Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to be larger than these large, these fabulous occasions? . . . The isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a desert place.［3］
The reader learns of her urgent desire to perfect her self to the extreme, and of her isolating secretive self:
Her [Isabel’s] thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines which had never been corrected by the judgment of people speaking with authority . . . She had a theory that it was only under this provision that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization, should move in the realm of light, natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic. . . . One should try to be one’s own best friend . . . The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. . . . She had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action.［3］
When she puts her idealistic philosophy into practice, Isabel “had an immense desire to appear to resist. . . . The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out, all round her” ［4］. Isabel comes to resist what she construes as a common, materialistic world, and, more specifically, to contest the traditional standards of everyday life, that, for example, bestow such a prominent position on Madame Merle. Isabel rejects traditional social practices and refuses to be conditioned by the material environment.
I suggest that what is at stake in Isabel’s resistance to the behavior of the people around her, such as the Europeanized Madame Merle is the moral tension between Isabel and the European milieu. In other words, Isabel resists the “group ideology” which tries to impose itself on her in order to alter her personality and render her like Madame Merle. Rather than surrendering, Isabel posits herself as a distinctive “subject” whose own opinions, statements, and system of ideas define her as a person. The novel shows Isabel’s task in formulating her own individualist ideology by opposing the “other,” as difficult but not impossible. As Smith contends, resisting common social practices “can and does take place, actively or passively, through single people . . . privately and publicly. It can take the form of refusal as much as intervention; it can be in the service of conservation as much as of disruption”［15］. Isabel manifests this refusal when she rebuffs Caspar Goodwood, who suggests to her, as Tony Tanner puts it, “oppression, coercion and constraint on the psychological level.” She also rejects Lord Warburton, who with his “complex social relations and obligations suggests immobilization on the social level”［15］. If she spurns the first out of a distinct disinclination to enter a firm physical world, she certainly declines the second on theoretical grounds, because what he offers her does not fit her vague notions of indefinite expansion. Isabel thinks she finds in Osmond, however, the qualities that fit her world: he is the ideal lover for her as the poor artist who seeks to perfect himself via art.
I would argue that it is Isabel’s Emersonian view of life which is responsible for her resistance to the “common,” as she sees it, opinions of those around her, and for her insistence upon making her own choice in marrying Osmond. This view of life sustains and nourishes her, and helps her develop a strong, independent character. At the same time, her ignorance and/or avoidance of the “common,” together with her icy aloofness, have negative effects. She refuses, for instance, to listen to the advices of Ralph, Mrs. Touchett and others with regard to her marriage to Osmond—until she herself realizes her mistake and admits it. She then finds Osmond a “hidden serpent,” someone who has “a wonderfully cruel intention” towards her.
Isabel’s resistance and conscious wish to construct her personality in a transcendental way do not, nevertheless, mean that she is not subject to concealed environmental forces that have formed her character. Although the novel provides merely glimpses and hints of Isabel’s childhood, these sufficiently let transpire the psychological, as well as social and economic, circumstances under which it was spent. The reader is told that Isabel’s late father had left her ignorant of the unpleasant aspects of life, and that she had had no “regular education and no permanent home.” She was “at once spoiled and neglected”［15］. I suggest that the absence of, in Laconia terms, both the “narcissistic image” (the mother)—i.e., the fact that Isabel is motherless—and the “symbolic father”—i.e., the fact that she has an “irresponsible” father—makes her develop as an alternative an idealized vision of the mother and the father. That is to say, she herself becomes the idealized image of her parents.
Her [Isabel’s] idealism and her fear of experience were alike manifestations of a single response; . . . this response evolved in part in reaction to the confusions of her childhood in Albany; and, in particular, to her experiences as the eager-to-please, motherless daughter of a charming but irresponsible father. . . . Isabel lacks an attentive mother to “mirror” her and a strong competent father to idealize; the child is required to mirror a parent who should be mirroring her.［3］
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