An Unnatural Gaze

In Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the circularity of Isabel’s imagination parallels the circularity of her social world that places her at its center. A circling interior life may result from a circling exterior. This essay holds in suspension the causal relation in order to better understand its possibilities. The motion of each circle proves to be vain in their exhaustive attempts to grasp for a truth from impressions. If our judgements are at the mercy of our gaze—if our own vision is the material source of our judgement—then, James’ narrator offers a proximity to the impossibility of one particular kind of gaze that we nonetheless act upon as if it were possible. The very presence of the narrative corroborates the fact that a portrait cannot see itself while depicting its very own gaze as if it could. In a literal sense, a portrait of someone’s eyes open depicts their gaze. James’ narrative is neither the failure of representing a self-reflection, nor is it a reiteration of how a woman may only see herself through others; the narrative does not invalidate either how one may directly return one’s own gaze in a mirror, but it may suggest an elision in the temporality of self-reflection. Part of Isabel’s tragedy seems to arise from mistaking the depiction of a gaze as the gaze itself, confusing an image of oneself with looking at oneself in a mirror, and seeing oneself as oneself in the mind’s eye. In her first rejection of Lord Warburton’s proposal, Isabel says: “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and the humblest of us; and I shall never be able to see mine in the manner you proposed” (James, 128). The nature of her own eyes, however, suggest the value of this point of view as a shelter is also the very habitat of its dangers.

The fluctuating strength of Isabel’s consciousness may be measured through the power of her gaze. Two gazes are involved in the gaze of each character. The referent of “gaze” in its singular form includes the function of both an inward and outward gaze. Each informs the other, since the inward gaze relates to the imagination, while the outward gaze may be considered the effect of one’s eyes on their social reality. This effect is the abridged tension between one’s look upon the world interwoven with one’s perception of others, and how the world becomes known through how others look upon and perceive oneself, dictating in their totality one’s vision of the world that substantiates one’s “self.” That the narrative as a whole may be conceived as James’ imagination of a woman’s imagination “in the attitude of a woman who had her life to live,” ensures the ambiguous status of her response to Lord Warburton (553). A woman in a given stage of her life possesses a certain attitude. A social attitude is social by virtue of the specificities of its temporality. However, the notion of a woman also becomes an attitude in itself that one may perform: a woman is an attitude. James’ narrative is a way of thinking in the mode of a woman. Given the status of a woman as an attitude and a mode, the way women inhabit one another’s gaze becomes of equal importance as the effect and reception of any gaze across sexual difference. How a woman sees herself may be informed by how a woman sees other women, and how she sees other women may inform how she sees both herself and herself as a woman.

Henrietta expresses to Ralph that Isabel, since arriving in England, is no longer as beautiful as she once was in America. She deleted Ralph’s playful assignment of their roles as Caliban and Ariel given her intimation of a social scheme to prevent Isabel from “changing” any further, because Isabel is to an imaginary character. Isabel is, rather, “intensely real,” and yet she sees also that “she herself [is] a character—she [cannot] help being aware of that” (130, 114). Her awareness of herself as a character. Completes her consciousness and signifies an aspect of a portrait’s nature is its possibility of being a self-portrait through the myth-making power of identification. The possibility depends on how one sees, and the power of one’s imagination. However, while Isabel is real, Madame Merle, is “unimaginable,” someone for whom Isabel has a “literal inability to say what it [is she has] been” (130, 553). In one of their exchanges, Madame Merle says to Isabel:

“If we’re not good Americans we’re certainly poor Europeans; we’ve no natural place here. We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil. At least one can know it and not have illusions. A woman perhaps can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface, and more or less, to crawl” (201-2, emphasis is mine).

Her revelation about a woman’s place—the lack of a natural one— is bound to a commentary on national differences. It raises a question about what a natural place is, if such a place is, and what a desire for naturalness is, if the desire does or does not in itself attribute to naturalness a utopic status. If a natural place may only be inferred through a negation of the unnatural state of one’s relations—, in which one exists as a woman, then this remark about national differences may also further demarcate a incompatibility between experience and imagination in the conceptualizing of freedom. The plane of one’s consciousness folds over as a fixed temporality of one national consciousness touches the fixed temporality of another, interrupting, and yet codifying, a chronology of experience crossing national borders. If there is no natural place for a woman, even a woman must assume, perhaps, a woman as an attitude, to be a woman in any place, in the same way that James’ narrator imagines the social world in the mode of a woman. The two women are neither “good” Americans nor “good” Europeans, which suggests not only that sexual difference may transcend national identities, but that the absence of a natural place for a woman becomes pronounced, if not refined, through the differences of national identity. The tension attributed to national difference may refine for a woman, from her perspective of herself, her own particular condition as a “woman.” The narrative’s revelation that Madame Merle “designed” Isabel’s disastrous marriage to her former lover produces the effect of a gaze looking upon itself in the moment it admits to having been aware that it has always been someone else’s construction. It is uncertain if the absence of a natural place renders a woman as a mere attitude, or if a woman is a portrayal through which she discovers her condition, as what is natural or unnatural shifts continuously without recourse to a universal definition. One performs as someone, but that someone is in fact, something; one becomes a mode through which someone else may become or fail to become themselves. Perception becomes unnatural through this sense of self-modulation. Madame Merle casts herself as old, while Isabel is new. This distinction of their oldness and newness is not only in the sense of their differences in age and experience as women, in their shared relations to Osmond, and given how the former has been in England for longer than the latter. The effect of the distinction illustrates how notions of youth fluctuate with the maturity of one’s gaze both as an individual, and as a historical consciousness that one may inhabit, through which one approximates oneself. A woman’s place is unnatural because she exists in time, but if this could be said for anyone, then it is the expression of desire which reminds her that her existence is essentially a relation. Her place is unnatural because it exists in the time of opposing desires. An approximation of individuality through a national identity cannot free the fundamental condition that a woman names the self as a relation.

