Literary Significance & Criticism
The Portrait of a Lady received critical acclaim since its first publication in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, and it remains the most popular of James's longer fictions. Contemporary critics recognized that James had pushed the analysis of human consciousness and motivation to new levels, particularly in such passages as the famous Chapter 42, where Isabel meditates deep into the night about her marriage and the trap she seems to have fallen into. James made an in-depth account of Isabel's deepest terrors in his preface to the New York Edition of the novel.
More recent criticism has come at the novel from feminist. In particular, Isabel's final return to Osmond has fascinated critics, who have debated whether James sufficiently justifies this seemingly paradoxical rejection of freedom. One interpretation is that Isabel not only feels as honor-bound to the promise she has made to stepdaughter Pansy as she does to Osmond, but also considers that the scene her "unacceptable" trip to England will create with Osmond will leave her in a more justifiable position to abandon her dreadful marriage.
The extensive revisions James made for the 1908 New York Edition have generally been accepted as improvements, unlike the changes in other texts, such as The American or Roderick Hudson. The revision of the final scene between Isabel and Goodwood has been especially applauded. As Edward Wagenknecht noted, James "makes it as clear as any modern novelist could make it by using all the four-letter words in the dictionary that has been roused as never before in her life, roused in the true sense perhaps for the first time in her life." James's verbal magic allowed him to both obey and evade the restrictive conventions of his day for the treatment of sexuality in literature.
Critic Alfred Habegger has claimed that the main character of Portrait was inspired by Christie Archer, the protagonist from Anne Moncure Crane's novel, Reginald Archer (1871). Crane (1838–1872) may have influenced James, who Habegger claimed was interested in Crane’s female characters. In the preface to the New York Edition of the novel, James referred to several of George Eliot's female protagonists as possible influences on the Portrait. Habegger questions this claim and quotes others as doing the same.
Another critical article is "Rewriting Misogyny: Portrait of a Lady and the Popular Fiction Debate" by Paul M. Hadella. The author also mentions the similarities with Crane's novel.
Read more about this topic: The Portrait Of A Lady
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“There was a literary gentleman present who who had dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out—and who was a literary gentleman in consequence.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)