Ralph Touchett

He is a character who seems more than any other to stand in for Henry James, even to the point of working out a compensation fantasy for James of a father and son camaraderie that he might have wished he had with his own father. Ralph Touchett is one of the most positive characters in the novel. His function in the novel is more than that of a satellite character used to bring out a particular side of Isabel Archer. He is also here to provide a center of moral authority in the novel. All the characters are measured by Ralph Touchett. He recognizes the moral quality of all of them with an unerring eye. Perhaps his gift of perception comes from his detachment. Since he has nothing to win or lose, being ready at every point of his life to die, he is a disinterested judge of character.

However, that might be giving Ralph a bit too much. He does seem to be taken with Isabel Archer from the moment he sees her. So he loses his disinterested stance toward life and those in it from that point onwards. When he sees her on his fatherÂ’s lawn, he immediately gives her his dog and from then on he makes Isabel Archer the reason for continuing to live. Ralph provides the catalyst for the action of the novel when he arranges to give half his own inheritance to Isabel so as to make her independently wealthy. He tells his father that if she doesnÂ’t have money, perhaps she will be forced to marry. What he doesnÂ’t realize is that Isabel doesnÂ’t have such practical notions of marriage and money. She has already rejected a marriage proposal from an English lord who happens to be a very nice man as well. If it werenÂ’t for RalphÂ’s generosity with Isabel, she would never have married Gilbert Osmond and cut short her exploration of what it means for a woman to live the free life. If she hadnÂ’t married Gilbert Osmond, Ralph wouldnÂ’t have been deprived of her company and her confidences for the years of her marriage. When Ralph first knows Isabel, he decides rather quickly for himself that he isnÂ’t in love with Isabel, just interested in her. The reader might look at this skeptically.

The reason for RalphÂ’s detachment from participating in life is, of course, his pulmonary disease, that comes to him in his early manhood and keeps him out of active participation in life from then on. He began working for his fatherÂ’s bank and seems to have wanted to do what his father wished for him in that capacity. Before that, he went to all the best schools, first in the States and then in England. He seems to have been ruled in these early years by his fatherÂ’s idea of what he should be--English or American, a businessman or an artist/art connoisseur. He doesnÂ’t seem to have had any inclinations of his own in either of these directions. People around him assume that he would never have made much of a name for himself in the banking business, but one can never know since this judgment would have been based on RalphÂ’s later life attitude of amused detachment gained from a resigned awareness that he was too sick to live life fully.

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