A Ghetto Nerd's Notebook: On Trying To Give Portrait Of A Lady As Fair A Shake As Possible.

The strengths of The Portrait of A Lady outweigh its aesthetic limitations and outlast the rages of its creator. The novel was serialized twice- in Macmillan's magazine and 14 straight issues of the Atlantic- and it doesn't have the impeccable structure and organic feel one sees in his novellas. The serial form is subject to an editorial fiat that doesn't necessarily jibe with the design of a novel: one is subject to demands regarding word count, and each installment has an identity of its own. Unless the novelist has already put their work together or made extensive edits, the work isn't going to congeal as a whole. ( and in Portrait, James did neither).

There is also the matter of intent; here, I have to voice my hesitancy. I first came to James via The Bostonians(his novelistic hit job on the women's movement of the time) and Italian Hours( Where he raged about the tyranny of women's voices and complained about women's "too advanced" status in culture 30 years before the suffrage movement). It was hard for me to read the arc of Isabel Archer's story- a woman who rebuffs two successful yet doltish nice guys and gets into a fucked up marriage afterward-and not think it a hit job on women's autonomy. It was made harder still by the author's narrative intrusions:( His use of quotation marks when he spoke of Isabel as an "intellectual," his boosterish love for Caspar Goodwood, and his tick of intrusive windy speechifying that pops up every 8 to 10 pages.)