CCiittyy UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff NNeeww YYoorrkk ((CCUUNNYY)) CCUUNNYY AAccaaddeemmiicc WWoorrkkss Publications and Research LaGuardia Community College 2013 IIssaabbeell AArrcchheerr''ss ""DDeelliicciioouuss PPaaiinn"":: CChhaarrttiinngg LLaaccaanniiaann DDeessiirree iinn TThhee PPoorrttrraaiitt ooff aa LLaaddyy Phyllis E. VanSlyck CUNY LaGuardia Community College How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/lg_pubs/73 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Phyllis van Slyck 633 Phyllis van slyck isabel archer’s “Delicious Pain”: charting lacanian Desire in The Portrait of a Lady That’s what love is. It’s one’s own ego that one loves in love, one’s own ego made real on the imaginary level. —Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique I cannot escape my fate . . . I can’t escape unhappiness . . . —Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady i In an early chapter of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James’s narrator, in an effort to illuminate the reader about Isabel Ar- cher’s character, offers a gentle but somewhat ominous warning: “Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded” (James, 1995, p. 54).1 By the end of the novel it seems that James’s heroine has been granted her wish: Isabel finds herself impris- oned in a “house of suffocation” where there is “neither light nor air” (p. 360). Yet Isabel’s motive for returning to Gilbert Osmond, despite her knowledge of his betrayal, begs for an explanation that neither Isabel nor James offers us. Jonathan Freedman has called the ending of The Portrait “an interpre- tive mystery . . . one of the most famous cruxes in American literature” (1994, p. 78), and, more recently, J. Hillis Miller has argued that “the basis of decision is hidden,” that we cannot determine Isabel’s motive (2005, p. 16).2 James himself made the following observation about the ending of The Portrait: American Imago, Vol. 70, No. 4, 633–661. © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 633 634 Isabel Archer’s “Delicious Pain” The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not fin- ished—that I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation—that I have left her en l’air.—This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity— it groups together. It is complete in itself— and the rest may be taken up or not, later. (1947, p. 18)3 Despite the coherence James claims for his earliest mas- terpiece, with regard to Isabel’s final decision and “the end of her situation,” he does leave us, as he puts it, en l’air, so perhaps it is time to step back from the question of why Isabel returns to Osmond in order to pose a broader one. What exactly does James’s heroine want? Or, as Renata Salecl asks in her discus- sion of “Love Between Desire and Drive,” “What is the nature of desire in a love relationship . . . what makes the loving subject see the other as the object of love?” (1998, p. 46). Before we can consider these pivotal questions that define the central action of The Portrait of a Lady, let us review James’s reflections on Isabel Archer in his 1908 preface to the New York Edition. Observing that “millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny,” he asks “what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?” (1995, p. 9). James argues that the writer must find the most appropriate “difficulty” for his heroine and the “most beautiful incentive,” and notes, tellingly, that this difficulty or incentive must be found “in the young woman’s own consciousness” (pp. 10–11). Unlike Catherine Sloper of Washington Square, who presumes almost nothing, who lacks the capacity to engage us with her intelligence, and whose strength lies solely in her consistency and stubbornness—all possible reasons for James’s dismissal of that text as unworthy of inclusion in the New York Edition—Isabel Archer engages us because she pursues her destiny with idealism and integrity, and it is precisely her best qualities—her intelligence, her generosity, her passion, and especially her innocent belief in her right and capacity to compose an independent self—that lead her to her fate. James also observes in his preface that, for each of his characters, he seeks “the complications they would be most Phyllis van Slyck 635 likely to produce and to feel” (p. 5, emphasis added). How might we understand the situation in which Isabel finds herself, given the extent to which she helps to “produce” the kind of “complications” that reverse and even destroy her most ideal- istic, and seemingly positive, intentions? I would like to offer a reading of Isabel’s choices, a perverse reading, if you will, but one which matches James’s heroine’s own perversion, her consistent turning away from, even against, the very postulates she claims to live by. Isabel’s discovery of love through the ideal image of herself she finds mirrored in Gilbert Osmond’s gaze leads to a reversal of her most noble impulses. Her choice of a suitor also points to something that would seem the opposite of desire, but