On The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady: Revisions in the Structure of Representation
Henry James first published The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 but when he prepared the New York edition of his works, nearly thirty years later, he made many significant alterations in the text of his novel. What might account for these numerous and sometimes dramatic revisions ? Why did James feel it was necessary to make these changes and what is the meaning of these additions to the novel ? Taking F.O. Matthiessen's essay "The Painter's Sponge and the Varnish Bottle" (1944) as a comprehensive catalog of the revisions James made, I do not propose to discover additional discrepancies between the two texts; rather, this essay makes a critical analysis of the effect these changes had and attempts to determine how the revisions can be seen as transformative shifts in the structure of the novel as a literary form. But before we look at the specific revisions themselves, it is necessary that our discussion begins with a close examination of the circumstances surrounding the creation of this work.
In the "Preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady" (1908), James reveals that, in the earliest stages of his creative process, before he had planned out his next literary composition, he would become aware of an image in his mind, an abstract picture of a set of relations that, through the course of events, would be altered in some significant way. Starting with this non-verbal representation of thought, James began to conceive of the new work, taking the process through which his thoughts altered themselves as the plot of his next fictional creation. Proceeding in this manner, writing was for James an arduous process where he endeavored to convert the geometry of his imagination into a language that could by understood by a general audience, translating his concepts from their imaginative space into the textual space of literary fiction. His next step, he says, was to conceive of a lead character such as Isabel Archer, a subject who through the force of her attraction would be able to bring about a change similar to the one he had originally imagined.
James recalls that the method of literary composition advocated by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was essentially the reverse of his own. As Turgenev saw it, the writer's primary task was to visualize the characters he chose to write about, basing them on reality to the greatest extent of his ability. Furthermore, Turgenev felt that a writer ought to treat his characters as if, like real people, they too were subject to the contingencies of physical existence. Turgenev felt that it was a writer's task "to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would produce and feel." Instead of the Jamesian model, where the characters and situations were derived from a highly abstract set of relations, in Turgenev's model the narrative was created around a set of highly defined characters who each presented the writer with a series of potentialities. Ironically, in writing the Portrait, James' method of creation resembled Turgenev's more than his own for, as James admits, "I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting." This shift in James' attention, turning away from theorizing about the structural composition of his novels and focusing directly on the physicality of his characters, stimulated him to publish the revised edition of the Portrait. Starting with the most obvious changes first, we will move progressively to the most significant changes that James made.
Matthiesson acknowledges that in many instances, the impelling force behind these revisions was a change that occurred on two levels, both in James' perception of the text and in his perception of himself as a literary artist. There are several features in James' method of revising the Portrait that suggest such a view. On the micro-level, this includes the most obvious changes, including the addition of colloquial language, replacing 'cannot' and 'she would' with shorter forms, the contractions of 'can't' and 'she'd'. On the macro-level, where the significance of his revisions extends much further, James approached the text with the intention of effecting the semiotic redefinition of Isabel Archer. As Matthiesson points out, the later James remodeled the figure of Isabel, at one point replacing the line "she was an excitable creature, and now she was very excited" with the following sentence: "Vibration was easy to her, was in fact constant with her, and she found herself humming like a smitten harp." The second sentence redefined Isabel with greater precision; it entails more than a simple characterization of her as being excited. Instead, the revised passage allows James to particularize and specify as to the kind of personality Isabel has. No longer confined to the mere adjective 'excited', James expands his metaphorical language, comparing Isabel to the tones that emanate from a classical instrument. For Mattheisson, the fact that James made this change indicates that in approaching the original text, he set out with the intent of converting Isabel into an image. Perhaps feeling that his original description of Isabel's character would be meaningful to a reading public all-too-familiar with 'excitable' heroines, James opted for a description that rested, instead, on ambiguity.
Secondly, Matthiessen points out, in the revised edition of the Portrait, James frequently expanded sections of the text that originally had been brief. For instance, in the earlier edition, James gave his first description of Osmond's character in two sentences, using as his central device a simile contained in the second line: "What continued to please this young lady was his extraordinary subtlety. There was such a fine intellectual intention in what he said, and the movement of his wit was like that of a quick-flashing blade." In the revision, this description was expanded with the introduction of an extended metaphor that she light on Osmond's character and class:
What continued to please this young woman was that while he talked so for amusement he didn't talk, as she had heard people, for 'effect.' He uttered his ideas as if, odd as they appeared, he were used to them and had lived with them; old polished knobs and heads of handles, of precious substance, that could be fitted if necessary to new walking-sticks--not switches plucked in destitution from the common tree and then too elegantly waved about.
