Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story of an independence-minded young woman named Isabelle Archer who visits distant relatives in England, the novel broadens James's trademark theme of American innocents confronting the corrupt sophistication of European cosmopolitans to explore the sussing out of hidden and deceptive motives. As Isabelle is drawn into a marital trap set for her by a conniving Madame Merle and the odious, controlling aesthete Gilbert Osmond, James questions not only the meaning of marriage, money, and friendship but how we read social signals. Only too late does Isabelle recognize that a gesture can be a guise, but her response to her predicament makes her one of the most compellingly ambiguous heroines in American literature.