MILLICENT BELL
115
self-determination is the motive of Isabel Archer's prolonged refusal
of marriage in James's
The Portrait of a Lady ,
published five years
before
The Bostonians.
In Isabel's world, the feminist movement
does not yet exist, and she is supported in her vague resistance only
by her friend Henrietta's example as an "independent" woman and
not really by her, for it is Henrietta who consistently champions the
suit of Casper Goodwood .
It
is no accident that the book begins and
ends with Isabel's flight from Casper, for it is he who represents the
threat of union with masculinity in its most absolute form.
It
is true
that he does not - to our knowledge - hold such beliefs as the Missis–
sippian Basil Ransom who despises all notions of egalitarianism and
regards women as a species of chattel, hardly more deserving of free–
dom than the slaves who have been taken from him. Casper is a cot–
ton manufacturer and an inventor, however, and so a representative
of new social and economic power and new forms of slavery in Isabel's
native country - from which she has also fled. And he represents
masculine force in its sexual sense, too. His embrace is that seizure
to which her entire nature almost submits, since she too is a sexual
creature. He presses upon her the only authentic kiss in the whole
book (and almost in the whole of James's writing) while she feels
"each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each ag–
gressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its in–
tense identity and made one with this act of possession. "
Isabel, of course, marries, but not Casper and not Lord War–
burton, who would likewise confine her to a role as chatelaine of his
castle while he continues to wield power over his broad lands and to
influence politics as a member of the House of Lords. She marries ,
perversely, a man who boasts that he has "never tried to earn a
penny," a man without profession or place precisely
for
these nega–
tive reasons , precisely because he seems to her to have disdained
such measures of personhood, even as she has herself. In the end, we
know, she finds that she is mistaken in Gilbert Osmond, and that
marriage with him only discloses in a hideous intimate form the
cruel inevitability of dominion and submission .
So pessimistic a view of marriage is surely present to James in
The Bostonians,
which probes deeply into what James thought had
happened to the culture as a whole because of the division, the deepest
in society , that sex difference made. He had come back from Europe
in 1881 after five years in England and looked again at his native
land, particularly at those foci of the culture, Boston and New York .
The Bostonians
was the result of that new, hard look and also a re-
