(The complete version of this paper can be found at http://www.bookpage.com/themerc/womeninthenovels.html)
A male novelist may reflect, in his portraits of women, his own desire for freedom from stereotypes, for a sense of alternate selves.[…]
Physical action, public history - the modes of male heroism - were less interesting to Henry James than the drama of feeling and intelligence in such unspectacular experience as a chaperoned American girl's journey to Europe, her acquisition of a legacy, her hesitations over marriage, and her mistaken choice, misled by those who wish to take advantage of her.
Literature was, in nineteenth century England and America, in part a feminine phenomenon. Men, too busy with so-called "real" occupations, tended to relegate the cultivation of taste to women-even if it was only a feeble skill at the piano that was one of the "accomplishments" of the well-bred girl or the habit of novel-reading which occupied feminine leisure. Women made up a majority of the readers of nineteenth century novels. They also wrote a great many of them, some, indeed most successful. […]
James, however, felt he had no other choice than to recognize the coincidence of his experience and outlook with a woman's. Temper and upbringing excluded him from the masculine preoccupations signified by the word "downtown"- where husbands vanished each day while their wives stayed home. [...] But there had been little pressure, in his eccentric family, to pursue the usual careers, and though he had been sent to law school, his attendance only lasted a year, during which he began to write stories instead of conning his law books. […]
He had chosen to be an artist-and not a soldier, businessman or statesman - and had found himself where women were. Apart from the strictly sexual sense, he had no taste for the roles of husband and father. "I am too good a bachelor to spoil"-he said. As a marginal man, excluded from domestic as well as public power, he could identify with the marginal condition of women.[…] His view of women expressed his perception that anyone, male or female, is likely to be trapped by dictated roles, by the banality of the social scheme.
He did not mind his alliance with the female sphere. The world of women, he knew, was more extensive and interesting than the presence of music masters and pastry cooks suggested. Perhaps it was there that a novelist interested in the inner springs of human behaviour might be best employed. He saw that however cosseted the upper-class woman might seem, her dependence upon male support and her inability to seek a separate, self-sustaining life should she fail to find that support made her the victim of her own sentimental expectations. She was less independent than the music master or pastry cook she might employ. There were poor women as well as rich, of course, women whose fates were still more circumscribed - but all women were poor in choices. Women were confined by a plot they had not written, the plot of novels which began with the need of a girl to find herself by finding the right man and ending with her successful arrival at the altar.
But his favourite scheme was that of women who found the conventional plot inadequate, who strove to be more free to realize themselves. It is his suspicion of stereotypes that makes him a sympathetic painter of female portraits. Some feminists have insisted that he had to have seen women from a conventional male viewpoint, but I propose now to show how he enunciated a feminism of his own in his writing style.
For example
In Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is an orphan, and poor. Only marriage, for a woman of her kind, in her time can give her a selfhood and a role in society. And just such an opportunity […] is promptly offered. Lord Warburton has no visible flaws; he is good-natured, intelligent, handsome and rich. But Isabel rejects him. Her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, who has brought her to Europe with the clear design of floating her upon the European marriage market, is unable to understand her perversity. After all, American women who made successful marriages to titled Europeans were already a familiar phenomenon. But Isabel is wary of any marriage that will define her as the conventional wife of the conventional male. She had already rejected a plausible American suitor, Casper Goodwood, a successful cotton manufacturer. He is passionate and determined, but Isabel shrinks from his embrace when he comes after her in England. "Why should I necessarily marry?," she asks. Should he hear rumours that she plans to marry, he ought to doubt it, she tells him.
She proves herself wrong, however, or she marries after all, and her reasons are opposite to the ones that would have inspired an Austen heroine. She marries Gilbert Osmond not for any positive advantages over his rivals but for his very lack of them. He is characterized by the mysterious Madame Merle as "Gilbert Osmond. He lives in Italy; that's all one can say of him or make of him. He's exceedingly clever, a man made to be distinguished; but as I can tell you, you exhaust the description when you say he's Mr. Osmond [..]. No career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything." Yet precisely these negatives attract Isabel, and she repeats them proudly: "No property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It's precisely the absence of these things that pleases me."
