold.6 Krauss reads these photographs as “an attack on form” (164). The horizontality created in many of Sherman’s photographs emerges from the artist positioning herself in a downward point of view from the camera. As Krauss says, “/Horizontality/ is thus not a matter of the horizon line but a function of the floor” (164). The photographs plumb “the domain of baseness . . . [showing] how the horizontalizing pull of gravity against the grain of verticality of form could produce a sense of the erosion of form from within.” Krauss invokes formlessness as a critique of the signifying structures that limit experience through the commodification of being. Isabel’s horizontality debases the objectifying verticality and allows her transcendence of the structures of vision, a formlessness concomitant to a disponible consciousness. Krauss’s view of Sherman’s attack on form further coincides with Barthes’s theories, with horizontality as a means to transgress the rigid structures of an upright narrative. Together, Krauss and Barthes offer a lens to read Isabel’s release from the external discourses binding her subjectivity. The erosion into formlessness initiated in this scene continues until Isabel disappears from the novel’s frame. After her vigil she begins a slow dispersal of the external armor of “things” that others took for her self. As she goes through Rome, visiting its monuments, She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. (430) The “things” she visits here are crumbling yet upright, evoking Krauss’s notion of the pull of gravity against the monumentality of the vertical, as if they too bear double weight and show the wear of constant contortions. Isabel endows these objects with James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 185 the secret sadness of her consciousness, reversing the circuitry of selfhood that Madame Merle espouses. Freedman pinpoints this scene as reinstating the connection between Isabel and the world that she rescinded on meeting Osmond: “Rather than possessing a reifying vision . . . Isabel achieves at this moment a humanizing vision in which her individual ‘sadness’ and the sadness of the scene connect to form an image of commonality and community” (165). Effacing herself allows for disengagement from—rather than possession by—Osmond’s visual economy. Dropping aspects of self into external things lightens Isabel’s burden, redirecting her interior energies toward the movement of the world. Just as Sherman’s photography erodes from within, so does Isabel. And yet it is not just through things that James figures her transcendence of these external forms: the erosion also allows Isabel to embrace Barthes’s infinite field of meaning that exceeds the upright narrative. Ironically, Isabel’s visions often take the cast of the emerging technologies of photography and, especially, film that will collapse James’s neat dichotomy of picture and scene. James describes Isabel’s recognition that Osmond and Madame Merle may have been colluding all this time as a “thing [that] made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light,” evoking the process of photography “making” an image through the use of a flash (PL 343). After this moment, Isabel’s consciousness continues to grow in opposition to the tradition of easel painting that had stifled her representation, and she begins to see the world as “illumined by lurid flashes” (464). This photographic consciousness disrupts the primacy of painted portraits as conduits of visual identity during her last encounter with Merle: The effect was strange, for Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in the flesh was like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move. Isabel had been thinking all day of her falsity, her audacity, her ability, her probable suffering; and these dark things seemed to flash with a sudden light as she entered the room. (456) The sudden terror of a painting endowed with motion evokes the essential uncanniness of film and other technological reproduction. Yet it is not the Gothic terror that brings this scene to prominence. The moving painting gestures toward film’s promise of new representational possibilities occurring between the novel’s writing and its revision. “The dark things” of the past are not only uncovered through the “flash” of “sudden light” but further forced into the representational service of depicting aspects of female life—adultery, betrayal, and out-of-wedlock birth—via new and possibly sympathetic terms. Garrett Stewart reads the “incongruous flux of black-and-white shots” that Campion uses as poetic and filmic disruptions, not only as a “technological throwback in the contemporary film’s own terms but also as a distracting media forecast within the 1870s plot” (248). While distracting on film, he admits that it reflects “the very nature of the heroine’s fantasy life . . . [as] ahead of her time and behind ours, lost in a hinterland—a libidinal limbo—of mostly voiceless because historically unspeakable desires.” With Isabel’s consciousness modeling new methods of representation, she embodies a new critical position toward the representational structures thwarting her desires. Transgressing her expected destiny, new forms of vision signify the possibility of new ways to consider herself. 