2 Isabel’s Emersonian individualist ideology and liberalism
Isabel is one of the most famous female literary characters to have pursued the Emersonian independent self-reliant identity. It is evident that her consistently pursuing her personal freedom in the story. This chapter will focus on her Emersonian ideology and liberalism.
2.1 Isabel’s Emersonian individualist ideology
If Isabel’s portrait as a whole implies anything, it is the American anxiety to build the topology of the ideal, the complex self-identity whose limits are undefined, as well as the mysticism and spirituality of such identity. Isabel says, “I’m not fixed, but . . . a good deal mystified.” Nothing expresses her, and others cannot read her. Her many speeches and monologues in the novel about the nature of her self, independence, infinite freedom and the mystified ideal personal behavior as when Isabel says, “I try to judge for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all. I don’t want to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate”［4］, remind one of Emerson’s statements in “Self-Reliance.”
When Isabel is deceived in her marriage to Osmond, Ralph assures her not to mind others—not only when such another is the husband who hates her, but also even when he happens to be the cousin who adores her. When Ralph is in pain, she feels a passionate need to “let her sorrow possess her,” and to melt “together into his [Ralph’s] present pain”; and all he can tell her is, “don’t mind people. . . . I think I’m glad to leave people.” When she asks him, “Is it true—is it true? . . . That all [love] I have is yours [Ralph’s],” he turns his head away and then replies, “Ah; don’t speak of that—that was not happy”［4］. Reminded by his words that heroines are always happy and never surrender to pain—a basic Jamesian idea finding its origin in Emerson—not even to the painful truth of love, she responds:
Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I’m happier than I’ve been for a long time. And I want you to be happy—not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I’m near to you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That’s not the deepest thing; there is something deeper［5］.
When Isabel is about to return to Osmond and Pansy, Caspar pleads, “You don’t know where to turn. Turn right to me”［4］. But Isabel cannot return to him because she cannot ignore her inner Emersonian voice. “To get away from you!” is her only answer to Caspar. She can think of nothing more dangerous than his aggressive reality, and she sticks to this thought despite Caspar’s invitation for her:
Why shouldn’t we be happy—when it is here before us, when it is so easy? I’m yours forever—for ever and ever. Here I stand as firm as rock. What have you to care about? You have no children. . . . You mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We all have nothing to do with that; we are quite out of it; we look at things as they are［4］.
Clearly, Isabel hears the voice of her own self, and opposes everything that clashes with this independent self. Isabel lives idealistically and entertains an imaginary world of her own to project an “ideal” Emersonian American Self. And she does this successfully. She proves her personality to be, although deceived by the Europeanized Osmond. Rejecting the role of an “actor” following ready-made ideological scripts and mimicking the “other,” she proves herself as an agent who attempts to transcend both the “common,” and what Jonathan Freedman defines as “any one vision that tries to fix or define her,” even the author’s own ostensibly omniscient vision［6］.
2.2 Isabel’s liberalism
We will not simplify our exploration into claims that this person is free and that person is not; we will, rather, explore the choices characters within the novel make, how these choices correspond to (and often contradict) their claims, and what the story as a whole suggests about the importance of personal freedom and how it comes to be squelched. We will, furthermore, expand our exploration to incorporate elements of rituality and its role in the representations of personal freedom in The Portrait of a Lady. The freedom to choose (in the broadest sense) is of certain relevance when discussing Isabel Archer. Critic Carol Vopat argues that Isabel is at the peak of her individuality when she is making a choice. As noted by Vopat, “Why should choice be so significant for her? Because choice is the means by which Isabel believes she actualizes her freedom”［7］. This is illustrated in Archer’s rejection of various suitors. The narrator of The Portrait of a Lady notes:
Caspar Goodwood had never corresponded to her idea of a delightful person, and she supposed that this was why he left her so harshly critical. When, however, Lord Warburton, who not only did correspond with it, but gave an extension to the term, appealed to her approva, she found herself still unsatisfied. It was certainly strange.［4］
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