This passages illustrated how James, in re-reading his original Portrait, was not content with a comparison between Osmond's thinking and the swift movements of a knife. Instead, he replaced the similar with a metaphor that suggested that Osmond was deeply entrenched in his ideas. In characterizing the superannuated status of these ideas, James compared them to antique furnishings, like those that adorned Osmond's ornamental home. James extends this metaphor further, introducing it into a second comparison where canes carried by the members of the privileged class are contrasted to those of the underclass who, due to their impoverishment, make their own canes by breaking branches off of the common tree. As can be seen from these revisions, although James has lost a metaphor that performed a simple function, he has enabled his text to raise questions of class distinction, promoting the development of ideas in his reader's mind that provide Osmond with more depth as a character. The use of this extended metaphor helps the reader to associate Osmond's character with his beliefs that were derived from the history of high-culture. James' revision is particularly efficacious, for here the revision out-performs the original, solidifying Osmond's image as someone who is a snob--anachronistic, pretentious, priggish.
James also made a series of revisions that suggested how the moral consciousness of the literary text had shifted since the 1880s. These include revisions in Ralph's description of Osmond, as James felt that Ralph's attempt to convince Isabel that Osmond as a 'humbug' needed to be re-written as a warning about Osmond's 'sordid or sinister' nature. Another revision of this type includes a description of the Countess which changes from 'rather wicked' to 'rather impossible'. In still another revision, we find that Madame Merle's original desire to 'save Isabel's reputation' became, in the revised text, a desire to 'save Isabel's skin'. In directing his language away from the notion of Isabel's moral character and to the easy visualized conception of her skin, James shows how the abstract signs of moralistic language were replaced by signs that referred directly to physical objects.
These revisions are also noteworthy because, as Matthiessen points out, they show how James paid attention, not to the ideas behind the narrative itself, but specifically to the language used to relate these ideas. Instead of altering the significant events of the novel, James redefined the narrative superstructure of the Portrait, supplementing the text with language that produced a heightened level of visualization and, simultaneously, contributed to the heightening of ambiguity through the diminishing of didactic narrative content. Changes such as these may be taken as proof that the Portrait represents the implementation of a new structuring system to govern the literary text. A change in the structure of literary representation is underway, as James' revisions a new growth emerging from the soil of literature, the early phase of modernism. Now it is no longer sufficient to say that Osmond was a 'humbug' as a result of his essentially villainous nature. James saw characters like Osmond as equaling with the complexity of Isabel, although he could not devote as much attention to Osmond as he did to his main character. In addition, the abjuration of overtly moralistic language constituted a move away from the metaphysical conceptions of good and evil and, in so doing, allowed for the creation of spaces of literary ambiguity.
Our proposition that these revisions were impelled by an increased familiarity with the psychological factors that contributed to the formation of Isabel's personality gains additional credence when Matthiessen announced that James also revised the reasons why Isabel found Osmond to be so appealing. Originally, Osmond appeared to Isabel "as bright and soft as an April cloud," while the revised version showed him to be "as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm." These changed shows how James altered his use of similes, replacing simple ones with ones that were more complex. Specifically, James moves from a comparison made between Osmond's personality and the appearance of a cloud, to a highly abstract metaphor that compared his manner of courtship to a practiced performance whose value was well-worn. This revision is an example of James' move away from similes based on intangible appearances and metaphysical sensations to ones that possessed a distinct sense of reality. In this instance, a sense of physicality and motion is conveyed as Osmond's personality is compared to two objects moving in relation to one another, the palm of his hand and the piece of ivory. In addition, this revision is more successful at giving the reader a memorable impression of Osmond's personality without destroying the suspenseful ambiguity of his true character.