The precarity of choice and chance find their strength in this approximation. James’ narrator makes us aware of Madame Merle’s sophisticated understanding of her own appearance as a woman who “[exists] only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals” (199). It is so difficult to imagine Madame Merle in her solitude that “one might wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit,” because “her nature [has] been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away,” yet the totality of her existence as a surface also suggests “that a charming surface doesn’t necessarily prove one artificial” (199). She has depth precisely because she is conventional, and does not pretend to be original; Isabel is aware “of the advantage of being like that—of having made one’s self a firm surface, a sort of corselet of silver” through her behavior (399). The meaning of her own appearance does not deceive Madame Merle, and by refusing to attribute more value than may be due to the surface, she solidifies its very value. Isabel deciphers only too late the significance of Madame Merle’s appearance as a deception in her misreading of their relation. (How do our relations last if not through an element of our own misreadings?) Isabel misreads not only the relation, but how she relates to a center that exists only as an intersection of seemingly infinite social relations, and how she is herself another center. When Lord Warburton expresses interest in Pansy, the repetition of his desire resurfaces its history as “unnatural,” corroborating the “unnatural” relation formed through marriage between Isabel and Pansy as stepmother and step daughter. It would seem that for a woman, her natural places are that of daughter, sister, or mother. Ralph’s shift from cousin to brother places Isabel in the vagueness of love as a sister. Part of Isabel’s speculation over Lord Warburton encircles itself as to erase her in the process: “But what were his hopes, his pretensions, and in what strange way were they mingled with his evidently very sincere appreciation of poor Pansy? Was he in love with Gilbert Osmond’s wife, and if so what comfort did he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy…” (419). Thinking about Lord Warburton’s motivations displaces Isabel as herself. It is possible she cannot think of him without having to see herself through her imagining of his mind—one of the more unnatural places, perhaps, for a woman—as another man’s wife, and the mother of another woman’s child. Having an outward gaze that has little to no effect over one’s social reality would seem to result in Isabel’s “mutilated glimpse” of her own future (553). Becoming an object of another’s gaze, being centered as the substance of a gaze at all, encountering another through the confinement of their gaze, may all produce the inward mutilation of one’s own. In seeing oneself displaced as the object of desire, seeing the new object creates another false mirror. Likewise, apart from the gaze of another, one’s outward gaze may mutilate one’s inward gaze.

Isabel’s choice of Osmond rests principally on the absence of specificity in his social history and economic status. Vagueness welcomes her imagination to ennoble the whole of his character. Replacing the object of imagination with another may objectify the imagination itself. Unlike Madame Merle, Isabel does exist alone in her portrait, or at least, expressly desires to be alone. When she is alone the difference between her perception, and the perception painted by the narrative, becomes visible. The narrative paints a surface upon which other characters interrupt Isabel’s own gaze, but in her solitude, her gaze becomes the surface. To speculate further the language of the gaze, we might go beyond the nature of surfaces as a socialized phenomenon and turn towards the very difference between flesh and other materials such as words themselves, or marble, as they catalyze the human imagination.

