A Late Quartet (for Henry James) — Rebecca Ariel Porte

All the evidence agrees, if one can regard a few water-warped notebooks as evidence: when things seemed intolerable, he taxed Henry James with his questions. It was an unfair practice, he knew, since, as was James’s right in the face of impertinence, he never answered them and since, as things stood at the moment (I summarize what I can’t quite bear to quote directly), he was alive and James was dead. Life would not continue in this fashion indefinitely, which would level the playing field so far as mortality was concerned, but, in the meantime, his heresy was to prefer a world in which the living weighed like a nightmare upon the brains of the dead rather than the dead upon the brains of the living. 

In any case, when he was dust in a field of asphodel, there would be all eternity for the revenge of his—of their—stunning indifference, his and Henry’s, which would, by then, be indistinguishable. Still, it would be easy for the living—for you—to thwart him, them—the dead! You would only have to be what you are: indifferent. He didn’t know whether to wish you the brute serenity of those who reserve their questions for the living alone. What he knew, merely, was with what terrible longing Montserrat Figueras sang Beatriz de Dia’s chanson of singing-what-you-do-not-want-to-sing and that if you ever sang for the dead, he hoped it would not be the dead who compelled you. 

For this alone, I would have missed him my whole life. It was a small enough thing, to wade into that low-lying flat, half-flooded, still, and salvage what I could of what remained of him, though I don’t believe he would have thanked me for that but—brains of the dead, brains of the living—who knew better than he how the quick revenge themselves? They pretend the dead can speak for themselves. So, hang fire, hang fire for a while—and let him speak—  

i. How do other people become real to us?

(He wrote) How do other people become real to us? This question is close, very close, to the question of how we become real to ourselves. Strangely, one of the answers may be that a proof of the reality of other people is their partial legibility. What happens when someone rouses your attention enough so that you say “there is something there to be read,” so that you say “I do not understand—but I would like to.” (Though I may not like that I would like to.) I am thinking, again, of The Portrait of a Lady, which tells what it’s like to come of age into sudden fortune, sophistication, and disappointment in other people and oneself. From James’s narrator to, seemingly, everyone in her circle, people are always trying to portray Isabel Archer, the lady of the title. She is trying, really, to portray herself. There is something in her to be read.

It’s the most prosaic and the most disturbing realization in the world, that you have attached enough to another person to want to read them, that there may be others whose attachments to you hold you in the world—hold you to an account which is never your own. To want to read someone is to betray the fantasy of a fully legible world, because no person is fully legible, even to themselves. Would-be readers discover that the desire for detachment is always open to the treason of a lesson of dependency. They learn that to want to read is to open the field of relation and so of ethical relation, a Jamesian bête noire from the beginning. 

Welcome, welcome to this world! You will find that our reciprocity is unpredictable as our gravity is constant. You will know unequal attachments. And when you feel or sense a reciprocal desire to know, the threat of the wound will be there, too, caught up in the promise of some sweeter interchange. Welcome, welcome to the world of those who can be broken by the regard of others! You could call it, by another name, the real world. In James, the entry into this world is, perhaps, the highest achievement of the personal. Its cost is high. 

When her cousin, sickly Ralph Touchett, shows Isabel the paintings in the gallery at Gardencourt, his family estate, he looks at her, candle-lit, as if she is a portrait of herself. She asks him if his house has a ghost. Ralph: “I might show it to you, but you’d never see it. The privilege isn’t given to every one; it’s not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. I saw it long ago.” Sounds, for a moment, as if the answer to “must one suffer to enter a mature morality” to see the ghost (to see that people are and as they are)? is simply: yes.

But there may be an answer more tender and crueler by far: when a person becomes real to you, when you become real to yourself, you learn that suffering is no guarantor of any particular knowledge; it is not, of necessity, a refining crucible of the soul. It is, rather, the more ambiguous gift: the sense that, finally, the ghost looks back. There is someone, something “out there” that is conscious of you, too—you confer reality upon one another—though you may not like the look in its eyes.

This, so many philosophers have argued, is the grounds of an ethics (or the ghost of one?) but it is not the thing itself, which may or may not flower from those grounds. One’s consciousness of something is not equivalent with its transparency, its legibility again, if you like. Every James story is a ghost story.

ii. Is reciprocity desirable?

