Why Read? by Mark Edmundson Page A

were rather superior." And later in the same passage: "Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines . . . In matters
of opinion she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. At moments she discovered she was
grotesquely wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than
ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself." James can admire Isabel, too;
he is far too fine a novelist to give us a simple portrait. But his dislike for her American egotism at many points reaches
contempt.
    In a sense, Isabel's horrid fate, marriage to the disgusting, fortune-seeking Gilbert Osmond, is James's punishment for her.
In terms of novelistic probability, the marriage seems rather forced. What we see of the courtship falls far short of persuading
us that Isabel would actually give in and marry Osmond. But a purgative marriage—a punishment—is what Isabel needs, so the
master of realistic fiction bends plausibility and brings it to pass. Isabel's small-time hubris, the vanity of provincial
America, summons Gilbert Osmond and the almost equally appalling Madame Merle to deliver to Isabel the chastening that, as
I believe James sees it, she so deserves. Brash Isabel early in the book announces that she might rather go without clothes
than be defined by them. By the end, James has her dressed in so many layers of drapery that the four-piece suit Woolf said
T. S. Eliot favored looks liberating by contrast. And then James is content, for Isabel has been chastened. She has learned
to submit. She has learned to surrender her American wildness in the interest of something else, something more European and
refined and more modestly fitted to an awareness of human limits. Then James does admire her—her submission to fate is rather
awful and rather touching. One recalls the sufferings that the Marquis de Sade visits on the unworldly, Rousseauian Justine,
whose naive sense of human nature the Divine Marquis despises. It may not be going too far to say that in Portrait James is our Marquis, and Isabel is the one whose virtue finds its reward. What James detests in this novel and chastens with
purgatorial zeal is the American wildness to be found in Emerson, in Whitman (whom James notoriously poked fun at), and in
Emily Dickinson. That the spark should be alive in a woman is probably all the more frightening to James.
    The first time I discussed this book in class I was surprised by the result. Most of the students were outraged that, on reasonably
close examination, it was clear that James's sentiments about the young Isabel were, to put it kindly, critical. What made
this perception particularly difficult is that those harsh Jamesian sentiments had now to be seen as in some measure about
them, about their own possible naivete, about their own unthinking self-love—that is, about the aspect of themselves that
they had discovered in Isabel. Many declared themselves anti-Jamesian. "Henry James must be one of the cruelest authors ever
to write," one essay began. They saw James, I believe accurately, as the enemy of a certain kind of American spirit—though
by no means an unambivalent enemy.
    But a few of the students felt differently. What they came to believe was that Isabel needed to be chastened. She deserved
it. She had found her apt fate as surely as a protagonist in a Greek tragedy finds his. Osmond was exactly what she needed
and exactly what she deserved so as to "suffer into truth," to use a Sophoclean formulation. Two of the students were candid
enough, and brave enough, to say that, in fact, they felt that the harsh discipline that James was applying to Isabel ought
well to be applied to them. They were like Isabel Archer in her earliest manifestation, and like her needed submission to
purgatorial cleansing. As the book burned away what was most noxiously self-assertive in Isabel, so they hoped that it