228
PARTISAN REVIEW
lovers. No wonder James commends her in terms that fairly
bristle with heroic intentions and that in the preface to
The Wings
of the Dove
he goes so far as to credit her with the great historic
boon of being "that certain sort of young American," exceptionally
endowed with "liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation, of
contact ... who is more the 'heir of all the ages' than any other
young person whatsoever."
If
James's relation to his native land is in question, then
more is to be learned from this young woman's career than from
any number of discursive statements quoted from his letters,
essays, and autobiographies. "It's a complete fate being an Amer–
ican," he wrote. Yes, but what does this fate actually come to
in
his work? The answer, it seems to me, is mostly given in his
serial narrative of the heiress of all the ages.
The initial assignment of this heroine is to reconnoiter the
scene rather than take possession of it. As yet she is not recog·
nized as the legitimate heiress but merely as a candidate for the
inheritance. Such is the part played by Mary Garland, for
in·
stance, a small-town girl from New England who herself feels
the pull of the "great world" even as she tries to save her errant
lover from its perils
(Roderick Hudson,
1875). Daisy Miller,
a young lady whose friends are distressed by the odd mixture of
spontaneous grace, audacity, and puerility in her deportment,
is also cast in this role, though with somewhat special and limited
intentions. Bessie Alden, a more cultivated and socially en·
trenched figure than the famous Daisy, voyages to England–
inevitably so-for the sake of enjoying its picturesque associ–
ations; and she is noteworthy as the first of the James girls to reap
the triumph of turning down the proposal of an old-world aristo–
crat. But it is in Isabel Archer
(The Portrait of a
Lady)
that we
first encounter this heroine in a truly pivotal position, comprising
the dramatic consequences of a conflict not merely of manners
but of morals as well. In Isabel her heretofore scattered traits
are unified and corrected in the light of James's growing recog–
nition of the importance of her claims. Two decades later, at the
time when his writing had settled into the so portentously complex
style of his ultimate period, she reappears as the masterful though