(He wrote) Is reciprocity desirable? I’ve heard a funny story about an extract from one of Lacan’s seminars: “Love is giving what you don’t have…,” he asserted. Apparently, someone in the audience, maybe even more perverse than Lacan himself, tossed back a completion: “…to someone who doesn’t want it.” I love that this was a collaborative effort, though I can’t imagine Lacan enjoyed being interrupted. The hybrid, “love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” is often cited as Lacan’s line alone. Ironically, this imprecision obscures the way this claim was generated, as more or less spontaneous reciprocity between speaker and listener. Another irony: the reciprocity in this call-and-response making speaks, impishly, back to the substance. It makes a felicitous union where none seems to be possible. And out of that union comes a denial of felicity. 

If you love as Lacan says we do, then what I want from you, belovèd, is both your recognition of the special value of my self (which I don’t fully possess) and of my desire (for Lacan, desire is lack). I also long for you to be abundant enough to live up to my projections about you. This idea of love—about which I have strong reservations as a universal theory—means exchange between lover and belovèd, giver and receiver, is possible. It also means the terms of exchange are insurmountably unequal. No matter how much not-having—no matter how much love—pours out of the lover, the gift is always marked “return to sender.” 

(Anyway, the box is empty.) 

For the belovèd, the impossible problem: even if you wish to acknowledge the lover’s ego in the way it yearns to be acknowledged, you cannot give the lover possession of yourself, let alone live up, completely, to the lover’s fantasies about you. The belovèd doesn’t want love because being loved transforms the belovèd into a being who does not want, that is, who does not lack and so love itself, by Lacan’s logic, is, by now excessive and too late. So the relation of love works—and it does work, if you buy this—if you share a faculty for bad timing—just so long as it’s not the same faculty of bad timing. You have to remember to be, always, too late for one another.

Is reciprocity desirable in The Portrait of a Lady? When? And what does it look like? Or is it melancholy inequality all the way down? One notes, by way of answer, James’s interest in the rhetorical figure called chiasmus, literally a crossing (derived from shape of the Greek letter “X”), which can happen on the level of sound, syllable, syntactical arrangement, or idea: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (Milton’s Satan). “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (Frederick Douglass). Terms trade place, symmetrically, in a chiasmus, wringing oppositions from their original order. The opening statement is the first slash of the “X.” Now draw a second slash across it. There’s the reversal. Imagine, then, circling the center of the “X.” If reciprocity is possible, an opportunity for equal exchange, a coming into parity, it’s there inside that circle, though it’s not going to last. In the encounter from Shakespeare’s Richard II between the king and the usurper Bolingbroke, Richard imagines two buckets, for a moment in parity. But then, water from one bucket, a certain kind of love or power, maybe, fills the other: “The emptier ever dancing in the air, / The other down, unseen and full of water.” And the moment of mutual standing or understanding fleets. 

James drew the title of his late masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, from the motto to the poet William Blake’s Book of Thel: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?” (Henry James Sr., I remember, was partially responsible for the popularization of Blake among American transcendental circles.) The Golden Bowl’s golden bowl has a crack, though not everyone who encounters it can see it. James asks Blake’s question with Blake: can love be collected? Can art hold transparent things? If it can do that, can it also bring together the ethical possibilities of art and love, even if something is always likely to leak away? 

Maggie Verver, the heroine of The Golden Bowl, asks, in her way, a poignantly interested version of this question: “can you make someone love you?” And then she mounts a subtle and brilliant campaign to answer it, maneuvering her husband, Prince Amerigo (involved in an affair with Maggie’s childhood friend, Charlotte, who is married to Maggie’s father)— into transferring his love and fidelity to Maggie herself.

“Can you make someone love you?” 

Yes. How? 

In James, one method is to force a chiasmus. You create or identify the heart of the “X,” where a reciprocity has been achieved (the affair between Prince Amerigo and Charlotte) and then you tug a little on the right threads in order to cause what is held together to move apart along separate branches of the “X”—and so the distance grows between Amerigo and Charlotte in favor of the strange intimacy between Amerigo and Maggie. 

