I am rereading this as part of a readalong organised by Dolce Bellezza. I notice that I acquired my copy in October 1994, a period of my life when I wrote my name and the date of purchase (and sometimes, the place of purchase!) in slightly pretentious handwriting at the front of each book I bought. At that time I had just graduated and was working in a bookshop while trying to find a job in publishing. I had managed to study English literature for three years without actually reading a word of James and I decided to start with his most famous work. As far as I remember I loved it, but found Isabel Archer mysterious and quite inscrutable.
As this is a readalong I plan to write two posts about it, as I read through it. These are some of my initial thoughts, up to Chapter 16 and Isabel’s encounter with Casper Goodwood.
(Sir John Lavery, The Lady in White, Manchester Art Gallery, from here; this is the painting used on the cover of my Oxford World’s Classics edition though incorrectly attributed there to ‘James Lavery’)
One thing that struck me more forcibly this time than I remember on my first reading is James’s needling of the English upper classes, with Ralph Touchett being an honorary member of that sect. My attention was caught in a description of Isabel’s drives in the countryside by a reference to ‘patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty park’ which I could not help interpreting as a reference to enclosure and to the holding of vast tracts of land by the aristocracy for their pleasure in contrast with the ‘ancient common’, land which belongs to the people and is grazed by their flocks and worked by them.
While Isabel settles in to life at Gardencourt and enjoys its beauties, Henrietta Stackpole is less amenable and directly critical of Ralph’s ‘idle’ life (‘when I have to work like a car-conductor’) and ‘sophistication’ which, to her mind, has more than a tinge of dishonesty about it; her class-consciousness is sharpened by her awareness that Ralph is constantly and covertly mocking her. Lord Warburton is depicted as a true ‘noble’ man; he espouses land reform and is considered a ‘radical’. However, he is vague when pressed about actually relinquishing any of his own property; he’s a romantic without real substance, according to Mr Touchett:
He has elegant tastes – cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure – more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. [...] His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is; he’s too much liked.
Mr Touchett has been ‘watching these people for upwards of thirty-five years’, with less hostility than Henrietta Stackpole. Still, he points to the difference between the US and Britain:
You [Isabel] and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first.
Ouch – Britain is not a true democracy after all. The aristocracy, Mr Touchett explains, is an obstacle to this, well regulated though the country is.
For these leisured people, to amuse and be amused are central tenets of life. ‘You may do what you please [...] if you’ll amuse me till seven o’clock,’ as Isabel tells Ralph. People, including strangers with ‘an introduction’, are invited to country houses to visit. Lady Pensil’s place in Bedfordshire (Bedfordshire, according to Mr Bantling, is ‘tiresome’, tiresome being the opposite of amusing and therefore a damning epithet) offers ‘genuine English sport’ and ‘theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing’, the games with which the wealthy pass their time. Ralph assures Henrietta ‘You’ll amuse yourself much more in Bedfordshire’ than at Gardencourt’ – with two resident invalids and a chatelaine who is rarely there, Gardencourt is generally quiet, ‘not English at all’, ’dull’ and without entertainments, what would a visitor do there? ‘[W]ill they make themselves agreeable to me?’ wonders Isabel about the English. With no other purpose than entertaining each other, it is important to all the characters that the social surface remain smooth, charming, agreeable.
The other aspect that struck me is how condescending many of the male characters are to Isabel. (Even more to Henrietta, who is just that bit further off the feminine ideal of the time.) Casper Goodwood, whom 1990s Helen might have thought romantic in his pursuit of Isabel across the ocean, I now perceive as stalkerish in his refusal to accept no for an answer and his insistence that he knows what is best for her. Ralph badgers his mother: what are her ‘plans’ for Isabel’s future; he is taken aback when she declares that she has none and Isabel is a free agent. Even the generally sympathetic Mr Touchett gets all scoffy when Isabel asks him about books and boasts that he has no use for books since he learns through direct observation and experience of the world; actions that are denied Isabel by her gender. Worst of all: both Ralph and James feel that Isabel somehow needs to suffer in order to become wise and there’s a sense that they are wishing it upon her...
And finally, a foretaste of what may happen:
Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however; for if Mrs Touchett had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all like Mrs Touchett.
I interpret this as suggesting a number of things: that, like Mrs Touchett, Isabel will make an unhappy marriage but that she will also find a way to assert her independence anyway, unconventionally if need be. I also note that Mr Touchett seems to take no responsibility on himself for those aspects of Mrs Touchett which he once admired and yet seem to have been mostly crushed out of her by marriage to him. I am wondering if there might be a thread here about bright, sensitive young girls being failed by marriage.