which is, in fact, its foundation. In choosing Gilbert Osmond, Isabel seeks to experience, however unconsciously, what Jacques Lacan defines as jouissance, or “painful pleasure” (1986/1992, p. 185).4 This is the pleasure that arises when the individual goes beyond what is bearable, testing the limits of desire, seeking an object, and a self, that can never be found.5 Although she insists on her ability to achieve psychological and social freedom, to stand apart from what James refers to as her “envelope of circumstances” (1995, p. 175), Isabel’s behavior suggests that she is drawn, instead, to those situations that will test the boundaries of that “self” and reveal its impossibility. Isabel thus fulfills James’s effort to transform “the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to [endow her] with the high attributes of a Subject,” but not exactly in the way James may have intended (pp. 8–9). In her quest for completion, for that object which will per- fectly reflect her ideal self, and in her choice of an “other” who mirrors this ideal—but also, significantly, its dark interior, the void at the center of identity—Isabel confronts her own alien- ated, ambiguous and in-coherent self, what Jacques Lacan calls the split subject (1977, p. 128).6 Isabel’s choices throughout the novel reveal her unconscious fascination with what lies beyond the pleasure principle, and she tacitly embraces the death drive as she confronts the irrevocable “lack” which constitutes the human condition (Lacan, 1981, p. 214).7 Her final decision, however, also offers her an ontological escape from Osmond’s (and perhaps James’s own) formalist control of her identity. Choosing to remain with someone who will render her desire 636 Isabel Archer’s “Delicious Pain” impossible forces Isabel to experience the paradoxical “split- ting” that exposes her shattered subjectivity. Her active role in the destruction of her ideal of coherence and autonomy, including her final decision to return to Osmond rather than “to save what [she] can of her life” (p. 633), defines her, avant la lettre, as a post-humanist subject. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argues that in the end what we seek is not pleasure but the pain that connects us with our unacknowledged but inevitable tendency towards dissolution: “If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’” (1920, p. 38). Shifting the interpretation of the death drive from the biological to the ontological realm, Lacan argues that the individual struggles not to return to a state of equilibrium (as Freud suggests) but, rather, the opposite: to maintain a state of permanent longing for an impossible object of desire. In support of his position, Lacan claims that Freud, too, recognizes the way desire is sustained by impossibility: “Freud strongly indicates that what in the end gives the . . . apparatus of the ego its real support, its consistency, is that it is sustained within by this lost object.” Because love actually de- velops, and is supported, through this longing, Lacan explains, “jouissance is introduced into the dimension of the subject’s being” (2007, p. 50). Put simply, “the death drive is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the Thing; it is that which the subject can never assume, integrate, subjectivize” (Evans, 1996, p. 92). Lacan’s reworking of the Freudian death drive as a quest for the lost object that can never be found offers insight into the true nature of Isabel’s desire. Early clues to the ambiguous nature of Isabel’s quest are suggested once again by James’s narrator, who reminds the reader just how contradictory her ideas about her emerging identity are. She insists on her independence from social constraints; she longs “to move in a realm of light, of natu- ral wisdom” (p. 56), yet she cares deeply about what others think of her. Her belief that “her life should always be in har- mony with the most pleasing impression she should produce” Phyllis van Slyck 637 (p. 54), anticipating William James’s “ideal social self . . . a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion” (James, 1890, p. 315), is at odds with Isabel’s determination not to be bound by social codes: “‘Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one’” (p. 175). James’s heroine’s insistence on her autonomy—to her Aunt Lydia, to her cousin, Ralph, and to her deceptive mentor, Serena Merle—and her desire to be free of others’ control, is undermined, long before Gilbert Osmond appears on the scene, by a conflict between her private ideal of selfhood and her desire to be pleasing to the eye of an un- named but definitive other. Despite her alleged program of Emersonian self-realization, Isabel seeks acceptance by those who reflect back to her an ideal self-image she has already (though only vaguely) imagined. For Lacan, the quest for an ideal self is precisely what sets desire in motion, but the impossible desire we define as love strikes us only when “the object coincides with [the] hero’s fundamental [self] image” (1998, p. 142). The other must mirror back