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| Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer in the 1996 adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady |
In the essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), Oscar Wilde claims
that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’. For those writing at
the fin-de-siècle with an interest in aestheticism the prospect that life is
performative had rich possibilities and drastically alters how we should read ‘character’
in their fictions. In Henry James in particular, a character’s naivety or otherwise
is indicated by how well he (or more often she) appreciates the aesthetics of
self-presentation. While in mid-century realist novels maturation is linked to
awareness of one’s inner life and the inner lives of others (Eliot’s Dorothea
Brooke gaining sympathy for those she does and does not know, Dickens’s Pip
being able to assess his own past behaviour critically), in James, development
consists in social performance and presentation.
In The Portrait of the
Lady (1881), Madame Merle, unlike the protagonist Isabel Archer, is worldly
– not only in terms of her sexual experience (the revelation of which forms the
climax of the plot) but in terms of her belief in this Wildean idea: ‘One’s
self—for other people- is one’s
expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the
books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive’. Isabel’s
artlessness does not exclude her from the observations inherent in this
performative scheme. She is repeatedly cast as an art object, by other
characters and by the narrator (the very name of the novel flagging up her
existence in a work of art). Ralph observes her in a gallery surrounded by
other art objects:
‘He lost nothing, in truth, by these wandering glances, for
she was better worth looking at than most works of art. She was undeniably
spare, and ponderably light, and proveably tall; when people had wished to
distinguish her from the other two Miss Archers they had always called her the
willowy one. Her hair, which was dark even to blackness, had been an object of
envy to many women; her light grey eyes, a little too firm perhaps in her
graver moments, had an enchanting range of concession.’
Isabel is not important in herself here – it is the ideas
she inspires in other people which Ralph and the narrator dwell on. And while
Isabel’s ‘performance’ – natural as it is – presents her positively (as ‘worth
looking at’, ‘light’, ‘tall’, ‘willowy’, ‘enchanting’), we can already see how
it could also lead to negative responses, making her into an ‘object of envy’
in a way she is unaware of. As the novel progresses, Isabel’s tragedy (her marriage)
is instigated by this attractiveness and her husband Oswald’s desire to collect
and curate art works. Her naivety – in not understanding that she is a
performer in life’s drama – is what leads to her being put on show, while Madame Merle, whose
performance is a deceitful one, can protect her own interests.
Returning to Wilde, the actress Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), shows
a similar ignorance. Abandoning acting upon finding love, she fails to realise
that ‘real life’ is as much a performance (at least for an aesthete like
Dorian), as the Shakespearean roles she performs onstage. She repulses him and
loses his love entirely not just by failing to act well but when she tells
Dorian: ‘you taught me what reality really is’. For someone who believes in the
artistry of life, like Wilde or Dorian, such a declaration is abhorrent.
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