“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 8) by Henry James: Famous Chapter 42, Isabel’s “meditative vigil,” called novel’s “best thing” in author’s Preface

Based on James’s writing process, which he describes in his Preface, you would not expect him to have any deep understanding of his characters. He says he (his host personality) doesn’t create them or invent what happens to them. They arrive in his mind as visions and apparitions, and then he watches to see what happens:

“It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my primary question: ‘Well, what will she [Isabel, who had arrived as a vision] do? Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them” (1, p. 13).

What Isabel meditates about in Chapter 42 is that she is miserable in her marriage. She had misjudged the man she married. He hates her because she is not his puppet.

“She knew of no wrong she had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: She simply believed he hated her” (1, p. 421). “The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his…Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?” (1, pp. 427-429).

Isabel’s interpretation of the failure of her marriage, based on the information then available to her, is valid. But the psychological explanation that James gives her for not having married the two men who had previously proposed to her is weak. He did not have a good explanation, because he didn’t understand where she was coming from.

James didn’t understand Isabel, because he (his host personality) didn’t create her. She had come to him as a vision or apparition. Who gave James his apparition? There are various speculations as to his outside inspirations. But outside sources did not give him a vision or apparition.

What inside source could there have been? An alternate personality, who may have been influenced by outside sources, presented James with a vision of Isabel. And then the narrators and characters, who were also alternate personalities (since they seemed to have minds of their own) carried on.

If you have a better way to explain the creative process that Henry James describes in his Preface, please submit your comments.

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