to the subject a fulfilling portrait that she has already, in a sense, composed: “The subject sees his being in a reflection in relation to the other, that is to say in relation to the ich-ideal” (1988, p. 125). Borrowing two terms from Freud, the “ideal ego” and the “ego ideal,” Lacan explains that the positioning of the self in relation to desire is directly related to the formation of subjectivity. The ideal ego is an imaginary projection that creates the illusion of unity, the illusion of a self (precisely the illusion Isabel is at pains to defend): “The human being only sees his form materialized, whole, the mirage of himself, outside of himself” (1998, p. 140). The ego ideal, in turn, is “the place in the symbolic order from which the subject observes himself or herself in the way he or she would like to be seen” (Salecl, 1998, p. 11).8 Henry James’s pervasive use of portraiture in this novel, beginning with Isabel’s self-idealization and including her portraits of her antagonists, may be related to the Lacanian notion of the ego ideal, for James’s fascination with the distill- ing, dramatizing, but also dangerous function of such compos- 638 Isabel Archer’s “Delicious Pain” ing reveals the way framing a subject traps the viewer. In this context, James’s methodology anticipates Lacan’s ideas about the function of the gaze and the mirror stage: the perceiver’s composed object, of self or other, fills his or her consciousness with an illusion, a misrecognition (Lacan, 1977, p. 6). The key to the connection between Lacan’s description of the ego ideal and Isabel’s quest is the alienation that the fantasy produces: this imaginary space is “where the alienated relation of self to its own image is created and maintained” (Klages, 2006, p. 80). What Isabel creates, or attempts to create, in her own self- idealization and her idealization of Osmond, is an illusion of a self, as well as an illusion of mastery. Predictably, in the course of her journey, Isabel discovers a profound gap between her desire and its realization. Despite her repeated professions of independence to her aunt Touchett, her cousin Ralph, and to Madame Merle, Isa- bel’s thinking quickly reveals a paradox: the extent to which the controlling fantasy of an ideal self or “ego ideal” dominates her effort to follow her desire and secure a love object. In his discussion of love, transference, and desire at the end of Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan tells a brief story that perfectly captures James’s heroine’s stance in relation to love early in the novel: Not long ago a little girl said to me sweetly that it was about time somebody began to look after her so that she might seem lovable to herself. In saying this, she provided the innocent admission of the mainspring that comes into play in the first stage of the transference. The subject has a relation with his analyst the centre of which is . . . the privileged signifier known as the ego ideal, in so far as from there he will feel himself both satisfactory and loved. (1981, p. 257) Like the “little girl” of Lacan’s story, Isabel is seeking some- one who will make her feel “both satisfactory and loved.” While her early suitors, Goodwood and Warburton, may seem to offer this kind of love, it is Gilbert Osmond who provides the neces- sary transference. Isabel immediately recognizes in her suitor Phyllis van Slyck 639 the narcissistic image that forms the substance of her ideal self. Osmond seems to exhibit the exact qualities that define her own aesthetic quest. He tells her that “one ought to make one’s life a work of art” (p. 237), effectively mirroring, to Isabel, her own early desire to be “one of the best . . . [to] be conscious of a fine organization” (pp. 53–54). James’s heroine finds herself deeply attracted to the controlled and refined aesthetic image Osmond presents to her because she tacitly recognizes her own ego ideal in his (calculated) self-representation. She responds to Osmond, in other words, as the object that sets desire in motion, what Lacan calls the objet petit a (1998, p. 77).9 As Salecl explains, we love this object “because of the perfection that we have striven to reach for our own ego” (1996, p. 187). Yet what is important here is that Isabel’s concept of herself now depends on “her misidentification with the image of another” (Klages, 2006, p. 81). Another important reason that Osmond performs this function, when Isabel’s other suitors do not, is that Goodwood and Warburton literally overwhelm Isabel with the presence of their desire; Osmond offers, precisely, its absence. It is absence, emptiness, lack, therefore, that defines the real nature of Isabel’s desire: she seeks the object that can never be attained—some- thing that will postpone, rather than grant, her satisfaction. For Lacan, this deferral, or failure, is precisely what defines the love relationship: “love . . . is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction (insatisfaction) and even its impossibility” (1998, p. 6).10 Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Isabel