Goethe’s Elective Affinities compares a love square to a double displacement chemical reaction: “Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself at D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other's partner.” James’s Maggie reinvents the formula with her own quartet and, by some lights (not all), to a happier end. (The scholar Jonathan Freedman sees Maggie’s victory as a hollow one: she sends her father and her best friend into exile and her bewitched husband is “as much a hypnotised automaton as an active participant in their marriage.”) If Maggie acts as if desire among the four runs as she wishes it would, she sets the quartet a series of limited choices. (Sigi Jöttkandt calls Maggie’s design an exercise of “sympathetic magic” in the realm of social relation and it underscores, for her, that “desire is not entirely free” or available to conscious will—and yet, if the raw potential for desire is there, it may be led.) In their own ways, the three interlocked in Maggie’s web must choose whether they will endorse as truth what she desires to be true: that her husband sees and thinks only of her. But even the qualified happiness at the end of The Golden Bowl is no sure defense against further displacements.  

When it comes to the grammar of social relations, chiasmus is something like achieving the position where an adequate requital is possible and then falling out of it. In James, people are always doing this to one another on the side of generosity or cruelty. Sometimes this is called a gift, as in The Portrait of a Lady, when the dying Daniel Touchett makes a substantial bequest to Isabel. This gift can never be made good on by the receiver, in part because it is a gift, in part because the giver has died. After a fashion, there’s also the jaded Mme. Merle’s “gift” of Isabel to the cold and subtle Gilbert Osmond. (Despite no other evidence for it, I hear a weak resonance between the names “Merle” and “Osmond” in Portrait and those of de Laclos’s jaded seducers in Dangerous Liaisons, “Merteuil” and “Valmont.”) Sometimes the unrequitable involves a betrayal. (Sometimes it is a betrayal.) Isabel’s decision to marry Osmond is, on one hand, freely made, but it is influenced, as are so many decisions, by the wills of others, by information or intent withheld. Madame Merle is also a worker in chiasmus, though chiasmus often turns on the designer. Sharon Cameron, among others, observes how unsettling is the perpetual motion of Jamesian chiasmus—its elements are always falling towards, falling away from, switching places so that no emphasis, no situation is safe from the heaven-of-helling, hell-of-heavening mind, safe from “further being contemplated,” further reversed. 

James allows us a glimpse of Osmond and Merle caught in the center of the “X,” their own moment of reciprocity, just at the beginning of the deep game they are about to play with Isabel Archer: 

The point to be made is, however, that at a certain moment the element between them, whatever it was, always levelled itself and left them more closely face to face than either ever was with any one else. This was what had happened now. They stood there knowing each other well and each on the whole willing to accept the satisfaction of knowing as a compensation for the inconvenience—whatever it might be—of being known.  

Face to face, the former lovers are in correspondence, physically and psychically, grammatically “levelled” by the passage’s “theys” and “thems.” They are also, the narrator tells us, happily and unhappily, more intimate with one another than they can be with anyone else—and James turns to a syntactical chiasmus to underscore the point. Moving from the united subject of the predicate, “they stood there knowing each other well,” the narrator separates each element of the pairing without breaking the reciprocity. “Each” is willing “to accept the satisfaction of knowing” in trade for the “inconvenience . . . of being known.” The clauses, “knowing” and “being known,” switch places to create a new compound. Merle and Osmond grant one another the pleasure—of which a heady sense of power is not the least portion—of knowing another’s interior being in all its most salient virtues, vices, and quirks. 

And it must be a rare privilege, to stand there, knowing each other well, for to be understood so fully, to be laid open to the sympathies or the exploitations or, merely, the judgements of others is, for both of them, existentially dangerous. (They can nearly, as a friend remarked, predict one another’s futures.) Reciprocity like this can be borne only so long as it’s just passing through, which may be why James gives this moment to the two most corrupt characters in The Portrait. A passage of irreducibility is the most he can offer these two, who are no longer capable (if they ever were) of giving what they do not have to someone who doesn’t want it. 

Experience, even if corrupt, must have its compensations. Merle goes on to wish Osmond weren’t quite so heartless; Osmond replies he’s not so heartless as Merle believes—and they begin to fall apart, out of the center of the “X.” Is reciprocity desirable, even so deeply conditioned by an “X”? There is some perverse formal satisfaction, at least, in knowing how a heaven makes a hell, a hell a heaven. Reciprocity satisfies to know better, knows better than to satisfy. It is waiting here, heart in hand, to give you everything you don’t have and you are waiting there, heart in mouth, to learn whether you want it.

iii. How do we use other people well?

