Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
time of my growing-up was long before the sexual revolution and it was not as peculiar as it would be now to maintain a Victorian distance between oneself and a man. For reasons which still puzzle me, there was an endless succession of men when I was in my twenties, who fell in love with me and who proposed marriage, which I invariably refused. Perhaps it was simply a response to my overwhelming properness, but none of these suitors ever proposed any living arrangement except marriage. A convenient psychological mechanism made every proposal a signal to fall out of love (for sometimes I believed that I was in love) or not to fall in love, a mechanism which still operated when I was in my forties and Edmund told me from time to time that he was in love with me. My reaction was my usual one of withdrawal and wariness, coupled with the certainty that it couldn’t possibly be true, or, if it were true today, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. And when Edmund said to me, “I don’t know why I’m in love with you,” I said, or rather shouted, since he was getting deaf, “I can’t imagine!” It was just as I’d thought: there was no reason; it had nothing to do with me. I longed to think, but did not say so, that I was like those other women he had loved, remarkable in one way or another, but he never gave me the comfort of comparing me with them. Some of them were “sort of’s,” too, it was said. Did he love me not for myself, but because I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not? How had the others been with him, not his wives, but the others he’d loved? Did they seem to care? Did he kiss them, striking his solid pose like a knotty-muscled acrobat about to swing someone up on his head? Did he make love to them? Did he appreciate my balancing act, walking the precarious wire between resistance and receptivity? Part of my “sort of” ethic was to conceal my fear—of bodies, of kisses, of passion—to protect our egos (his, the male’s; and mine, the sort of’s), to try, simultaneously, not to be prudish and not to be encouraging. His definition of me had stiffened my pride. But he, with his strange intuition, seemed to know exactly how far he could go without my fleeing. He would kiss me (I see him now, bearing down, striking the pose) without undue insistence, stand there heavily, or help me on with my coat. Even in his ancestral house, with my friend Barbara in the next room, after drunkenly prowling the corridor, he tottered into my room in his dressing gown and seated himself on my bed—even there, something gentlemanly in him (or was it the thin walls?) yielded to my refusal, stated calmly, loudly, to make him hear, though I was quaking inside. Instead, we went downstairs and talked about marriage. “What would you be like to be married to?” he asked, and I said, “I’d make a terrible wife.” How could I explain that I couldn’t be a wife to anyone, that I had never been tempted to sacrifice myself to anyone—to a man or a woman either. “I’m like Isabel Archer before she married Osmond,” I said. “What? Oh, Isabel Archer. You’re not like Isabel Archer,” he said grumpily. Wanting to shout, “Can’t you see that I have a sense of my own survival, that I don’t want to be a slave?” I said, “It’s because I’m too selfish,” for in every man’s mind is the conviction that nothing could possibly be more important to a woman than he is, than his love is. An odd kind of etiquette prevented me from reminding him of Elena, his wife, who had given herself to serving him in a graceful and beautiful way, who believed this to be the duty of a wife; it would have been to acknowledge that she was threatened by something real, when in fact, the “why” of his being in love with me and my absence of response, prevented it from being real. But perhaps he was playing with me, seeing how far a “sort of” would go, testing the depth of my vanity—or my gratitude? Edmund liked to set traps and play psychological games, but perhaps he was too genuinely humble to play this one. It seemed to me that he didn’t even notice the effect he had on people—the tremors of excitement, the paralyzed timidity, the coquettishness, the discreet competition for his favour. Seismic waves ran round the living room when he said to the “Chosen One,” “Come into my study, I want to talk to you.” Hypnotized, she (it was almost always a woman) would rise from her chair and follow him, striking a little silence among the rest of us. She would emerge from his study twenty minutes later, flushed and proud. “What did he say?” I would ask it it was Barbara who was thus honoured. “Oh, we just talked about the non-payment of taxes,” she would say. More wonderful than being called into his study was to be with him alone in a restaurant or at the theatre, to be part of the obeisance done to him, to shine like a full moon in the sun’s light! It was then that I understood why women choose to be satellites, to reflect light rather than risk generating their own, in short, to be wives. How warm and comfortable I felt with Edmund; how nice everybody was to me! And how chilly it was to go back to my unprotected life as a non-wife, a “sort of,” perpetually on the defensive.