186 The Henry James Review James frames Isabel’s last sequence in the novel—her return to Gardencourt to see Ralph on his deathbed—with two moments of visionary epiphany that, like her nighttime vigil, apply the pressures of picture and drama to give her occasion to exceed beautifully—and finally—from her vexed position. The first moment situates her consciousness in a visionary splendor that hijacks her own sense of narrative trajectory: On her long journey from Rome her mind had been given up to vagueness; she was unable to question the future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes and took little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out though they were in the richest freshness of spring. Her thoughts followed their course through other countries—strange-looking, dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no change of seasons, but only, as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of winter. She had plenty to think about; but it was neither reflexion nor conscious purpose that filled her mind. Disconnected visions passed through it, and sudden gleams of memory, of expectation. The past and the future came and went at their will, but she saw them only in fitful images, which rose and fell by a logic of their own. (PL 464–65) Like Barthes’s “reading while looking up” from the book, Isabel’s vision is constructed as seeing without looking (Rustle 29). Her release from externalized aesthetic vision leads to a spontaneous restructuring of her life experience through interior images that appear by an unconscious agency. “Disconnected visions,” a stichomancy of film stills, thwart any “conscious purpose” or narrative coherence, and yet, in the liberation from thinking about a forward trajectory, Isabel does, in fact, move through the strange, pathless lands. Just as the third meaning restructures a film toward other possible texts, James formulates Isabel’s pliant interior vision as eschewing narrative goals of objectivity and mastery. He figures her consciousness as a way to read herself as against—or as affronting—a life story demanded by patriarchal authorial agency. After moving through a pathless land, drowning in the stream of images that has composed her life, Isabel finds her termination in visionary release. Bereft at the loss of Ralph, she must confront the possibilities of her life with Caspar Goodwood. In his kiss “like white lighting” Isabel experiences the embodied pressures that her vexed position bears (489). But that too gives way to a final transcendent erosion into formlessness: So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free. She never looked about her; she only darted from the spot. . . . In an extraordinarily short time—for the distance was considerable—she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path. (489–90) Goodwood’s kiss plunges Isabel deep into her own consciousness, into the “train of images” that precedes death and awakes unto an oblivion beyond the object world. James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 187 Isabel’s metaphoric drowning, another horizontal rehearsed “death” that wears at her figuration, gives way to a final release. In the abundance of moving images, Isabel withdraws into herself and, without looking, finds the “very straight path” where she previously saw none. Bentley remarks that “In James’s revised ending, the kiss inaugurates a metaphorical flourish in which the interior landscape of Isabel’s desire is mapped onto larger plot conflicts” (138). Her interior landscape connects and resolves the larger plot conflicts through self-revelation, showing Isabel the course she knew she must take. Again, vision rendered as an interior experience takes precedence over the perception of the outside world. Isabel, seeing “nothing” of the world, finds a clearer understanding of her inner life. Where her straight path leads has been the subject of conjecture, but it matters little to the integrity of the novel or to the ultimate trajectory of the “life that would be her business for a long time to come” (PL 466). This death, finally, amounts to her escape from the structures of objecthood enforced on her throughout the novel. Her potential for agency stems from her ability to defy the formal conventions used to define her. Here Isabel’s “latent extravagance” bursts at the seams between portrait and novel and, at last, makes her available to herself. This moment, her escape from the narrative frame shortly before the conclusion, returns her to an infinite state of potentiality, unlike, say, Madame Merle, ultimately damned to be so “complete,” as Ralph calls her (155).7 Form as the means to represent consciousness remains contested throughout the novel, beginning with its title and extending beyond its conclusion into James’s retrospective preface. In the famed passage wherein Isabel disagrees with Madame Merle’s assertion that “things” express selfhood, the affronting young woman responds: “I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one” (175). Isabel’s conception of the self—that no-thing expresses her—locates her consciousness in an ambiguous relation outside the ontological structures of form. She finds a freedom in negating the object world that suggests an immaterial self able to transcend the limitations of things. While she does not go so far as providing what she thinks the self is, her reticence speaks to a faith in it, despite having doubts about the success of her self-expression. While Isabel’s uncertainty may appear similar to the beautiful difficulty that James finds in representing his protagonist, her statement positing the self’s problematic intangibility runs counter not only to Madame Merle’s positivist materiality but to the representational aims James enumerates in the preface. James borrows George