The Consequences of Your Actions

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

I spent the past few weeks re-reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which I read for the first time many years ago while I was in University. Back then, I identified with its heroine, Isabel Archer: like her, I placed a high value on my own autonomy; like her, I was unsure of how to balance other people’s opinions about what I should be doing with my own goals and desires. But, as many readers do, I found some of Isabel’s choices inexplicable, frustrating, and even infuriating. When I began the re-read, it was with the hope that, being now a much better reader with more life experience, she and James might have something new to say to me.

Here’s the plot (without spoiling the final act): Isabel Archer is a young American woman who arrives in Europe. She is beautiful and intelligent, and almost everyone she meets is impressed with her. An English Lord falls in love with her on the spot, and she’s also being pursued by an American entrepreneur. She rejects both of their proposals, knowing that marriage would bring a swift end to her freedom. She hopes to do something more interesting with her life than getting married.

One of her admirers (her kind, sick cousin) arranges for her to receive a large inheritance, hoping to give her the means to live the fullest life possible. This attracts the notice of the ultra-refined Madame Merle, who arranges for Isabel to meet her old friend Gilbert Osmond in hopes (for reasons that are initially obscure) that they might marry. Osmond has no particular career or ethos other than being an aesthete, but he speaks and lives so beautifully that he manages to make this sound like a noble occupation. Against the advice of all her friends, who warn her with alarm that Osmond is shallow and narrow-minded, Isabel decides to marry him.

It turns out to be the most profound mistake Isabel could have made: Osmond is, indeed, shallow and narrow-minded. Even worse, he is controlling, and Isabel discovers that to him her intellect has value only as an aesthetic attribute. He expects obedience from her, not partnership. Whether Isabel will reassert herself and/or escape her situation is the subject of the final act of the novel.

The Portrait of a Lady is centered around a single, consequential mistake: her decision to marry Osmond. The first part examines in detail how Isabel comes to make the mistake, and the second shows how she copes with having made it. I have a particular love for stories about mistakes. Here’s what I wrote about Middlemarch, which shares some bones with The Portrait of a Lady¹, in an earlier essay:

Early in Middlemarch, there’s a scene in which Tertius Lydgate, a young, promising doctor, falls in love with a beautiful actress who is suspected of murder. The circumstances of the murder are melodramatic: the actress and her husband are acting a scene in which she pretends to stab him to death, but one night her foot slips, she plunges the knife in, and he dies in front of the horrified audience.

Lydgate is convinced of her innocence. After an investigation finds her not culpable, he tracks her down and proposes marriage. But she dissuades him by telling him the truth: My foot really slipped, she says. And then: I meant to do it.

My foot slipped, and I meant to do it. The mistake, and the intention both.

Middlemarch is concerned with mistakes, but not the kind of mistakes that drive tidier stories: inciting incidents, chance derailments, wrong men. It is instead concerned with mistakes we make when we believe our eyes are fully open and we are doing exactly what we mean to do, mistakes that we only recognize as such after months or years. It shows what our choices make of us — this is the heart of Middlemarch’s morality.

Isabel is convinced that marrying Osmond, after turning down men who are conventionally better catches, is the best and highest expression of her independence, generosity, and free-spiritedness. It rhymes with the mistake of Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, who marries Mr. Casaubon because she wants to devote herself to service and the intellect instead of the conventional path of wife and mother.

I wouldn’t say that The Portrait of a Lady is a feminist book, and I’m not really interested in debating whether it is one or not. I will say that cultural narratives about women choosing “the wrong man” often have a misogynist cast. They attribute the woman’s choice to some base or inferior element in her — she’s superficially dazzled by money or a jawline, or a slave to primeval drives compelling her to mate with an “alpha” man. Women should marry different kinds of men, is the implication; when they follow their own desires, they tend to choose wrong. Among the worst strains of the far right, these stories take on an economic aspect, describing women as a scarce resource improperly and inefficiently allocated.

The Portrait of a Lady avoids these tropes, partly because James refuses to pass judgment on Isabel, but mainly because he makes it clear that her mistake flows from the highest and best things about her. It was a mistake made deliberately, inevitably, from the depths of her character. It’s these kinds of mistakes that are the material of tragedy.

Can Isabel undo her error, and should she undo it? This is the primary question of the novel’s second half. I remember, reading it when I was younger, thinking that the answer seemed so obvious — of course she should exit her awful marriage! I would attribute this to being a modern reader for whom divorce has much less moral significance, except that the novel’s other characters, Isabel’s friends, all take the same view. They all want Isabel to escape, and James seems aware that the reader will want her to escape, too. In this context, Isabel’s hesitation appears supremely frustrating. Her reasoning — that she made a deliberate, serious choice, and that it would be a betrayal of her moral ideal to seek to undo that choice — seems almost perverse.

But encountering it again, her framing is perhaps not so strange. It strikes me now how much of our morality hinges on the question of whether we should be able to undo our mistakes. This is part of what we’re talking about when we invoke “accountability” and “responsibility”: should someone who has screwed up badly be able to reverse their choice and avoid censure and suffering?

This is subtly but importantly different from “forgiveness”, and the answer tends to change depending on the error, especially for actions like Isabel’s, which cause harm only to herself. If someone buys a shirt in the wrong size, no one will object if they exchange it for a different one. But certain other errors, even when they are more-or-less remediable, come with finger-wagging: failing exams, missing planes, managing one's money poorly. We feel some repugnance when people get bailed out of bad situations of their own making. And when the choice has a moral dimension, we are less likely to think it should be freely undone: the suffering that results is seen as a necessary lesson, punishment, or warning².

I’m not really doing justice to Isabel’s/James's thinking, which doesn’t quite touch the idea of “punishment” and “consequences” but arises from something a bit subtler — the significance, or the sacredness, almost, of having made a free and serious choice. Her choice to marry Osmond, as she sees it, was the ultimate expression of her own autonomy, and she is keenly aware that many other women are not granted such a choice³. To seek to reverse it, and especially to place herself under the protection of a male rescuer, would be a different kind of self-betrayal. When information comes to light that suggests she entered the marriage under false pretenses, it seems to offer her an intellectual out — if her choice was not made as freely as she thought, then there is less weight in undoing it.

All this sounds perhaps heavy, but I found The Portrait of a Lady to be a riveting novel despite James’s reputation, even more riveting on re-read. It’s full of dynamite scenes and revelations; James finds a way to heap the maximum level of emotional intensity onto the smallest of gestures. This time Isabel did not frustrate or infuriate me, or at least not as much. She makes a waste of her life, but not a senseless one, and there is triumph hidden there too.

1. As well as The House of Mirth, which I also love.

2. See also the concept of “moral hazard.”

3. A subplot involves Osmond’s daughter Pansy, a disturbing manifestation of a feminine ideal: beautiful, pure, silent, and obedient.