Isabel tells Madame Merle, “I can do what I choose—I belong quite to the independent class. I’ve neither father nor mother; I’m poor and of serious disposition. . . . I therefore am bound to be timid and conventional” ［4］.
Paul argues that like most “morally healthy individuals,” Isabel, in her preoccupation with herself and in her attempt to crystallize and idealize her character, subverts her personality and finds herself “pursuing perverse or paradoxical ends, in full consciousness without unclouded eyes”［16］. In justifying Isabel’s idealistic behavior, he relates it to her seeking “unnecessary personal unhappiness.” This is the basic motive, he contends, for Isabel’s idealistic philosophy in life. Someone in turn finds “oedipal longings” behind the image Isabel forms of Osmond, and contends also that “Osmond proves so attractive [to Isabel] because he provides . . . mirroring and idealization, and is the ideal self object” which “neither Caspar nor Lord Warburton can be”. For her, Osmond becomes then the real gentleman—“the first gentleman in Europe”, “perfectly polite”, and moreover “artistic”. Isabel is impressed by his “cleverness” “amenity,” “good nature,” “felicity,” and “knowledge of life”. She notices that people do not criticize Osmond as they criticized her father. Indeed, Osmond’s upbringing of Pansy makes Isabel regard him as an ideal father. He advises Pansy and offers her discipline and protection. Seeing such conduct on the part of Osmond makes Isabel think that her father had not been concerned with her.
Isabel comes to have a passive view of men in general—she sees them as “abstractions” from whom she needs only “approval,” not, say, “passionate love”—to the extent that “men are afraid of her”. But, what about Osmond? For Isabel, Osmond “is a non-threatening masculine figure,” who “evokes only safe and familiar feelings,” such as “maternal protectiveness, or filial adoration, and who calls forth what is definitely an aesthetic rather than a sexual or sensual appreciation”［4］.
Isabel has a tendency to ignore what others say to her, reducing them, in her exalted evaluation of her own ideas. Osmond chides Isabel several times about this behavior, but she ignores his words. Hating her for having a mind of her own, he tells her sarcastically, “You can do exactly what you choose”［4］. When Madame Merle tells Isabel, “I know you better,” Isabel’s answer is, “I’m not sure of that”［4］. And when Caspar Goodwood tells Isabel, “You will get sick of your independence”［4］, she tells him, “I like my liberty too much. . . . If there is anything in the world I’m fond of . . . it is my personal independence”［4］. Ralph, indeed, informs her, “I don’t believe you allow things to be settled for you,” and Isabel responds: “Oh yes; if they’re settled as I like them”［4］.
3.2 Isabel’s transition
With the influence of both American and English culture, Isabel embodies a contrary personality of innocence and knowing. In the following parts the readers may find some details and includes.
3.2.1 The early American Isabel: an innocent abroad
Isabel enters British high society like a whirlwind. Because she never went to school, an institution that provides a "standard of comparison”, she did not have a "standard of comparison" and was never able to compare her gifts and defects with other people. Some criticized how her father had brought her up and questioned whether she had any education. As striking with this questioning, the very early Isabel are the following traits and characteristics: a "ridiculously active" imagination, "seeing without judging", restlessness and agitation, and "an unquenchable desire to please". "She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering” ［17］.
The orphaned relation of rich Aunt Lydia Touchett (who discovers the naive young idealist gathering, dust in a dingy corner of Albany), Isabel is an innocent abroad, who revitalizes the boring aristocracy with her vibrant energy. She immediately distinguishes herself by turning down the proposal of a highly desirable English lord. Lord Warburton has merit in her eyes:
His quality was a mixture of the effect of rich experience... with modesty at times almost boyish; the wholesome savor of which was as agreeable as something tasted-lost nothing from the addition of a tone of respectable kindness. "I like your English gentleman very much." Isabel said to Ralph after Lord Warburton had gone away［4］.
Yet his merit was beside the point. Isabel refuses Warburton's proposal for what are apparently excellent reasons. Possessed of a high opinion of herself, Isabel does not wish to follow conventional expectations, which she felt inappropriate for a woman of her style.
Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish then with, a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one the impression of having intentions of her own. Those intentions did not include living the sheltered existence of an affluent nineteenth-- century wife. Protesting that "It's not my fate to give up-I know it can't be［4］. Isabel shocks everyone around her with her refusal.
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