In her explanation to Warburton, Miss Archer revealed typical late Romanism: "I can't escape unhappiness .... In marrying you I shall be trying to"［4］. She wishes to face "the usual chances and dangers" that most people confront everyday, and from which she thinks such a marriage would shelter her. Her unexpected decision seems to free her from all custom, at least temporarily. As her aunt said, "I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything.... After that one needn't stand on trifles" ［4］. She already deserted the attentions of Caspar Goodwood back in Albany, and she was not about to succumb to the more refined temptations of social reformer Lord Warburton either.
One of Isabel's most impressive traits is her ability to stir feelings of love in virtually every man she meets. Cousin Ralph Touchett, the most sympathetic male character in the novel, also worships her from afar. He makes a decision that will seal Isabel's fate. He convinces his dying father to leave her a substantial fortune. He had the best of intentions: "She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free"［4］. But, ironically, it is this generous act that will prove to be Isabel's undoing.
3.2.2 The later American Isabel: A knowing abroad
When Isabel Archer is first presented, she is sitting in the library of an all but abandoned family house trying to carry out an ambitious plan to read through all the German philosophers. She finds it difficult to muster the necessary discipline to accomplish this task. When her aunt arrives and decides to take Isabel back to Europe with her, Isabel drops the study of German philosophy without a backward glance. However, in her views of Europe and of what it means to be a woman of her age, expected to marry and marry well, she operates out of a romantic conception. When her friend, Henrietta Stackpole warns her against the decadent Europeans and encourages her to return to her American simplicity, Isabel admits that she has a sense of her life as a romantic carriage ride through a dark night into the mists of the unknown. The reader might feel the anti-climax that Ralph Touchett feels when Isabel announces her plan to marry Gilbert Osmond, but Henry James has prepared for this decision with a number of occurrences in the plot［18］. For instance, when Isabel arrives at Gardencourt in her guise as the New Woman, independent and straight-talking, she comes supported by the most conservative people, Mrs. Touchett. When Isabel wants to stay up talking to Ralph Touchett and Lord Warburton, Mrs. Touchett tells her it is not proper for a young woman her age to stay up alone with two men her age. Isabel shocked at the unexpected constraint on her freedom, but readily complies with her aunt’s insistence that she go to her room: she asks her aunt to please tell her any time she is being unconventional so she can decide whether to correct the mistake. She carries on the remainder of her unmarried life in strict accordance with the constraints of the liberty of young women.
Why Isabel goes from being a lover of liberty to a lover of the severest constraint upon women? Perhaps liberty frightened or bored Isabel and after tasting it for a year or two, she desired rest and conventionality. Maybe answers are there in the background out of the book. In the following chapter the author will discuss the background.
4 Isabel’s sexuality and marriage
The Portrait of a Lady, we might say that, is a book of Isabel’s love story. So that, it is easy to find Isabel’s thought and pursue in her relationship with those males in the book. Then, this part concentrates on her sexuality and marriage.
4.1 Isabel’s sexuality
A look at Isabel’s sexuality reveals further how classical James’s art is. Isabel’s sexuality is not represented explicitly, but symbolically, even ambiguously. She vacillates between the sexual and the asexual: the reader finds in the novel both a sexual symbolism showing a sentimental and passionate Isabel and a portrayal of her that shows her inhibited as well as tough. She rejects Goodwood and Lord Warburton, as mentioned above, because she feels they will restrain her independence, and chooses to marry Osmond not because of a physical attraction but because of his artistic talents.
Sexual symbolism concerning Isabel is apparent when she considers Goodwood’s figure as “too straight and stiff”. Seymour Kleinberg explains Isabel’s relation to Goodwood in Freudian terms, believing that she sees Goodwood as a “walking erection”. This becomes more evident when Isabel rejects Goodwood’s offer of marriage. “She felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact in his face”［19］. After turning him down, Isabel takes his hand and “felt a great respect for him; she knew how much he cared for her and she thought him magnanimous”［4］. But a few lines later, she “intensely rejoiced that Caspar Goodwood was gone.” At these moments Isabel struggles between her passionate and impassionate pulses, until the sexual conflict in her comes to be expressed in bodily gestures: 转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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