Isabel's Will

I mentioned in the first post on this blog that I really didn’t have a handle on Isabel Archer Osmond, did not really understand if she was a victim of Gilbert Osmond or they were a matched set of egos intent on marital domination. I have read many essays and critiques of “The Portrait of a Lady” offering both observations.

For the most part, I think Mr. James was sympathetic to Isabel and writes she’d been “made a convenience of” by two conniving sophisticates she was no match for. Then I remember something that Ralph Touchett said to himself on the first day Isabel arrived at Gardencourt: She does not take suggestion. By this one sentence I can make Isabel my own character: She wants her own way. I get that. All of my life I have heard things like, “You do not take instruction well. You are stubborn. You are intent on things your own way,” and lately, “Why don’t you ever listen to what I say, do what I suggest?”

I understand Isabel better. She may have been a victim, but she waltzed into her marriage after her dearest friends and family members advised against it. Her friends know she’s miserable but she won’t admit it; she is too proud and too embarrassed. Only to Ralph who is dying will she confess her error. I respect her reticence but in the sixth chapter of my sequel to TPOAL, I have Mrs. Touchett tell her “no one appreciates or respects a martyr, Isabel, don’t carry that too far.”

In my sequel, Isabel most definitely knows she was/is headstrong. Her husband may be obnoxious, he may even be psychotic but she’s consciously aware that her own assumptions were based on a faulty premise composed in her own mind. I think that is why she went back to him. She does not see herself as a victim, she’d rather see herself as a foolhardy young woman prepared to live with her choice. Isabel is very big on choice. She does not want to get out of jail free.

And this is precisely the reason her husband objects to her: that streak of Emersonian morality and her belief in free-will annoy him. He is not bothered by any such philosophical concepts himself. His will dictates for his aggrandizement; tinged with only a mild irony. As Dostoevsky said in his story “The Gambler,” there is nothing so dangerous as sophistication.