(He wrote) How do we use other people well? Tragically, there are certain errors we outgrow our ability to make. What do I mean? I mean, I make an error and, potentially, it teaches me to know better, better to understand the error and its effects. And I may be insulated from making the error again—because that’s what learning does. But also, I may become incapable of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. This flavor of morality belongs to a special kind of innocence. In certain lives, an education does not mean simply understanding that, from the best of intentions, you have used people badly but also that life cannot be lived without using other people. A further conundrum, if you accept this premise, is how to use them well. For example, although we don’t always think of it as use, an extension of sympathy can often be as much about meeting the needs of the giver as those of the receiver. In James, it is usually better, in the ethical sense, to fail because you have been too sympathetic, better to have bet too much on the wrong objects than to have withheld your tenderness and gambled by the odds. This is a form of use that doesn't often live up to the "formula of humanity" part of Kant's categorical imperative: to see people as ends in themselves rather than means to an end.

In chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel makes a mistake. Or, rather, she acknowledges her responsibility in the mistake of her marriage to the dry, cruel aesthete, Gilbert Osmond. Of Osmond during the period of her courtship, she reflects that “she had mistaken a part for the whole.” The passage goes like this: 

[S]he accused him of nothing—that is but of one thing, which was NOT a crime. She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her. That was all she accused him of, and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a crime, for against a crime she might have found redress. He had discovered that she was so different, that she was not what he had believed she would prove to be. He had thought at first he could change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like. But she was, after all, herself—she couldn’t help that; and now there was no use pretending, wearing a mask or a dress, for he knew her and had made up his mind. She was not afraid of him; she had no apprehension he would hurt her; for the ill-will he bore her was not of that sort. He would if possible never give her a pretext, never put himself in the wrong. Isabel, scanning the future with dry, fixed eyes, saw that he would have the better of her there. She would give him many pretexts, she would often put herself in the wrong. 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. It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man. She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the whole. 

There’s a class of rhetorical figures called metonymy, in which a thing stands for something else intimately associated with it: “I’ll have a glass” for “I’ll have a glass of wine, perhaps.” Linked to metonymy, is a species of figure called synecdoche, in which the part stands for the whole. Isabel's error is, on her own account, of this category. Synecdoche is not always framed as an error—sometimes it can be a kind of convenient shorthand—as when we say “a green thumb” to mean a good gardener or, as in Hamlet, when the ghost invokes “the whole ear of Denmark.” 

And yet, for Isabel, synecdoche's a mistake. Passion is sometimes too efficient, she seems to say, eager to mistake the parts of the object that call to it most fiercely for the entirety of the object. The fascination of early love involves, as Freud has it, an overvaluation of the object. This overvaluation expresses itself, for Isabel, as for so many would-be lovers, in an analogy to a celestial object. Her vision of her husband, in early days, she thinks, was as a half-moon, shadowed by the earth; her vision of him now is the full moon. And yet she had “kept still” in hopes of getting what the lover wants, to see more and more of the belovèd revealed. Only her stillness does not prove prophylactic—she falls into the error of synecdoche anyway. Her fascination had needed to use Osmond this way in order to satisfy itself. So if one of Isabel’s more generous errors is her superfluous investment of sympathy in the wrong object (call it misjudgement), the place judgement fails is the place where love becomes possible. To want to love, then, is also to wish for judgement’s failure. 

How amazing, by these lights, to want to love! But it’s an error that gets what it wants, at least for a while. And what it wants is to believe that the best parts of the object are all that matters about it. Projection works by synecdoche. James does not suggest that it could be otherwise. Synecdoche may be an error of use but it’s not a corrigible user error. It’s more like inherent vice, the art conservator’s term for the tendency of an object to deteriorate in a certain way because of its intrinsic construction, its materials, or some flaw in its make-up.

Synecdoche’s generous misjudgement is like inherent vice—until it isn’t. When the material of inexperience decays enough, the generous misjudger may no longer be able to trust that the part can stand in for the whole, nor that the whole is knowable. By some measures, this state of constant skepticism is sophistication, by others just another form of erring. 

An essay by the late Barbara Johnson reads the "formula of humanity" bit of Kant's categorical imperative—again, the part about relating to people as ends-in-themselves rather than as means to an end—next to Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects. Winnicott argues that, apart from its demonstrable negative cases, there is “a positive value of [the] destructiveness of use" so far as people are concerned. Briefly, if the object you use survives the destruction of use, then you can be confirmed that your own powers are limited—that there is so much that exceeds your “projective mental mechanisms . . . a world of shared reality . . . [in] which the subject can use and [the object] can feed back other-than-me substance into the subject,” as Winnicott puts it. From this claim of Winnicott’s, Johnson develops the idea that a good synonym for “using people” would be “trusting people,” creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation,” somewhere midway between destructiveness rampant and “excessive empathy.” Use may shade into violence but it may, in the other direction, be the foundation of a reality in which exchange and common ground are truly possible. By this logic, the error of synecdoche, that daring misplacement of sympathy, which Isabel can no longer make in her maturity, is a tragic loss. 