“She is someone in her own right,” I’ve heard it said admiringly of a wife who is more than just a satellite, as if a husband can legitimately ask his wife to be someone in his right. Isabel Archer. I loved her because she was born, evidently, with a sense of her own right (so were Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shirley, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett and Emma, and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe). Henry James treated with perfect rectitude Isabel’s determination to be herself, and allowed her to recognize all the marriage-traps: the suffocating prison of life with an English lord; the trap of Caspar Goodwood’s passion—until the last, for poor Isabel, with her premonition of what women’s liberation is all about, was punished by the man with whom she felt most free. James’ genius lies in not seeming to have intervened. Still, he lets us know where he stands. Other women who go too far in the direction of liberation are mocked at, like old Miss Birdseye, a genuine feminist, or, like Olive Chancellor, pinned on a board, a perfect specimen of a repressed Lesbian. In real life, Henry James was shocked by Virginia Woolf (he would have been more shocked had he read Quentin Bell’s biography) and all her untidy friends, a lot of them “buggers”, as Bell puts it. Was James a snob? A persnickety old maid? Outwardly perhaps, but with an inward sensibility that was refined and refined, tortured by little dissonances, by noise, messiness, engaged with enormous cunning in the task of trying to hide the disorder in his inner self, lucky to die before the hounds ran his secret to earth. And Isabel? Does any man like Isabel? While I was thinking about Isabel, I got a letter from an old friend, the painter, Leonid, who had been reading The Portrait of a Lady. He was furious with Isabel for the same reasons that all men are furious with her. “De repousser un lord authentique, humain, anglais, pour s’amouracher de ce fake italien,” and so on, to “sa vie aboutit à un mess.” Leonid, who was no more like Lord Warburton than, say, Pissarro was, identified himself with Warburton and felt refused by Isabel, just as Edmund (I could swear) identified himself with Caspar, of the famous kiss like white lightning, who was also refused by Isabel, somewhat more ambiguously. And another painter friend (homosexual) ranted against Isabel, accused her of being a selfish monster, and turned all the virtues that I saw in her into vices. Some women are even angry with Isabel for refusing Lord Warsburton (for some reason, no one remembers or cares about her refusal of her cousin Ralph, the only one with whom she might have been happy, but James has arranged for Ralph to have a fatal sickness), or with any heroine who refuses the hero—and not many do. I myself was vaguely irritated by Lily in Trollope’s The Small House at Allingham, who adamantly turns down the likable Johnny, for even those of us who are happily unmarried have been conditioned to think of marriage as the only happy ending to a novel. But Isabel Archer is a real threat to the male ego, and for a woman to defend her, stirs up the little flame of jealousy at the bottom of every man’s heart. Strange, because she is punished terribly, and what she sought was not real freedom, but a relative freedom within marriage. She would settle for this illusory freedom, just as they all did, the fighting women, the real ones and their fictional alter egos, except for Jane Austen. One would like to know, did any man ever propose marriage to her, and if he did, why did she refuse him? As for Charlotte Brontë, the fieriest of them all, finally she was submissive to her Arthur. She loved him, she said, but didn’t she give up writing for his sake; couldn’t she be said to have died for his sake? My heart bleeds for Charlotte, who, in Jane Eyre, had so perfectly described the ideal relationship with a man. One thinks of Jane and St. John, how she was dominated by him, petrified by his certainties, and how, after seeing him as he really was, after refusing to live his life, she suddenly discovered her own. “I was with an equal,” she says, “one with whom I might argue—one whom . . . I might resist.” And of her life with Rochester, she says, “In his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine.” One wants to take these phrases from