In composing the scene where Pansy first enters the novel, James wrote that her "natural and usual expression seemed to be a smile of perfect sweetness." Yet this statement too needed to be revised, for such a characterization Pansy seemed, to the later James, to be stilted, as it conjured up an image to static and solid to adequately portray the young girl. Rewriting this description, Pansy's face was now "pained with a fixed and intently sweet smile." We see here that the later James found his earlier method of representing people to be flawed and discovered a more reliable route to authentic literary representation. One suspects that he re-read his earlier attempts to represent Pansy's emotional character as being too well-defined to appeal sufficiently to the reader's imagination, something that is a prime concern for a novelist. To fully realize the Pansy that inhabited his imagination, James reworked the image, giving her a smile that spoke more of her forced expression than of the authenticity of her perfect demeanor. As a result, the author's suggestion that the smile has been coerced takes root and, in turn, the reader's suspicions do as well.
This revision is an example of the 'perfection' of the early text imposing a set of limitations that. with James' revisions, were finally eliminated. The ambiguous opacity of the later text not only displays a greater level of artistic maturity, but also permits the reader's imagination to engage spontaneously with the narrative, making the Portrait a better novel by drawing the reader into a heightened level of complicity with James' created world. Whereas the early text may have prevented his audience from connecting with the characters, the revised text is better able to bring about a change similar to the one James originally imagined. As in our earlier discussion of the semiotic redefinition of Isabel, in this instance the character of Pansy possesses a greater reality when James defines her, not through a direct representation of her defining characteristics, but through a simile that poeticizes the naturalness of her expression and opens the text to an increased range of potential meanings.
Also of great importance are the changes made in the final pages of the novel, where James revised his description of the one scene of physical passion contained in the Portrait. In the scene where Caspar Goodwood kisses Isabel a final time, James first wrote, "His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free." In the revised text, he continued on at length:
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with his act of possession. So she had heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.
The revision shows how James felt that his audience needed more than a single metaphor if he was going to communicate the full significance of the event. Yet instead of discarding the original two sentences, he kept both and between them he incorporated an expended textual passage that added a chain of images that reflected the workings of Isabel's conscious mind. Passing from an image of pure romanticism, where she felt herself to be the object of desire, Isabel becomes aware of the reality of sexual arousal, as she now feels Caspar's erect penis, the thing 'in his hard manhood that least pleased her'. This passage makes it clear that she associates the male sexual organ with aggression, for she finds Caspar's expression, filled with desire and lacking all rational control, to be obscene. With this addition, James is able to convey a pertinent psychological insight into Isabel's character, the fact that she separates romantic love and sex. Indeed, this insight may be the psychological root of her essentially romantic personality, the romanticism that caused her to be so naive as to reject a man like Lord Warburton and marry, instead, a man like Gilbert Osmond.
Making a final revision, James felt the need to rework the concluding lines of the novel because, as Matthiessen notes, the ending was misunderstood more often than not by the public. In the first edition, the novel ended with Caspar Goodwood, to whom Miss Stackpole spoke some final words of consolation: "Look here, Mr. Goodwood, just you wait." Many readers interpreted this concluding line of dialogue as containing a glimmer of hope that Isabel and Caspar would someday be reunited. This must have been a source of great frustration for James, for this is perhaps the one point in the novel he did not intent to be ambiguous. He revised this passage in the New York edition, adding a final description of Caspar's state: "He looked up to her--but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant that he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him the key to patience." The revised version, being less susceptible to misinterpretation, presents a more distinct sense of the finality of Caspar's relationship with Isabel, for in the revised text James makes a pronouncement that clearly indicates Caspar's ultimate rejection. Through the lens of Caspar's consciousness, he interprets for the reader the meaning of Miss Stackpole's words: he is still young, there will be other women in his life. He realizes that these 'cheap' platitudes are intended to bring him encouragement, but they do not bring him comfort; rather, they cause his age to double instantly. Such a consolation does not bring him stability, it only brings him face to face with renunciation, the resignation of his hopes for happiness. Looking at Miss Stackpole, he listens to this promise of a new life yet to come while, inside, he surrenders himself to a life without love. James' revision makes it clear that the Portrait ends on a note of sorrow, as he underscores the fact that Caspar's love for Isabel is a promise that will never be fulfilled.
