"Isabel Archer": A Possible Source for The Portrait of a Lady

Author(s): Andrea Roberts Beauchamp

Source: American Literature , May, 1977, Vol. 49, No. 2 (May, 1977), pp. 267-271
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2925429

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 268 American Literature

probable, that a plot, a situation, and indeed even a name for his
heroine had been suggested to James in a bit of magazine fiction by
Professor Alden, D.D., a story entitled, significantly enough, "Isabel
Archer." This brief tale of a "bright and beautiful" young woman
whose life was blighted by marriage to a heartless hypocrite adum-
brates the central elements of James's first mature masterpiece.
There is no external evidence to indicate that Henry James ever
read this story; my argument for it as a source will depend upon
certain internal parallels too precise, I believe, to be entirely for-
tuitous. Nonetheless, I want to demonstrate that "Isabel Archer"
would have been easily accessible to the young James. The story ap-
peared in the 1848-49 volume of a family magazine, The Ladies'
Wreath, a New York publication with a circulation, in its peak year,
of 25,000. The issues ran to only about thirty-six pages each, but these
were annually bound for the Christmas trade as substantial volumes
whose hardcover format provided a more permanent existence for
the stories, poems, and sketches.3 In the year of the publication of
"Isabel Archer," the James family was living in New York, and
although James was only six in that year, he was already, as we know
from Leon Edel's biography, an avid reader, of periodicals as well
as books.4 It is no strain on our credulity to believe that The Ladies'
Wreath was among them. Why such a slender story, one without the
slightest redeeming artistic merit, should have made so lasting-if,
presumably, subconscious-an impression on the future novelist is an
enigma that we cannot hope to solve; but unless we are willing to
write off as mere chance the identical names for their heroines and
the analogous plot lines for their fictions, then we must accept the not
unlikely possibility that James had read-and stored away, to become
part of that mysterious process that is the artist's imagination-the
Reverend Alden's homily.
The story runs only about four pages and may be summarized
briefly. The setting is the "humble dwelling" of an aged and pious
invalid, Mrs. Clayton, to which a frequent caller is her young friend,
Isabel Archer. As the story begins, Isabel has come to announce her
intention to visit her aunt "in the city." Mrs. Clayton disapproves of
visits to the city in general-"I have known the city. It is a place of

3 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, I741-1850 (New York, 1930),
P. 353.
4 Henry James: The Untried Years: I843-I870 (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 89, 94-95.

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 Notes 269

peril to young he
Isabel is to undertake it in the company of one Mr. Heywood, a
man of seeming character and probity, but whose polished manner
Mrs. Clayton knows to hide a wicked heart. Her silent censure of this
plan piques Isabel's curiosity: "'May I ask,' said Isabel, with a forced
smile, 'what occupies your mind?'" Mrs. Clayton's concern encom-
passes something more fundamental than one trip to the city: "'As
you have asked me, I will tell you. I was thinking whether it were
possible that one whom I love . . . may be left to fix her affections
unwisely.'" One tends to agree with Isabel that so precipitous a con-
clusion "runs in advance of all facts and all probabilities." Neverthe-
less, Mrs. Clayton, who knows something of Heywood's true nature,
provides the central moral of this story: "'If we take counsel of God
in the yielding of our affections all will be well. It is not what the
young are apt to do. I hope and trust that you will be saved from
fixing your affections on an unworthy object, thus rendering them
ministers of the keenest sorrow.'"
Isabel, however, like her Jamesian namesake, is not anxious to
dispose of her affections. "'I shall not give them but in exchange for
a heart whose capacity transcends that of any one I have yet known.
When such a treasure is offered to my acceptance, though unaccom-
panied by wealth, or rank, or influence, I shall not probably refuse
it.' "
While Mrs. Clayton is warning her young friend of the dangers of
marriage to an irreligious man, Mr. Heywood makes a timely ap-
pearance, entering the "humble tenement" "with the same politeness
with which he would have entered a palace." Although his address
is directed primarily to the old woman, his intent is obviously to im-
press the young one. "His habitual manners," the author informs us,
were "so polished and kindly, as almost to make you believe that they
were the natural expression of a glowing heart." Seeing that Isabel
has been taken in by this pleasing exterior, Mrs. Clayton bids her a
tearful farewell filled with foreboding:

"I hope," said Mrs. Clayton to herself, as soon as she was alone, "that
dear child will not listen to the voice of the charmer. Heywood is false
and heartless. I know how he treated his mother, though no one else
but God does. He can never make a good husband unless renewed by
the grace of God. In his heart he despises religion, much as he pretends
to respect it in her presence."

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270 American Literature

Ten years then quickly pass. Once m

dwelling. . . ." Mrs. Clayton still occupies it, "though now unable
to rise from her chair without assistance."

A thin, careworn looking woman, apparently past the meridian of

life, sat by her side, assiduously plying the needle while she listened
with grateful reverence to the words of consolation which fell from
the lips of her aged friend. Who could have recognized in her the once
bright and beautiful Isabel Archer? And yet it was her. The fears of
her sagacious friend had been realized. The fascinating manners of a
heartless man had won the rich treasure of her heart's affection. SHE
TOOK NOT COUNSEL OF GOD in the bestowment of her affections, and reaped
the bitter consequences, in a husband unkind, irreligious, ruined....
Her only hours of peace were passed by the side of her to whom, in
brighter days, she had ministered, whose friendship was as lasting as that
christian love on which its foundation rested.

My precis of this sentimental story perhaps has served to show the

kinship between the two Isabel Archers. The melodramatic fate of
the first rehearses the tragic fate of the second. Certain motifs which
play a major role in James's novel are nascent in this pious sketch.
The traditional opposition between the natural simplicity of the
country and the corrupt sophistication of the city-that most shop-
worn of literary cliches-becomes in James the immeasurably more
complex "international theme," in which the America-Europe oppo-
sition replaces the country-city one. In this opposition, America offers
innocence, spontaneity, and a sense of man's innate goodness, but it
lacks the art, culture, and rich complexity of experience represented
by the older, but more decadent and immoral, civilization. While the
earlier heroine gains no moral insight from having gone to the city,
James builds his novel on his heroine's acquisition of a new wisdom
and maturity through her forfeit of innocence.
A second point of comparison between the two works lies in the
choice of the marriage partner. Both women maintain that they are
not anxious to wed-" 'If there's a thing in the world I'm fond of ...
it's my personal independence,'" James's heroine tells Caspar Good-
wood-but nonetheless both do marry. Having too much confidence
in her own judgment, James's Isabel refuses to listen to the counsel of
her aunt and cousin, just as the Reverend Alden's heroine dismisses
the cautions of Mrs. Clayton. Both trust implicitly in their powers of
assessment, even though such powers have been totally untested.

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 Notes 271

Lastly, the two I

teriors, mistaking
see on the surface is true and that the attractive appearance and
polished manners of Osmond and Heywood are a clue to their inner
lives, an indication of beauty of spirit. What they fail to apprehend is
that fine manners do not necessarily reflect good moral character,
that Osmond and Heywood, far from being superior to the other
men of their acquaintance, are in fact unfeeling hypocrites. It is
worth noting, too, that the actual process of the heroine's discovery
of her husband's duplicity, in both instances, is not made part of the
actual narrative but revealed retrospectively after an interim period
of years-ten in one story, three in the other.
These parallels in the stories, given the identity of the heroines'
names, make it more than likely that James's great Bildungsroman
was somehow indebted to Professor Alden's little didactic tale.

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