Oh, The Games People Play

There are many ways “The Portrait of a Lady” can be said to be a modern novel despite its verbiage. Henry James is considered the bridge between the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth. His immediate influence was Nathanial Hawthorne but he wished to do something different, more modern, which to him meant psychological; more conscious, less circumstantial.

After an odious discussion with her husband about Lord Warburton's intentions toward Pansy Isabel ruminates on how she came to marry Gilbert Osmond; her sincerity, her initial adoration, her wish to bestow on such a gentleman, "the best in Europe," money she felt not rightly hers but that she could use for the enhancement of someone so fine. She traces the path of her own blindness and her husband’s disenchantment with her.

There were times when she almost pitied him; for if she had not deceived him in intention she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.

He said to her one day that she had too many ideas and that she must get rid of them…He really meant it…he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance. She had known she had too many ideas; she had more even than he had supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he had asked her to marry him. Yes, she had been hypocritical; she had liked him so much. She had too many ideas for herself; but that was just what one married for, to share them with some one else. One couldn’t pluck them up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them, be careful not to utter them. It had not been this, however, his objecting to her opinions; this had been nothing. She had no opinions--none that she would not have been eager to sacrifice in the satisfaction of feeling herself loved for it. What he had meant had been the whole thing--her character, the way she felt, the way she judged. This was what she had kept in reserve; this was what he had not known until he had found himself--with the door closed behind, as it were--set down face to face with it. She had a certain way of looking at life he took as a personal offense.

Poor Isabel did what so many women today do; they play dumb when they aren’t, play games, mask their true identity, diminish their own needs and desires. They're told you have to have to hide your temperament, pretend the things they say are worthy of The Sermon on the Mount and disguise any and all irritation until the poor chap is locked in. Later, all hell breaks loose when everything he does from being five minutes late, to not picking up his socks, to forgetting what she considers important dates can send her into a fit of explosive aggression that threatens to burn the house down or firebomb the car. It’s quite common, this sort of dissimulation still today.

Isabel had it right when she said it was her own fault for playing down her true spirit and playing up his. She concedes her own folly. I admire her for this acknowledgment, for not absolving herself from the tragedy that is her marriage. By refusing to be the victim, by viewing her own gullibility as not something that was acted upon but something that led her to her own choice, however regrettable, she empowers her future. This is the way HJ managed to write a contemporary novel in the nineteenth century.

In my sequel to TPOAL, Isabel does not play games, but is forthright. She has learned the truth and the truth has set her free. Osmond is still up to his old tricks but he too wearies of contradiction and mistrust. Nevertheless, thinking he has won the round, proceeds without caution. Oh, the games people play.