As this essay makes clear, the central motivation James had in making his revisions was his drive to produce a truly modernized from his original Portrait. For this modernization to be accomplished, he needed to incorporate a range of features including the colloqualization of literary language, the use of great specification and particularization when describing human characteristics, the excision of moralistic language, the development of ambiguous spaces and the deployment of a new method for representing the organicity of forms. Most importantly, the modernization of the literary text necessitated the heightening of ambiguity as this feature of the modernist text facilitated a more technical application of specific social, cultural and psychological knowledge that, in turn, allowed a deeper structure of meaning to become accessible. As James' familiarity with the universe of the Portrait increased, his ability to handle the social and psychological particulars of his characters did as well.
James helped to create the modern literary work by installing spaces of ambiguity into his text. Our insights into his revisions show that he set out to recreate the Portrait by refining the semiotics of its textual universe, at times substituting for definitive content a series of images that, by erasing the presence of authorial intentions, assisted the development of this ambiguity. As the author's privilege to indicate the 'truth' faded away, it left in its place a perverse sense of suspicion that appearances might not reflect a truthful reality but may, in fact, be deceiving. Seeing James' revisionary agenda as a semiotic struggle in the name of ambiguity, we can see that the modernist project incorporated the idea of giving the reader a greater privilege as the creator of meaning. As an early representation of modernism, the Portrait incorporates traces of the modernist principle that the text exist separately from the intentions of its author, in that it is dominated by an authorial consciousness that privileges neither truth nor falsity, but only represented the indeterminacy of life.
The preservation of ambiguity is of prime necessity because, if James is going to achieve the effect he desires, he needs to ensure that none of his characters, and especially Isabel, suffer fates that are predetermined by the text. Instead they must be, as in Turgenev's view of literature, always subject to the forces of chance. James displays a great artistic confidence in affirming the use of ambiguity in literature. That he could make these developments indicates how extensively literary consciousness expanded between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. With these conclusions having been made clear we can see that James, having appropriated Turgenev's method of literary creation, allowed for the transformation and differentiation of the basic concepts that governed the literary work, making the Portrait the site of a fundamental revision in the structure of literary representation.
Henry James first published The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 but when he prepared the New York edition of his works, nearly thirty years later, he made many significant alterations in the text of his novel. What might account for these numerous and sometimes dramatic revisions ? Why did James feel it was necessary to make these changes and what is the meaning of these additions to the novel ? Taking F.O. Matthiessen's essay "The Painter's Sponge and the Varnish Bottle" (1944) as a comprehensive catalog of the revisions James made, I do not propose to discover additional discrepancies between the two texts; rather, this essay makes a critical analysis of the effect these changes had and attempts to determine how the revisions can be seen as transformative shifts in the structure of the novel as a literary form. But before we look at the specific revisions themselves, it is necessary that our discussion begins with a close examination of the circumstances surrounding the creation of this work.
In the "Preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady" (1908), James reveals that, in the earliest stages of his creative process, before he had planned out his next literary composition, he would become aware of an image in his mind, an abstract picture of a set of relations that, through the course of events, would be altered in some significant way. Starting with this non-verbal representation of thought, James began to conceive of the new work, taking the process through which his thoughts altered themselves as the plot of his next fictional creation. Proceeding in this manner, writing was for James an arduous process where he endeavored to convert the geometry of his imagination into a language that could by understood by a general audience, translating his concepts from their imaginative space into the textual space of literary fiction. His next step, he says, was to conceive of a lead character such as Isabel Archer, a subject who through the force of her attraction would be able to bring about a change similar to the one he had originally imagined.
James recalls that the method of literary composition advocated by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was essentially the reverse of his own. As Turgenev saw it, the writer's primary task was to visualize the characters he chose to write about, basing them on reality to the greatest extent of his ability. Furthermore, Turgenev felt that a writer ought to treat his characters as if, like real people, they too were subject to the contingencies of physical existence. Turgenev felt that it was a writer's task "to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would produce and feel." Instead of the Jamesian model, where the characters and situations were derived from a highly abstract set of relations, in Turgenev's model the narrative was created around a set of highly defined characters who each presented the writer with a series of potentialities. Ironically, in writing the Portrait, James' method of creation resembled Turgenev's more than his own for, as James admits, "I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting." This shift in James' attention, turning away from theorizing about the structural composition of his novels and focusing directly on the physicality of his characters, stimulated him to publish the revised edition of the Portrait. Starting with the most obvious changes first, we will move progressively to the most significant changes that James made.
