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PARTISAN REVIEW
vention, for instance, of the lady-correspondent Henrietta Stack–
pole, who is no passionate pilgrim but the mouthpiece, rather,
of popular Americanism. It is she who questions Isabel's future
on the ground that her money will work against her by bolstering
her romantic inclinations. Henrietta is little more than a fictional
convenience used to furnish the story with comic relief; but at
this juncture of the plot she becomes the agent of a profound
criticism aimed, in the last analysis, at James himself, at his own
tendency to romanticise the values to which privilege lays claim.
And what Henrietta has to say is scarcely in keeping with her
habitual manner of the prancing female journalist. Characteristi–
cally enough, she begins by remarking that she has no fear of
Isabel turning into a sensual woman; the peril she fears is of a
different nature:
"The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your
own dreams-you are not enough in contact with reality- with
the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say, sinning world
that surrounds you. You are too fastidious, you have too many
graceful illusions. Your newly-acquired thousands will shut
you up more and more in the society of selfish and heartless
people, who will be interested in keeping up those illusions....
You think, furthermore, that you can lead a romantic life, that
you can live by pleasing others and pleasing yourself. You will
find you are mistaken. Whatever life you lead, you must put
your soul into it-to make any sort of success of it; and from
the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you;
it becomes reality! . . . you think we can escape disagreeable
duties by taking romantic views-that is your great illusion,
my dear."
The case against the snobbish disposition of the Jamesian culture·
seekers and their over-estimation of the worldly motive has seldom
been so shrewdly and clearly stated. But Isabel is not especially
vulnerable to criticism of this sort. It is only in her later incar·
nations that the heiress succumbs more and more to precisely the
illusions of which Henrietta gives warning-so much so that
in
the end, when Maggie Verver appears on the scene, the life she
leads may be designated, from the standpoint of the purely social
analyst, as a romance of bourgeois materialism, the American
romance of newly-gotten wealth divesting itself of its plebeian
origins in an ecstasy of refinement!
Henrietta's words, moreover, are meant to prefigure the
tragedy of Isabel's marriage to Gilbert Osmond, an ltalianate
