Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady Essay -- Portrait Lady

Henry James Portrait of a LadyOn her long journey from Rome her mental capacity had been given up to vagueness she was inefficient 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 new(prenominal) countriesstrange-looking, dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no change of seasons, al atomic number 53 simply as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of winter. She had plenty to think slightly but it was neither reflexion nor conscious purpose that filled her mind. abrupt visions passed through it, and sudden dull 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.(606) This passage, from the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady, strikes me as one of the most brutally no-good moments in the entire novel. Here Isabel, who has defied Osmonds wishes that she defer to the sanctity of their marriage has, with a solemn and ghostly motion to the liberty and independence that has characterized her throughout, come to be beside her cousin Ralph as he dies. What makes the passage so effectively tragic is that in its tone, language and imagery, it picks up on notes that have been sounded again and again from the beginning of the novel at the same time, however, we cannot fail to register the differences in the workings of our heroines mind as she tries to make sense of what has become of her. Much of the poignancy of the above-quoted lines comes from the track in which they contrast with James earlier descriptions of Isabels mentality. It is surely dowry of... ...he would come back in her weakness...(607)James only too vividly draws the contrast between Isabels initial freedom and her eventual manacles within the secretly and malevolently-built struct ure of her marriage. It is with one word that James sums up the central tragedy of Isabels story when, fitted with this new, terrible consciousness, she concludes The only occasion to regret was that Madame Merle had been sowell, so unimaginable.(607) Once again, James strikes a note that has sounded again and again over the course of our reading. Indeed, imagination is in many ways the novels primary subject, as it is our heroines ruin by the end of this almost unspeakably cruel and sad story, we can only hope that it will be her redemption and high quality as well. Works CitedJames, Henry. A Portrait of a Lady. 1908. New York Houghton Mifflin, 1963.