Matthiesson acknowledges that in many instances, the impelling force behind these revisions was a change that occurred on two levels, both in James' perception of the text and in his perception of himself as a literary artist. There are several features in James' method of revising the Portrait that suggest such a view. On the micro-level, this includes the most obvious changes, including the addition of colloquial language, replacing 'cannot' and 'she would' with shorter forms, the contractions of 'can't' and 'she'd'. On the macro-level, where the significance of his revisions extends much further, James approached the text with the intention of effecting the semiotic redefinition of Isabel Archer. As Matthiesson points out, the later James remodeled the figure of Isabel, at one point replacing the line "she was an excitable creature, and now she was very excited" with the following sentence: "Vibration was easy to her, was in fact constant with her, and she found herself humming like a smitten harp." The second sentence redefined Isabel with greater precision; it entails more than a simple characterization of her as being excited. Instead, the revised passage allows James to particularize and specify as to the kind of personality Isabel has. No longer confined to the mere adjective 'excited', James expands his metaphorical language, comparing Isabel to the tones that emanate from a classical instrument. For Mattheisson, the fact that James made this change indicates that in approaching the original text, he set out with the intent of converting Isabel into an image. Perhaps feeling that his original description of Isabel's character would be meaningful to a reading public all-too-familiar with 'excitable' heroines, James opted for a description that rested, instead, on ambiguity.
Secondly, Matthiessen points out, in the revised edition of the Portrait, James frequently expanded sections of the text that originally had been brief. For instance, in the earlier edition, James gave his first description of Osmond's character in two sentences, using as his central device a simile contained in the second line: "What continued to please this young lady was his extraordinary subtlety. There was such a fine intellectual intention in what he said, and the movement of his wit was like that of a quick-flashing blade." In the revision, this description was expanded with the introduction of an extended metaphor that she light on Osmond's character and class:
What continued to please this young woman was that while he talked so for amusement he didn't talk, as she had heard people, for 'effect.' He uttered his ideas as if, odd as they appeared, he were used to them and had lived with them; old polished knobs and heads of handles, of precious substance, that could be fitted if necessary to new walking-sticks--not switches plucked in destitution from the common tree and then too elegantly waved about.
This passages illustrated how James, in re-reading his original Portrait, was not content with a comparison between Osmond's thinking and the swift movements of a knife. Instead, he replaced the similar with a metaphor that suggested that Osmond was deeply entrenched in his ideas. In characterizing the superannuated status of these ideas, James compared them to antique furnishings, like those that adorned Osmond's ornamental home. James extends this metaphor further, introducing it into a second comparison where canes carried by the members of the privileged class are contrasted to those of the underclass who, due to their impoverishment, make their own canes by breaking branches off of the common tree. As can be seen from these revisions, although James has lost a metaphor that performed a simple function, he has enabled his text to raise questions of class distinction, promoting the development of ideas in his reader's mind that provide Osmond with more depth as a character. The use of this extended metaphor helps the reader to associate Osmond's character with his beliefs that were derived from the history of high-culture. James' revision is particularly efficacious, for here the revision out-performs the original, solidifying Osmond's image as someone who is a snob--anachronistic, pretentious, priggish.
James also made a series of revisions that suggested how the moral consciousness of the literary text had shifted since the 1880s. These include revisions in Ralph's description of Osmond, as James felt that Ralph's attempt to convince Isabel that Osmond as a 'humbug' needed to be re-written as a warning about Osmond's 'sordid or sinister' nature. Another revision of this type includes a description of the Countess which changes from 'rather wicked' to 'rather impossible'. In still another revision, we find that Madame Merle's original desire to 'save Isabel's reputation' became, in the revised text, a desire to 'save Isabel's skin'. In directing his language away from the notion of Isabel's moral character and to the easy visualized conception of her skin, James shows how the abstract signs of moralistic language were replaced by signs that referred directly to physical objects.