Those who cannot use anyone cannot trust anyone. They can no longer go, as James’s correspondent, Constance Fenimore Woolson, remarks of Isabel, “believingly to their ruin.” And those who can never mistake the best parts of their intimates for the whole are not necessarily wiser than they are sad.

iv. Can you change the past?

(He wrote) A seduction riddle is a kind of riddle formed so that a bad answer looks like a good one. (As is only right, I can no longer find my source for this information.) Can you change the past? seems to me the kind of question that makes an exemplary seduction riddle. “No” is the narrowest and most literal answer one can make to this question and also, in its claim to the meanest version of truth, this “no” obscures much better answers. So no—but also (I will save you time)—yes. You can change the past and I can tell you how. But you’re not going to like it. 

One could read much of Henry James as an essay in seduction riddles, in the enigma of how ordinary life can be experienced as the inside of a seduction riddle. The Portrait of a Lady puts Isabel Archer in just this position. And one version of the seduction riddle in which she is embedded takes the form of the question: can you change the past? This is the kind of question, that, regarding Isabel, can only take shape following the major seduction riddle of the plot: her marriage to Osmond, manipulated so delicately into being by Madame Merle that Isabel would be factually wrong to claim any legible violation of free will. Isabel’s husband is the exemplar of the bad answer that looks like a good one. 

How would the world have to be in order for life to seem like a series of seduction riddles? What would have to be impossible to say? What would have to be impossible to picture, impossible to read with certainty, impossible to name? What would you have to be like in such a world? 

Sianne Ngai notes a recurring plot in James: one character plays the social analyst struggling to understand some secret of human relation, a secret whose revelation requires the work of immediate concealment. That play of exposure and cover-up, Ngai understands as an allegory of the “structural occultation of female reproductive labor, hidden in and through every day capitalist forms” (wages; the rise of a service economy). You can’t represent the totality of things, capitalism and all its effects, except by indirection, as Fredric Jameson has noted a time or two. But James’s circumlocutions are intertwined with other kinds of secrets alongside those of labor and capital: queer desire (the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s line), consummated sex, and why people do what they do. Among these unrepresentable things, it’s the last whose taboo is most mysterious in The Portrait of a Lady: 

Why does Isabel return to Rome and very likely to what Caspar Goodwood calls the “ghastly form” of her marriage? Can you change the past? What if these questions were, in some sense, the same question? 

How can we have spent so much time in Isabel’s consciousness and fail to have clear answers? One response is that the novel doesn’t want you to know. The narrator describes Isabel’s mind as “vague” after the revelations of the real nature of the history between Osmond and Merle, Osmond’s daughter Pansy’s true parentage, and the source of Isabel’s wealth. Isabel’s intent is mysterious, even to her, up until the novel’s final paragraphs when her encounter with the passion of Caspar Goodwood (her square-jawed, American suitor) provokes her to epiphany: “There was a very straight path.” Apart, though, from the information that her road leads to Rome, the novel is mysterious about whether that straight path will be a resumption of her relations with Osmond and Pansy and, if so, the terms on which those relations are to happen. The end of the novel withholds the thing one most longs to know concerning the fate of Isabel Archer. Consciousness, like style, keeps certain secrets, even when it appears to lay all its cards on the table. 

The sense of a secret—and then its uncovering—may be a great incentive to learn how to change the past. Isabel turns out to be involved with many secrets, such as the facts of the lives of people she thinks she knows. The secret of her own consciousness, for she doesn’t understand herself, is another—and it’s unsolved by the disillusionments that put her “in the secret.” As a character, she is also “in the secret” of James’s even-handed style, in which David Kurnick sees a utopian egalitarianism at odds with the unequal machinations of plot, as if James’s characters were actors collaborating in a play that pits them against one another so that the collision of style and substance results in “the imagination of collectivity and a ruthless analysis of how damaged we remain by our separateness.” This reading of James makes the secret something like Stanley Cavell’s vision of aesthetic objects as the means by which we imagine the futures that belong to the present, an “unattained but attainable commonwealth.” Jameson has argued something similar about Proust’s aristocrats as a vision of the classless society, seen through a glass darkly, a form of life in which interpersonal affairs would be the main event: love, gossip, social planning. Sianne Ngai responds that you could also read style and plot as conspirators rather than agonists and (if you do) the picture you get is not of a radical democracy frustrated by the terms of the unevenly arranged world but, rather, the unconscious collusion demanded by a capitalist society. 