Eliot’s phrase of the “frail vessel” to describe the weak container meant to hold Isabel’s consciousness—and those of other women who “insist on mattering” (PL 9). In formal terms, the vessel’s shapely boundaries, like the portrait of the title, form another representational matrix invoking Isabel’s view of the limiting barriers of things. According to Sharon Cameron, “the integrity of [Isabel’s] consciousness, its ethical wholeness or intactness, defined by its containment in . . . [James’s] metaphor of the ‘frailty of the vessel’ is . . . in the novel as a whole broken down or violated” (63). While Cameron’s reading argues that consciousness need not possess an autonomous integrity to exist, she still suggests that this violation is “disturbing,” if not for the fact of it, but that it “is contested years later by James in the Preface.” She questions James’s reconsideration as instantiating that “consciousness . . . can achieve transcendent status,” even when this fact is “contradicted by 188 The Henry James Review the representation in the novel that follows” (62). However, I argue that Cameron undervalues the dynamic of release represented through Isabel’s consciousness and, further, that despite her qualms, James presents a less stable position than first appears. The preface to Portrait brims with descriptions of a “beautifully exceeding” release that amplifies the tension surrounding Isabel’s representation. While James may maintain that he is “in complete possession” of Isabel’s consciousness at the center of the novel, perhaps all is not what it seems to the Master. Her elusive constitution haunts him when he returns to the novel for the New York Edition. The retrospective vision of the prefaces, in effect, completes the arc of Isabel’s trajectory. James returns her to that state of pre-existence, to the free-floating aesthetic conception that makes her available as the original seed of the novel’s creation. While the author is reticent to retrace that “dim first move toward” her, finding the suggestion of plotting “the growth of one’s imagination” as “monstrous,” he suggests that Isabel’s origins mirror her eventual release (8). Far from explicitly mapping out his imaginative enterprise, James instead sets the scene of the novel’s genesis. He envisions his rooms in Venice on Riva Schiavoni when he began to write Portrait: the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight. (3) Outside his rooms, tense with fidgeting, life moves ceaselessly. The movement of the Riva Schiavoni (unlike the confined flow within Madame Merle’s notion of the self) resolves James’s excess drive with its promise. One can almost see Isabel floating into view along the channel as “the ship of some right suggestion,” leaving her origins enigmatic and available to conjecture. Of course, the true “touch” for his canvas is an apt way to describe the enterprise of sticking Isabel’s consciousness in the center surrounded by the right relations, but that single touch here is contradicted by the idea of Venice’s mobile plentitude. James recollects his “wonderment” of this scene and realizes “that they express, under this appeal, only too much—more than, in the given case, one has use for” (4). The scene of Isabel’s origin not only mirrors the ambiguous relation of the self to the material world but further bulges with “the latent extravagance” that fascinates James while posing a challenge to his representational faculties. As the image en disponibilité, Isabel is not only the stray vessel of suggestion but the force that strains its hold. In the preface James hints at the power of Isabel to resist his professed possession of her. Undermining his own purchase over his imagination, he confesses that: As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where THEY come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are THERE at almost any turn of the road? They accu- James’s Immaterial Portrait of a Lady 189 mulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life—by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed—floated into our minds by the current of life. (5) In opposition to the structuring tension that Isabel is in the novel, here, in the preface, she exists in the liberating terms evoked in James’s imagery. Unlike the frail vessel, or other formal ontology, Isabel exceeds form to embrace the phenomenology of image en disponibilité—the stray, wind-blown germ of the novel floating easily on the water, carried along by the breath of life. No longer the static portrait feeling the forces of the frames around her, Isabel’s release frees her from the burdens of objectivity and avails her weightless on the stream of consciousness. Isabel’s presence remains well after she is released from the narrative frame, lingering at the threshold of the text as she once did in the door of Gardencourt. Bearing the double weight of picture and scene, Isabel, unlike Barthes’s filmic still, never “[attains] that spasm of the signified which usually causes the subject to sink voluptuously into the peace of nomination” (Responsibility 56). James’s revelatory diction herds her toward objectivity before finally relinquishing her at the narrative’s conclusion, allowing her to hover somewhere between the conception of a consciousness and a representation in language. Rather than sinking peacefully into static nomination, Isabel’s selfhood remains at large. The weight and pressure evoked in James’s preface to The Wings of the Dove bear the lexical fruit inherent in the terms—stress, tension, erosion, torsion—that