These revisions are also noteworthy because, as Matthiessen points out, they show how James paid attention, not to the ideas behind the narrative itself, but specifically to the language used to relate these ideas. Instead of altering the significant events of the novel, James redefined the narrative superstructure of the Portrait, supplementing the text with language that produced a heightened level of visualization and, simultaneously, contributed to the heightening of ambiguity through the diminishing of didactic narrative content. Changes such as these may be taken as proof that the Portrait represents the implementation of a new structuring system to govern the literary text. A change in the structure of literary representation is underway, as James' revisions a new growth emerging from the soil of literature, the early phase of modernism. Now it is no longer sufficient to say that Osmond was a 'humbug' as a result of his essentially villainous nature. James saw characters like Osmond as equaling with the complexity of Isabel, although he could not devote as much attention to Osmond as he did to his main character. In addition, the abjuration of overtly moralistic language constituted a move away from the metaphysical conceptions of good and evil and, in so doing, allowed for the creation of spaces of literary ambiguity.
Our proposition that these revisions were impelled by an increased familiarity with the psychological factors that contributed to the formation of Isabel's personality gains additional credence when Matthiessen announced that James also revised the reasons why Isabel found Osmond to be so appealing. Originally, Osmond appeared to Isabel "as bright and soft as an April cloud," while the revised version showed him to be "as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm." These changed shows how James altered his use of similes, replacing simple ones with ones that were more complex. Specifically, James moves from a comparison made between Osmond's personality and the appearance of a cloud, to a highly abstract metaphor that compared his manner of courtship to a practiced performance whose value was well-worn. This revision is an example of James' move away from similes based on intangible appearances and metaphysical sensations to ones that possessed a distinct sense of reality. In this instance, a sense of physicality and motion is conveyed as Osmond's personality is compared to two objects moving in relation to one another, the palm of his hand and the piece of ivory. In addition, this revision is more successful at giving the reader a memorable impression of Osmond's personality without destroying the suspenseful ambiguity of his true character.
In composing the scene where Pansy first enters the novel, James wrote that her "natural and usual expression seemed to be a smile of perfect sweetness." Yet this statement too needed to be revised, for such a characterization Pansy seemed, to the later James, to be stilted, as it conjured up an image to static and solid to adequately portray the young girl. Rewriting this description, Pansy's face was now "pained with a fixed and intently sweet smile." We see here that the later James found his earlier method of representing people to be flawed and discovered a more reliable route to authentic literary representation. One suspects that he re-read his earlier attempts to represent Pansy's emotional character as being too well-defined to appeal sufficiently to the reader's imagination, something that is a prime concern for a novelist. To fully realize the Pansy that inhabited his imagination, James reworked the image, giving her a smile that spoke more of her forced expression than of the authenticity of her perfect demeanor. As a result, the author's suggestion that the smile has been coerced takes root and, in turn, the reader's suspicions do as well.
This revision is an example of the 'perfection' of the early text imposing a set of limitations that. with James' revisions, were finally eliminated. The ambiguous opacity of the later text not only displays a greater level of artistic maturity, but also permits the reader's imagination to engage spontaneously with the narrative, making the Portrait a better novel by drawing the reader into a heightened level of complicity with James' created world. Whereas the early text may have prevented his audience from connecting with the characters, the revised text is better able to bring about a change similar to the one James originally imagined. As in our earlier discussion of the semiotic redefinition of Isabel, in this instance the character of Pansy possesses a greater reality when James defines her, not through a direct representation of her defining characteristics, but through a simile that poeticizes the naturalness of her expression and opens the text to an increased range of potential meanings.
Also of great importance are the changes made in the final pages of the novel, where James revised his description of the one scene of physical passion contained in the Portrait. In the scene where Caspar Goodwood kisses Isabel a final time, James first wrote, "His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free." In the revised text, he continued on at length:
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with his act of possession. So she had heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.
