Isabels life in the novel is a study in disenchantment.

It is the story of a young woman whose bitter personal disappointment opens her eyes to the chasm that separates what is real from what is ideal. Her ideal is such as to command respect. In this sense, it has a universality of reference. Isabels dream of completely satisfying personal relationships is one of the recurrent dreams of mankind. As Isabel discovers, however, the real world is one in which her ideals have no valid currency. It is, in consequence, a stripped and denuded world, where the cry for reciprocity must forever be denied; where what is most beautiful is at the same time the most treacherous. he answer in !amess moral "the answer to society and life# is renunciation of further complications in order neither to corrupt or cause pain to others nor to be corrupted and suffer oneself. $or the sensitive person renunciation is the compassionate %innocent& response to involvement; the more one renounces the less likely he is to violate the innocence of others or to betray his own integrity. his discovery is the end of e'perience and the completion of !amess perfect circle of negation. !ames is primarily interested in a character developing as part of a social group. His figures are usually intellectuals like himself, sensitive, refined, sophisticated, controlling impulse by reason, and endowed with a faculty for acute self(analysis. hey view their own motives and reactions with a remarkable detachment and an equal degree of subtlety. )ost often his characters are Americans who have come over to *urope in order to assimilate its culture. hey want to achieve a kind of artistic perfection, of which *urope, in its almost mythical grandeur, seems to posses the key. +hat attracts them to *urope is the ceremony and formality of life which appeal to them and which constitutes the highest form of culture. However, the ,ld +orld usually disappoints them. hey fall a prey to elegant but cunning fortune hunters. In % he -ortrait of a .ady& and later in % he +ings of the /ove& a young and beautiful girl is trapped by a couple of unscrupulous lovers and discovers this only where the trap has closed. His principle in writing % he -ortrait of a .ady& was not so much completeness of treatment, as it had been in other novels, as adequacy of treatment and he meant by that what the 0reeks approved of in their %neither too much nor too little&. hat he was able to do that was largely due to the way in which he approached and developed the story before he began to write it. In the -reface he wrote for the novel he admitted that he had begun % he -ortrait..& with the character of his heroine whom he had had

in mind for a long time, but had refrained from treating because of the pious desire to place his treasure right. "1# o her, as she stood isolated, had been added the other characters and the setting, and these characters, who seemed 2ust to have come to him, had suggested her story. %I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of themI recognized them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete term of my plot.& "3# +hile they are all interested in her, she must feel herself apart, think of herself as working out her destiny by herself. hat had meant he would have to get into Isabels mind and this had suggested placing the center of the sub2ect in Isabels consciousness. %Place the center of the subject in the young womans own consciousness, I said to myself, and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you wish! !ames decided to give his American girl the center of the stage, and then he contrived by the device of the inheritance, which 4alphs love and interest made possible, to make her rich, thus putting it into the power to be generous, to marry a poor man in the wish to help him. He made her, in his opinion, a free individual, and the bitterest part of her tragedy occurs when she finds that she has not been free, only blind, and those others have %made& her life. +hat was in %+ashington 5quare& on a small scale is in % he -ortrait of a .ady& on an enlarged and heightened scale. Isabel is intelligent and clever, but people, two in particular, who are not only clever but also wicked, surround her and hence her defeat is in their hands. It must not be overlooked, however, that defeated though she is e'ternally, Isabel achieves a moral victory for herself; 6atherine did not, she sank into passive e'istence. !ames treated his heroine not only intelligently and truly and affectionately, he treated her artistically. He let Isabel matter enough. He gave the whole novel enough. He not only placed her in the center, he places her in her consciousness, in her view of herself and of life. He looked at the other characters only as their plotting involved her, and e'cept for 4alph, who was lovingly watching and noticing all, he stayed as much as possible out of the minds of those surrounding her. He looked at everything as he saw it. 7y this time in his career, !ames had quite thoroughly developed the theory that the point of view from which the individual perceived reality conditioned both what he saw and how he 2udged e'perience.

In a significant e'change with )rs.

ouchett early in % he -ortrait..& Isabel asks8

"ow what is your point of view# $hen you criticize everything, here you should have a point of view, yours doesnt seem to be %merican & you thought everything over there so disagreeable! $hen I criticize, I have mine' its thoroughly %merican( )y dear young lady, said )rs. ouchett, there are as many points of view in the world as people of sense! )y point of view, thank *od, is personal! "9# 5he illustrates this remark by her eccentric behavior throughout the novel. *ach character illustrates it in its own way. 0oodwoods point of view is that of the practical, forceful American man of business, who never can see any moral ob2ection to doing whatever one has the power to do to secure ones moral happiness. .ord +arburton, for all his %radicalism& is stuck fast in the varnish of his caste and class. *ven Henrietta 5tackpole, that liberated American career woman is thoroughly consistent in her good(natured, ruthless desire to %see *urope& and by doing so missing almost every shade of the e'perience. -erhaps only 4alph has both the commitment to life and the necessary detachment to transcend the limitations that perception usually places on character. He is the only one to see the pathos and, at the end, the promise of Isabels situation. hus, Henry !ames anticipated by some nine years the theory of perception that his brother +illiam was to put forward in his % Principles of Psychology "1:;<#8 $hilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses form the object before us, another part +and it may be the larger part, always comes out of our own head! "=# !ames dramati>es this theory in many ways in % he -ortrait?& $or e'ample the dialogue in 6hapter 1; between )adame )erle and Isabel about the relation of things to the self is essential for the definition of each character and for their respective cosmopolitan and American outlooks8 -nes self, )adame )erle says, for other people, is ones e.pression of ones self, and ones house, ones clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps & these things are all e.pressive! Isabel replies8 I think just the other way! I dont know whether I succeed in e.pressing myself, but I know that nothing else e.presses me! "othing that belongs to me is any measure of me' on the contrary, its a limit, a barrier and a perfectly arbitrary one! "@# his brief e'change has many ramifications in the novel. Isabel has to discover, painfully, that her innocent American belief in the integrity of the self and the unimportance of what Howells had called %the paraphernalia& are to prove

highly inadequate to her perception of the *uropean scene, the deviousness of ,smond, and the machinations of )adame )erle herself. *mersonian self(reliance has to give way to recognition of limits, and Isabel reali>es at the end of the novel that she has to return to the self that she has defined by all her previous actions and acquisitions. he portrait of Isabel is the portrait of a mind rather than that of a person with physical form and body, and it takes the whole novel to give the complete portrait. Isabel, like her creator, knows instinctively and deeply, that art alone is not enough, that a feeling of morality, for life, for the human element is ever more important. Isabel is forcing herself into an artificial pose, a false portrait. he sub2ect of the portrait is herself a work of art, a portrait of the young girl eager to find and catch the finer life but trapped in that very desire by the evil forces which use her possibilities for their own petty ends. 5he was meant to be original, to be natural, to be the full portrait of confident, >estful life. Any attempt to turn the portrait to the wall is unnatural and disturbing. And !ames, as it were, didnt even try to do so. He knew how romantic Isabel was, how little e'perienced she was in mature social behavior. He had shown that she was completely mistaken in believing that %the world lay before her & she could do whatever she chose! 7ut !ames also knew the meaning and the value of renunciation. he American life of his day, in its reckless plunge to outer e'pansiveness and inner defeat, had taught him that as his leading spiritual theme. hrough Isabel Archer he gave one full and fresh e'pression of inner reliance in the face of adversity. It is no wonder that after enumerating her weakness, he had concluded8 she should be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the readers part an impulse more tender and more purely e.pectant!"A#