Gilbert Osmond remains somewhat of a mystery to me. We know he married for money but we are not at all sure he didn’t admire Isabel a little. He said some very touching things to her in their courtship. He told Madame Merle he thought her full of grace and charm. But three years into the marriage we learn she is unhappy but I am not sure if it is because he is a bully, an emotional blackmailer, a woman-hater or any combination thereof, or if Isabel simply gets on his nerves with her opinions and personality, nothing more than an innate incompatibility that time will distill as it does for many couples after the initial shock of recognition takes place, after the courtship ends and reality sets in. Is he devious? Yes, certainly. Is he violent? Isabel says he is not violent, but simply “he does not care for me.” What does that imply? In another passage she says “It’s not you, it is me he hates.” Is she just oversensitive, overly dramatic? Is she reacting to a lack of affection or lack of respect? Does he disregard her physically and does a lack of sexual interest recoil inside of her as a snaky form of rejection? It’s hard to know. James does not exactly spell it out. All we know is that Osmond married for money, though not solely for money, is attached to his own ideas, fond of having his own way, is petulant, condescending and keeps his wife at arm’s length. The same could be said of her. Yet the relationship began with affection and warmth. Where did it go? We don’t know. Osmond tells Madame Merle that he wished to be “adored” but since that is not to be, he has to live with it.
James spends many chapters with the surrounding characters, Isabel’s friends, while they speculate on her marriage, the state of her mind but Isabel herself offers little but that yes, she is to be pitied. She admits she is unhappy, but doesn’t tell us exactly why other than her husband apparently can’t stand her. Why not? A feminist reading on the novel tells us it's the old standby: the need for a husband to dominate and defuse a strong woman with "ideas." I can agree up to a point but to me the situation screams sexual incompatibility, something James would never broach.
I think Mr. James got tired of Isabel after a while and gave up on her. As a man, he couldn’t quite get inside the head of a mature woman in an unhappy marriage. He was not married and perhaps tinkering with the Osmond’s marriage became too challenging for his limited resources. He had an idea of a lady, what might happen if certain events were put in place but it got too complicated when the actual marriage became the story. He was only interested in Isabel Archer Osmond up to a point; that point being her choice once free of monetary concern, after which, he lost interest. He did his fact-finding, he reported the findings. He did not go in for the “so then what happened?” the book was quite long enough and he worked on deadline.
So as I speculate, I've begun my sequel and have only to figure out Osmond's state of mind. Is he the bad guy? It would certainly make my job easier if I could make him a really odious character, given to pettiness, infidelity, shady dealings, collusion. But James did not go in for such easy assertions. He wanted to make a fiction that was like life and in life there are many shades a gray. In marriage it's usually he who weeps and wails the loudest is the victim but it's not necessarily the truth. My first chapters have him petulant, sore over his wife's trip to England, peeved at having been outed by his sister--he's lost a lot of leverage with that and mostly bored by Isabel, except for the money of course. You see, I've a lot to flesh out with Gilbert Osmond.
The following books were used for reference in this post:
Modern Critical Interpretations Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Harold Bloom editor; ISBN 1-55546-008-9
Modern Novelists, Henry James, by Alan W. Bellringer, ISBN 0-312-02056-2
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