The revision shows how James felt that his audience needed more than a single metaphor if he was going to communicate the full significance of the event. Yet instead of discarding the original two sentences, he kept both and between them he incorporated an expended textual passage that added a chain of images that reflected the workings of Isabel's conscious mind. Passing from an image of pure romanticism, where she felt herself to be the object of desire, Isabel becomes aware of the reality of sexual arousal, as she now feels Caspar's erect penis, the thing 'in his hard manhood that least pleased her'. This passage makes it clear that she associates the male sexual organ with aggression, for she finds Caspar's expression, filled with desire and lacking all rational control, to be obscene. With this addition, James is able to convey a pertinent psychological insight into Isabel's character, the fact that she separates romantic love and sex. Indeed, this insight may be the psychological root of her essentially romantic personality, the romanticism that caused her to be so naive as to reject a man like Lord Warburton and marry, instead, a man like Gilbert Osmond.
Making a final revision, James felt the need to rework the concluding lines of the novel because, as Matthiessen notes, the ending was misunderstood more often than not by the public. In the first edition, the novel ended with Caspar Goodwood, to whom Miss Stackpole spoke some final words of consolation: "Look here, Mr. Goodwood, just you wait." Many readers interpreted this concluding line of dialogue as containing a glimmer of hope that Isabel and Caspar would someday be reunited. This must have been a source of great frustration for James, for this is perhaps the one point in the novel he did not intent to be ambiguous. He revised this passage in the New York edition, adding a final description of Caspar's state: "He looked up to her--but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant that he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him the key to patience." The revised version, being less susceptible to misinterpretation, presents a more distinct sense of the finality of Caspar's relationship with Isabel, for in the revised text James makes a pronouncement that clearly indicates Caspar's ultimate rejection. Through the lens of Caspar's consciousness, he interprets for the reader the meaning of Miss Stackpole's words: he is still young, there will be other women in his life. He realizes that these 'cheap' platitudes are intended to bring him encouragement, but they do not bring him comfort; rather, they cause his age to double instantly. Such a consolation does not bring him stability, it only brings him face to face with renunciation, the resignation of his hopes for happiness. Looking at Miss Stackpole, he listens to this promise of a new life yet to come while, inside, he surrenders himself to a life without love. James' revision makes it clear that the Portrait ends on a note of sorrow, as he underscores the fact that Caspar's love for Isabel is a promise that will never be fulfilled.
As this essay makes clear, the central motivation James had in making his revisions was his drive to produce a truly modernized from his original Portrait. For this modernization to be accomplished, he needed to incorporate a range of features including the colloqualization of literary language, the use of great specification and particularization when describing human characteristics, the excision of moralistic language, the development of ambiguous spaces and the deployment of a new method for representing the organicity of forms. Most importantly, the modernization of the literary text necessitated the heightening of ambiguity as this feature of the modernist text facilitated a more technical application of specific social, cultural and psychological knowledge that, in turn, allowed a deeper structure of meaning to become accessible. As James' familiarity with the universe of the Portrait increased, his ability to handle the social and psychological particulars of his characters did as well.
James helped to create the modern literary work by installing spaces of ambiguity into his text. Our insights into his revisions show that he set out to recreate the Portrait by refining the semiotics of its textual universe, at times substituting for definitive content a series of images that, by erasing the presence of authorial intentions, assisted the development of this ambiguity. As the author's privilege to indicate the 'truth' faded away, it left in its place a perverse sense of suspicion that appearances might not reflect a truthful reality but may, in fact, be deceiving. Seeing James' revisionary agenda as a semiotic struggle in the name of ambiguity, we can see that the modernist project incorporated the idea of giving the reader a greater privilege as the creator of meaning. As an early representation of modernism, the Portrait incorporates traces of the modernist principle that the text exist separately from the intentions of its author, in that it is dominated by an authorial consciousness that privileges neither truth nor falsity, but only represented the indeterminacy of life.
The preservation of ambiguity is of prime necessity because, if James is going to achieve the effect he desires, he needs to ensure that none of his characters, and especially Isabel, suffer fates that are predetermined by the text. Instead they must be, as in Turgenev's view of literature, always subject to the forces of chance. James displays a great artistic confidence in affirming the use of ambiguity in literature. That he could make these developments indicates how extensively literary consciousness expanded between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. With these conclusions having been made clear we can see that James, having appropriated Turgenev's method of literary creation, allowed for the transformation and differentiation of the basic concepts that governed the literary work, making the Portrait the site of a fundamental revision in the structure of literary representation.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 12:02 PM
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