Her cousin Ralph, to whom she recites these inverse virtues, is also in love with her, and probably her truest mate, but disabled for marriage by a fatal illness; he can only sublimate his generous love by persuading Isabel's father to donate his legacy to her. He hopes to "put wind in her sails," towards whatever port her fine imagination directs her. The trouble is that her imagination cannot identify any port to which she can set sail. Anything, after all, than a marriage. And so, in some sense she does not marry, though she marries a man lacking marital value. This infatuation with nullity is the terrible price of her transcendental vagueness, her desire to escape what life actually offers; she tries to imagine that she will delegate the power of her fortune to a man who lacks it; and this, of course, is only to reconstitute the terms by which marriage, after all, is dictated to such a woman as herself in her time to marry a man who, economically and socially empowered, will do her doing for her.
But Osmond empowered by money proves to be only a parody of conventional respectability and social success; he lives only for the surface, for the figure he cuts in the social world. He is not guilty of any obvious vice; he is not divorceable in the courts; he does not beat, is not sexually unfaithful. He is simply a cold and pretentious man who has come to hate his wife for her independence of spirit. The Gothic plot makes Isabel's marriage the consequence of her husband's secret design to gain control of her money, a design instituted by Madame Merle who wishes to make her lover rich. But the essential realistic story does not require this betrayal. Isabel has betrayed herself into a marriage like millions of others. Even had there been no villainous manipulation, what form of life could she have found that would have enabled her to escape being ground up in the mill of the conventional? That James does not have a ready answer accounts for his vagueness in drawing the portrait suggested by the book's title. Isabel's qualities have no outcome. Only in a late scene is she actually called the portrait of a lady as she stands in a gilt-framed doorway of the home she has made with Osmond. Gracious and remote, she seems to have become a type dictated by time and place, rather than a unique person.
Isabel's legacy solved her economic problem, making it unnecessary for her husband to have money; which is precisely why she became the prey of the fortune hunter. But what if she had remained poor? Does not her friend Henrietta Stackpole support herself and members of her family by her labours as a journalist? James inserts and seems to withdraw this working-woman options. Journalism was an alternative still considered eccentric and even vulgar in Isabel's social world, even if some few women were becoming novelists without stigma. In any case, Henrietta herself becomes completely respectable and conventional by marrying an upper-class Englishman; just the opportunity Isabel rejected. Most paying work was out of the question for a socially defined "lady," whose education provided her with no training for any profession. The Bronte sisters, daughters of a country parson, might teach school or go out as governesses. There were no other professions that could keep the average impoverished lady respectable.
To marry "for love" without money on either side was no solution for such women and never the appropriate rescue of the heroine of the English novel. James suggests in The Portrait of a Lady what might have been Isabel's fate if had she not become an heiress and she had fallen in love with a poor man. Madame Merle had once loved Gilbert Osmond, and they had both been too poor to marry; no fairy godfather Uncle Touchett had freed the young Madame Merle to marry as she pleased. Instead, they had a secret love affair, and a child, Pansy, whom Madame Merle does not dare acknowledge as her own. […]
Marriage, James knew, did not always make for a "happily ever after." His own stories rarely end in marriage, and when they do, as in The Bostonians, it is with the writer's prediction that tears are still in store. Isabel's question, "Why should I necessarily marry?" is a transcendental protest of an individuality. […]
Marriage, for James, is only the institutional confirmation of that process of predictive definition in which we all engage, a process which denies a free outcome to human potentiality. Such heroines as Daisy, Isabel and Verena struggle against this process and yet they are collaborators in it. As much as they wish to be free, they bring about their own novelistic closure by seeking romantic fulfilment in conventional terms