Almost always, in James, these secrets exist alongside the secret of sex, whether it’s circuitous representations of queer desire or Isabel’s sexual reticence (which may, anyway, have queer overtones—is it Diderot who calls celibacy an extravagant perversion?). It’s not for nothing that James figures Isabel’s final confrontation with Caspar Goodwood in terms of erotic pressure, “the hot wind of the desert . . . lift[ing] her off her feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth.” James had a heavy hand with names and Goodwood pulls back the curtain on sex with all the forthrightness his name implies: “His kiss” is, for Isabel, “like white lightning” and while she takes it, she feels “each thing in his hard manhood that least please[s] her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with the act of progression.” James revised this passage quite a bit from the 1881 edition—if anything, the revision amplifies the bathetic melodrama of the kiss, the novel’s last resort, perhaps, when sex outs itself. 

A friend of mine once compared The Portrait to a failed or unsanitized fairy tale and this kiss, does, indeed resemble the version of the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty in the older versions of the story. “Knowing the tropes,” as my friend put it, “doesn’t allow you to escape the story.” And so one version of life, for the literary heroine, is to “give up the false hope that knowing your fictions will save you.” Another friend suggested that the novel careers up to the line where sex won’t be denied and it’s at this point that resolution becomes impossible, that melodramatic feints and ambiguity seize the stage, an attempt at recovering the secrecy that’s been lost. 

When a secret is revealed in James, it’s almost always got to be brushed under the rug again. So one explanation for Isabel’s rejection of the dangerous but potentially fulfilling eros on offer is purely negative: Goodwood’s sexual overtures threaten her, so she bolts. There are other explanations. Here are some: 

2) Forms really are more important to Isabel than feeling (she can’t bear the world’s opprobrium; she can bear a life of obligation in which happiness isn’t the point—she remarks that there are obligations in marriage that have little to do with enjoyment).

3) She sees some possibility to be reconciled to her life, to the decisions she’s already made (if not reconciled with Osmond).

4) She sees some possibility that she might yet help Pansy, her step-daughter, to secure some other fate for herself besides the one that has made a ruin of Isabel.

5) Her decision is clear but entirely irrational, even in emotional terms and especially in terms of what’s supposed to happen to literary heroines in nineteenth-century novels. 

6) Some combination of these. 

7) She has learned to change the past. 

We are in no doubt, by this point in the novel, that the past can be changed for a person. Late in the game, the Countess Gemini, Osmond’s flighty, scandalous sister, discloses what Isabel hasn’t guessed about Merle, Pansy, and Osmond. Isabel comes to understand not only how “deeply, deeply, deeply” false Merle and Osmond are but also how she has misread, by the design of others, the extent of her own freedoms and the meaning of her decision to marry. Merle changes Isabel’s past yet again when she twists the knife at their final encounter, telling Isabel that the origins of her fortune, which Isabel had not understood, lie with Ralph Touchett, another reorientation of Isabel’s view on earlier events. 

So the past can be changed for us by others, merely by the presentation of some ungainsayable fact, heretofore unknown, a process indistinguishable from historical education. But Isabel, full of “generous mistake[s],” has been a bad analyst of the social (not entirely her fault) and for someone who has analyzed badly in the moment, who is apt to fall for a seduction riddle, the only recourse may be to become the kind of person who can change the past as well as receive the shock of a past changed by others. The one who rehabilitates analytical power in this way might be called, at least in a minor sense, an historian. 

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin remarks that “[t]o articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” For the historical materialist, the past “unexpectedly thrust[s] itself . . . on the historical subject.” The historian who kindles little flames of hope in the past is convinced that if he fails to do this, “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if [the enemy] is victorious.” Benjamin is speaking at the scale of history and historical time. But there is a version of this drama, in which an attempt to redeem something from the past takes on existential urgency, that can happen at the scale of a life. Unhistoric lives and historic events may be incommensurable but they are not disseverable. Others are always changing the past for us—whether it’s on the political level, damnatio memoriae (the chiseling of names from monuments, doctored photographs), disinformation, the fast-fading of open secrets of atrocity from cultural memory—or whether someone close makes you aware of some intimate effect of which you’d been ignorant. 

