THEMES

In The Portrait of a Lady Henry James explores the difficulty negotiating between individual liberty and the constraints of social conventions. He locates these opposing forces in America and Europe respectively. However, the equation isnÂ’t as simple as that--America equals liberty while Europe equals social constraint. James divides Europe in his moral universe. England constitutes the middle ground between the ungrounded freedom of America and the extreme restraint of Italy. It is no mere chance that James chooses a woman as the protagonist of a novel with such a moral landscape since women are so much the repository of the social values of a culture, functioning both to enforce social norms and to reproduce them.

Isabel Archer is one more of the many innocent Americans with whom writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves preoccupied. Her innocence is the primary element of her sense of her freedom. In other words, James seems to be saying that Isabel only thinks sheÂ’s free and capable of living her life freely. In America she can nurture these fantasies. She has spent a childhood being neglected by her father, neglect that is couched in terms of freedom. She has been free to read anything in the library and she has done so, but has been unable to balance freedom and the discipline necessary to get through the formal study of anything. Sent to school as a young girl, she decided quickly that it was not the place for her and she was allowed to stop going. In her adult life in America, she seems to have no place to go besides marriage to the ever stiff Caspar Goodwood. She sits alone in the little-used library of her grandmotherÂ’s almost abandoned house. Both of her sisters have married quite conventionally despite their free childhood. ThereÂ’s no reason to think Isabel wouldnÂ’t have done the same if not for her auntÂ’s timely rescue. In the American scene then, James demonstrates that unrestrained freedom will lead the protagonist nowhere. She will be isolated and bored. She will not progress in her studies because she will have no direction. She will be wasted on a marriage to a man so inarticulate that he cannot express his feelings in any terms other than proprietary ones.

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