Do you want to have a painful fate?
Isabel Archer is the imposing figure in Portrait of a Lady. Henry James is the author of the novel. He has very beautifully portrayed the curved journey of a young woman’s desire to live free. She believes herself powerful enough to cut the chains of parenthood. Set in the 1870s, it tells us how Isabel has the dreamlike quality of being uncannily attractive and undeniably intelligent. From the beginning, we see her in a meditative mood as if she was pondering something serious and that was her marriage proposal to Lord Warburton. If you’ve seen the movie, Nicole Kidman plays the part and she makes us easier to understand. There are tears in her eyes but she doesn’t let them fall. it’s symbolic. Another charming young man, Casper Goodwood, who is a bit more proud on the persuasive side of her, proposes to her. Isabel turns them both down. This woman has great ideas about her life and she wants to do them without the help of men. Continuing with the novel, we find that she has also charmed her cousin Ralph Touchett. He is a sick man and is madly in love with her, but he meets a negative fate. Isabel does not do it on purpose but the playwright has tried to show the female perspective through the hands of men. Isabel believes in love, but she also believes in struggles and painful life. When Lord Warburton approaches her, she politely declines her proposal saying that she likes her but that she cannot marry. He is eager to know the reason, but she remains silent.
Isabel is the living example of what a woman expects and wants to live a liberal life. Going out into the world and exploring people is her main desire. She wants to take risks and win dangerous situations. Here, Archer believes that her life is going to be painful and miserable. This does not mean that she is thinking of suicide. This is the hard fact of life, but everyone chooses to ignore it. Wise readers will react to Isabel as immature and negative, but I think it is her choice to live this way. She doesn’t believe in hearts and flowers, but in pain and resistance. Some readers have vehemently dismissed thoughts of her by saying that she has a strange outlook on being miserable. I say that if your life imparts pain to you, it also becomes a refuge on a shoulder to carry all your tears. Isabel is wandering to find that shoulder. She doesn’t want to compromise her destiny. Our female lead sincerely believes that she will be unhappy and that her fate will allow her to have new experiences. Marital chains will only prevent her from having her share of her life, and she strongly objects to this fact. Her dearest friend Henrietta Stackpole meets her in London and is shocked by her devious attitude of hers. She was even more shocked to realize that Archer turned Warburton down. Henrietta is a reporter by profession and is a symbol of feminism in those days. Henrietta misjudges noble people’s sentiments and calls Casper Goodwood”I have never seen such a handsome ugly man“, when he talked about his desire to marry Isabel. Ralph, on the other hand, mixes with Henrietta and demands to know why Isabel rejected Warburton. He practically blackmailed her into knowing, but she gives a rational answer. He knows Isabel very well and wants to save her from her fate, but can’t do anything as she is about to die.
James has candidly revealed a woman’s perspective on life, love and marriage. Through Casper Goodwood, she shows us the respective gestures of single and married women. They have a code of conduct to follow. The lines, “A single woman, a girl your age, is not independent. There are all kinds of things she can’t do. She is hindered at every step.” These lines show the person’s open ancestry. So the fact of allowing that she has happiness and dangers is another patriarchal morsel that he wants to feed her. This is exactly what Elizabeth doesn’t like, but her fate takes a nasty turn when she marries Gilbert Osmond, the archetypal villain, with her mate, Madame Merle, and an innocent daughter.