Series of scenes may be sectioned by how they open and close with the entrance and exit of a suitor. They blur the difference between introduction or re-introduction and intrusion, suggestive of how in this complex mesh of encounters, each encounter in its isolation is also an interruption of Isabel’s solitude. One character becomes the object of another’s perception before another perceives them; the chronology of perception reflects the nature of the relation as the narrative progresses: “[Ralph’s] face was turned toward the house, but his eyes were bent musing on the lawn; so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the ample doorway for some moments before he perceived her” (29). A description of Ralph’s gaze contains Isabel’s implicit gaze resting upon him for the first time. So, though she sees him first, he, in the idleness of his character, expresses repeatedly a need to watch her and to watch over her. Isabel’s own point of view of her life seems to pronounce its vagueness precisely when she is conscious of someone supplanting it, but without her consciousness alarmed to the fact, her view shares the view of a reader. We, as readers, live the framing of Isabel’s character; to read does not exempt one from avoiding the errors in another’s fate. Goodwood’s letter interrupts Isabel’s gaze in a similar manner to how she comes into Ralph’s view: “she sat motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn. Her meditations were presently interrupted by the arrival of a servant who handed her a letter. The letter bore the London postmark and was addressed in a hand she knew—that came into her. Vision, already so held by him, with the vividness of the writer’s voice or his face” (111). Goodwood’s letter is both a synecdoche for his presence and the presence of his absence. Beginning in the future perfect tense—“I don’t know whether you will have heard my coming to England, but even if you have not it will scarcely be a surprise to you”—his words convey that he does not know if those very words had already been conveyed, expressing a lack of urgency in their value through their very urgency (112). Withstanding the passage of time, and at the same time, becoming the past, his written words have fixed what was, at the time of writing, the presence of his knowledge. When Isabel reads his words, they become their own present through the present time of her reading. Through their delivery, from his writing of his words to her reading of them, they are a part of the man as a whole. He becomes, however, the presence of her imagination before she reads the letter, at the very instance she recognizes his handwriting. She reads “with such deep attention” that she fails to perceive “an approaching tread on the soft grass. Looking up, however, as she mechanically [folds the letter], she [sees] Lord Warburton standing before her” (112). The scene traces the intrusion of one man through her inward gaze, and the suspension of his presence and her imagination through the disruption of her outward gaze. Two kinds of absence also enclose the moment of her attention. One is the absence of Goodwood through the presence of his letter, and the other is the absence of Warburton in her perception moments before her gaze shifts to him. The first in another series of scenes that open and close with Lord Warburton begins within once more interrupting Isabel’s outward gaze:

“She was so absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman—a gentleman who was not Ralph come back to say that the excavations were a bore. This personage was startled as she was startled; he stood there baring his head to her perceptibly pale surprise.

‘Lord Warburton!” Isabel exclaimed as she rose.

‘I had no idea it was you. I turned that corner and came upon you’ (290).

Isabel’s inward gaze remains active, but invisible, as her outward gaze focuses passively on the ground. Lord Warburton’s shadow renders her vision like the very “cracked but not dislocated slabs” in the object of her vision. Madame Merle cannot be imagined alone, but Isabel’s own solitude exists with Lord Warburton parting with Isabel in a gallery of marble statues. She remains alone until Goodwood finds her, this time not in the form of words, but in his physical form. She sits down before then, in the knowledge of her solitude, “in the centre of the circle of these presences, regarding [the statues] vaguely, resting her eyes on their beautiful blank faces; listening, as it were, to their eternal silence” (303). Like the displacement of Madame Merle and Isabel as American expatriates in England, the statues dislocate Greek historian the present tense of Rome:

“I say in Rome especially, because the Roman air is an exquisite medium for such impressions. The golden sunshine mingles with them, the deep stillness of the past, so vivid yet, though it is nothing but a void full of names, seems to throw a solemn spell upon them…a clear, warm shadow rested on the figures and made them more mildly human. Isabel sat there a long time, under the charm of their motionless grace, wondering to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound. The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief; the polished marble floor reflected their beauty. She had seen them all before, but her enjoyment repeated itself, and it was all the greater because she was glad again, for the time, to be alone” (303).

Isabel’s gaze, rather than conjuring the presence of a man through his written words, turns marble faces “mildly human” before he, unknown to her, will arrive. Her gaze may partake in an antiphony for Madame Merle’s observation that a woman has no natural place. If a woman has no natural place, her gaze responds to the condition through animating the unnatural—as a depiction of a natural form—into its presence as a part of nature. In the scene Isabel physically becomes the active center of a highly artificial circle. In society, she becomes a center through the successive force of every other character’s gaze. This scene paints the prize of her solitude as a center: her own gaze becomes all powerful, and her enjoyment “[repeats] itself.” It is nearly a play on the perfect candidate for a marriage plot: the ideal depiction of a man in a woman’s eye repeats its status of perfection, and thus seals its impossibility. The narrator and her gaze become one gaze through the rapture of an impression enlivened by the Roman air. Gazing outwards at a circle of “presences,” she images what kind of speech could be heard through marble ears or spoken through marble lips. Her wonder imitates how others imagine the experience, vision, and speech of women. Like Goodwood’s handwriting, Osmond’s likeness to a “nonentity,” and the all-encompassing surface of Madame Merle, the marble statues are a presence of blankness open for her imagination to fill their features. Thus, the strength of her gaze is also its very weakness. The very presence of one’s own gaze evinces the imperfection of solitude as a means to evade becoming the surface of another’s vision.

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Oxford University Press, 2009.