One of the secrets The Portrait keeps is whether Isabel, who has been given the strongest possible motivation to change her past, succeeds in remaking her orientation to the world. For this is what, in a single life, the ability to change the past amounts to: you change your own relationship to the facts or else you change someone else’s. The novel may not be able, in the end, to imagine what that would look like for its heroine, resting its case with the statement of the problem, as Shakespeare’s tragedies sometimes do. Vex not his ghost… 

James gives us glimpses of Isabel as a novice historian: on the long journey from Rome, in which she becomes aware of herself as “in on the secret,” so that “the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part, their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness”; on the train on the way to the Touchetts at Gardencourt, when she imagines a counterfactual life in which Mrs. Touchett never came to spirit her away from America and she had married Caspar Goodwood; and when she and the dying Ralph “look at the truth together” and nothing else matters. 

And there is the moment, at the beginning of the last chapter, when Isabel finally sees a ghost, fulfilling the spectral promise of a sequence in the portrait gallery, early in the novel, when Ralph jokes that the ghost of Gardencourt appears only to those who have suffered. (As ever, one gets the most mileage from James’s ghosts by thinking of them as psychological projections rather than supernatural phenomena.) Isabel, who has suffered, sees the ghost and, because the novel could have it no other way, the ghost is Ralph’s—it is the herald of his death, that very morning, in another room. Not merely a sign that you have suffered, the sight of a ghost (in this metaphorical sense) may be a sign that you have learned to change the past. “History is what hurts,” says Jameson, which is to say those who have been hurt into history, despite their attempts—Isabel’s first desire—to “suffice to [themselves]” are likely to see a lot of ghosts. “Death is good,” says the dying Ralph, “but there’s no love.”

Isabel is given great wealth and so a chance at self-sufficiency, a chance to choose well. And she squanders it. Everyone in the novel is intensely concerned with how she will decide her life, perhaps because they see in Isabel Archer a possible proof of free will. (The agency that money gives is almost too much responsibility for James’s characters—they keep passing on the gift so someone else will have a chance to fail it.) In this, Isabel’s position is like Adam and Eve’s in the Garden of Eden, presented with a fateful choice in the experimental chamber of paradise, tempted by serpents to contravene reason. The story of the Fall is the ur-seduction riddle, the bad answer disguised as a good one. The Garden is also the place, after the test is failed, where the world cracks open and history pours in. So, “history is what hurts.” A seduction riddle, once you know you’re in it, is the initiation into the world of those who can be hurt, which is to say an initiation into the world of those who can change the past (because there is now a past to change), which is to say an initiation into the world of those who have become historical. 

The testing field in The Portrait is not sacred but earthly—the portentously named Gardencourt, where Isabel returns, at the end, to the scene of an early temptation, as if to relive the trial by repetition compulsion. And a trial comes in the form of Caspar Goodwood. “The world’s all before us,” he breaks out. And comes the echo: the last lines of Paradise Lost: “the world was all before them, where to choose.” The idea that the world is all before her is horrifying to Isabel because she agrees: there is so much world, too much. 

If her decision about her life is clear, then the one revenge she may have against the seduction riddle of the world, of the novel, may be to shield from our surveying eyes the contents of that decision. And so we never learn, definitively, what her return to Italy means. The novel forbids the conclusion of a Fall, let alone a Fortunate Fall. The enigma holds. If the secret’s out—that the world is like a seduction riddle—then any answer you could make to it would, after a certain point, be a question of submitting to a bad answer formed like a good one (being seduced) or a good answer formed like a bad one. 

James’s world does not seem to allow for good answers that announce themselves plainly or bad answers that walk around naked and unashamed. Someone who has become historical but who is not yet an historian, who is not yet sure of whether she can change the past, might, in order to make some bare claim on human dignity, reserve the right to sift, in privacy, the good answers from the bad. This may be precisely the point when you come to the end of what you can know, with any certainty, about the minds of others, of what the novel can know about its characters. Like any of the dead whose works and days are too much with us, Isabel Archer keeps her secrets.

(Desunt nonnulla, “the rest is missing”—or, he wrote no more.)

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Rebecca Ariel Porte is a member of the Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is at work on a book about Paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age.