Introduction to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (post 2) by Roger Luckhurst: Narrative Inconsistencies

“The novel begins with an overall narrator, setting a scene in the grounds of Gardencourt and slowly zooming in on its figures. A debonair, witty narrative voice directs us in our judgement of these characters, undercutting Isabel’s forthright comments with an ironic voice of experience. The omniscient narration slips in and out of the perspectives of Isabel, Mrs Touchett, Ralph, and others with sinuous ease…Yet somewhere around Chapter XVIII, with the arrival of Madame Merle, the narrative tactics change. Crucial information is withheld from the reader, whilst our knowledge of the jaws of the trap around Isabel grows. Then James make his most audacious structural decision: he leaps forward in time, so that we fail to witness her momentous decision to marry Osmond. This is perverse, after the acres of time given over to her rejection of her competing suitors: we surely need to know her thought-process. As if this weren’t strange enough, we then leap forward again three years into her marriage and for the space of four long chapters we are left outside Isabel’s consciousness…We know she has suffered the death of a baby; we suspect the marriage may not be happy; we are given no clue. When the reader is finally allowed to return to her consciousness, in Chapter XL, it leads up to one of the most sustained subjective reveries in English literature in Chapter XLII…From this point on, the overall narrator virtually falls away, the irony disappears: we regard the world principally from the perspective of Isabel. The novel has shifted in strange leaps from consensual Realism to the single window of Isabel’s extended consciousness. Even so, her very last, critical decision, whether or not to return to her husband in Italy, is left outside our knowledge. We only hear of her decision and are left to imagine the consequences in the space left by her absence. This accounts for the complaints of some contemporary reviewers that for an alleged exhaustive portrait, the novel fell oddly short” (1, pp. xvi-xvii).

Comment

In my past post on “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), I noted the same thing: narrative inconsistencies due to multiple narrators. The questionable reality of the ghosts was not due to an intriguing ambiguity, but due to the inconsistency of multiple narrators who took different sides of the issue.

Judging from the above Introduction to “The Portrait of a Lady” (1881), James’s creative process had employed multiple, inconsistent narrator personalities for many years. Any confusion it caused for the reader was not due to profundity. It was a manifestation of his multiple personality trait.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.