re- peatedly articulates a consistent interest in the kind of painful pleasure described by Lacan: she seeks a kind of knowledge that can be found only in situations that she herself defines as unhappy. Of the space Isabel occupies in her Albany home, the narrator comments, “she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the room she had selected was the most depressed of its scenes” (p. 33). When she tells her Aunt Lydia of her feelings about her family home (“‘A great many people have died here; the place has been full of life’”), Mrs. Touchett responds with a Sophoclean irony that foreshadows Isabel’s fate: 640 Isabel Archer’s “Delicious Pain” “‘You should go to Florence if you like houses in which things have happened—especially deaths’” (pp. 35–36). Yet Isabel ignores her aunt’s warning and persists in select- ing “places where the vague lamplight expired,” insisting that she must confront “the unpleasant” which has “been too absent from her knowledge” (p. 39). She responds to Gardencourt’s “well ordered privacy . . . where the tread was muffled by the earth itself, and . . . all friction dropped out of contact and all shrillness out of talk” in a way that anticipates the subtle control that will soon attract her to Osmond (p. 57). It is not surpris- ing, therefore, that Isabel’s initial appreciation of Osmond’s Florentine villa, with its carefully manicured garden, is consis- tent with her earlier sympathy for other subdued environments and her strong preference for a controlled aesthetic frame, hinting at a fear of real intimacy, or perhaps a tacit awareness of its impossibility.11 Osmond, predictably, is the first to understand Isabel’s desire: he recognizes her quest for an ego ideal and mirrors back to her exactly what she imagines for herself. Setting forth an appreciative portrait over an intimate connection, he tells Isabel, “For me you’ll always be the most important woman in the world.” Isabel, in turn, sees herself reflected in his mind: she “looked at herself in this character, looked intently, thinking she filled it with a certain grace.” The satisfaction she experi- ences through Osmond’s mirroring of her ideal self—his words “gratify her desire to think well of herself”—further clarifies her attraction to someone who, in the narrator’s and reader’s eye, is clearly her least appealing suitor (p. 264). Osmond grasps the narcissistic nature of Isabel’s self-image and builds upon it, while she in turn works, at least initially, to become the image that Osmond has composed for her. In this circular exchange, Osmond teaches Isabel about the structure of desire—showing her that while on one level it is our private fantasy, that fantasy is stimulated, brought into being, through an intimate connection between something we have already imagined for ourselves and something which is recognized and offered to us by another. This connection, a kind of symbolic exchange, “unleashes [a] fatal attachment,” and according to Lacan, “that’s what love is. It’s one’s own ego Phyllis van Slyck 641 that one loves in love, one’s own ego made real on the imagi- nary level” (1988, p. 142). We see the “unleashing” of Isabel’s “fatal attachment” in her silent, appreciative composition of her suitor, framed by his villa and the Florentine hills, when she visits him for the first time. It is a gentle yet ominous im- age, one in which, as James’s narrator tellingly observes, her “imagination supplied the human element which she was sure had not been wanting”: She had carried away an image from her visit to his hilltop which her subsequent knowledge of him did nothing to efface and which put on for her a particular harmony with other supposed and divine things, histories within histories: the image of a quiet, clever, sensitive, distin- guished man, strolling on a moss-grown terrace above the sweet Val d’Arno . . . The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly . . . of a lonely studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached today; of a feeling of pride that . . . had an element of nobleness . . . (p. 237) This somber mood of a “lonely studious life” that already contains “an old sorrow” clashes eerily with the vibrant energy Isabel has brought to earlier conceptions of her identity. Her attraction to this subdued, controlled atmosphere can only be understood in relation to loss. This “picture” of Osmond as “quiet, clever, sensitive,” someone whose “lowness of tone” fills her with purpose, confirms the way Isabel will constitute and sustain her desire, not through an expansive freedom but through what she construes as a “noble” personal restraint. Because she admires his “cultivated” “care for beauty and per- fection,” she projects into his character “a feeling of pride” that she believes she can share, for it has “an element of nobleness.” But if Isabel imagines a future stretched before them “in the disposed vistas . . . of a formal Italian garden,” the picture’s “atmosphere of summer twilight” offers a hint that she has also glimpsed the serpent (p. 237). Between the controlled boundary