activate my reading. These terms imply a slow build of possibly damaging forces across various registers—visual, social, formal—that finally disassemble in Isabel’s release. Her trajectory from “image en disponibilité” to a “portrait of a lady” ultimately ends in the preface with her return to a state of availability, escalating in force throughout the novel toward Isabel’s “beautifully exceeding” apotheosis. NOTES 1 Discussions of “picture” and “drama” as rhetorical terms in James’s work can be traced back to Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), where he extends their use further to discuss the work of authors such as Flaubert and Thackeray. In his 1934 introduction to The Art of the Novel (AN), Blackmur dissects the terms in relation to James’s own discussions of the work, and since then Booth and others have weighed in on how the conceptions of “picture” and “drama” have been tools to understand structure, representation, and narrative perspective in James’s novels. 2 These passages appear on pages 298–300 in The Art of the Novel. 3 For further discussions of how James’s use of “picture” and “drama” as rhetorical devices coincide with art and aesthetics in his novels, see Winner, Tintner, and Francescato, among others. 4 Bentley sketches a helpful thumbnail of gaze theory: “Scholars of the visual arts have argued for the importance of implicit gender difference—distinct male and female viewing positions—built into the structuring conventions of much Western painting and film. Traditional art, the argument goes, presumes male habits of sight that are active and self-contained. And while men’s looking asserts a possession and mastery of visual objects, a woman’s gaze is always occluded, circumscribed in some fashion by her subordinate position in society. Because she has internalized her role as an ornamental object, women rarely look at the world—hence at art—from the same active position as do men” (134). 5 Of course, the chronology of Isabel’s origin bears the strain of James’s retrospection in the prefaces. He narrates her trajectory in reverse, so that a defined character becomes stray image. However, this mobility Isabel possesses in the preface—across temporal and formal states—only emphasizes her transcendence of such structures. 6 Sherman’s photographs from the late seventies through today are well known for exploring the post-modern status of the image. In her groundbreaking series “Untitled Film Stills,” Sherman deconstructs boundary between still and moving images by photographing herself in various mise-en-scène, recalling 190 The Henry James Review moments from imaginary films. In each image, Sherman renders herself available to the signifiers of different situations and personas typical in various Hollywood genres, including film noir and melodrama. Krauss argues that the woman in the photograph, though Sherman herself, becomes the conduit of meaning, not in the way that an actress communicates through performance but rather as a product of the external significations associated through formal tropes of film. The repetition of the same subject rendered into new representations through purely visual functions makes the photographed woman—who is and is also not “Cindy Sherman”—as available to various external re-presentations as Isabel is. The “right relations” that bring out James’s character act in ways similar to the cinematic signifiers Sherman uses to convince the viewer she has produced a character as well. 7 For a reading of this scene that imagines it in a far different way—in the final entrapment of Isabel with no way forward—see Stewart’s discussion of Campion’s film alongside James’s novel (248–50). WORKS BY HENRY JAMES PL—The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1995. Print. AN—The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Scribner’s, 1962. Print. WD—The Wings of the Dove. Ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard Hocks. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2003. Print. OTHER WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print. ———. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Print. Bentley, Nancy. “Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman: Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan M. Griffin. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2002. 127–46. Print. Bersani, Leo. “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject.” Critical Inquiry 32.2 (2006): 161–74. Web. 15 May 2015. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Print. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Francescato, Simone. Collecting and Appreciating Henry James and the Transformation of Aesthetics in the Age of Consumption. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Print. Freedman, Jonathan L. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print. Gorra, Michael. Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Story of an American Masterpiece. New York: Norton, 2012. Print. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Cindy Sherman’s Gravity: A Critical Fable.” Artforum International 32.1 (1993): 163–64; 206. Web. 20 Jan. 2015. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. New York: Viking, 1957. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Stills. 1977–1980. 69 black and white photographs. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print. Tintner, Adeline R. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986. Print. Winner, Viola Hopkins. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1970. Print.