James throws further light on the self Isabel fears after the dilettante Gilbert Osmond declares his love. "What made her dread great," James reiterates, "was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread — the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there," James stresses, "like a large sum stored in a bank — which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out." On this view the self is not a wellspring of infinitely renewable energy but a bank, a repository of -164- a finite sum of money. James reveals that the market society has infiltrated the deepest recesses of the self, even of Isabel Archer, who knows nothing about money. Her fear of "giving herself completely" is a complex fusion of her fastidiousness, her desire for independence, her unwillingness to subordinate and cage herself, her deep feelings about sexual power and powerlessness, and her mixed feelings about money and all it stands for.
Caspar Goodwood inspires the deepest fear of any of the suitors because he directly expresses his sexual passion. Throughout her last meeting with Goodwood, Isabel is "frightened" at his "violence." She feels "she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which others dropped dead. . the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth." Death and sexual love merge as James's imagery enacts the physical emotions connected with a fierce seduction or rape. Isabel "floated in fathomless waters. . in a rushing torrent." Sounds come to her "harsh and terrible. . in her own swimming head." "She panted" when she pleads with Goodwood" to go away." Instead, "he glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed." In the conventions of the period a kiss, reinforced by James's imagery, has the force of sexual intercourse. For Isabel, Goodwood's "hard manhood," his "aggressive" physical presence, culminates in an "act of possession." The possession is sexual but also involves the issues of freedom, independence, and money. Osmond sees Isabel as a commodity, as his prize possession. In returning to Osmond, a choice open to multiple interpretations, Isabel is in part fleeing from the intensities of Goodwood's passion, from the possession he threatens, although overtly he argues for their complete freedom to do what they please. Isabel, however, is also affirming her independence and rejecting her status as a possession as both Goodwood and Osmond define possession.
In a possessive market society, money is the ultimate commodity, the ultimate possession. Isabel wants to see for herself, to judge for herself, but she does not know anything about money. She is also torn between her impulse to know the world, to throw herself into it, -165- and her impulse to trust herself, to devalue worldly possessions, and to ignore the vulgar street. After she inherits a fortune, she is afraid. "A large fortune means freedom," she tells Ralph Touchett, "and I'm afraid of that." If she failed to make good use of it, she goes on, she "would be ashamed." The stakes are high because shame is intimately connected to a sense of personal identity and self-worth.
Isabel argues for a sense of self that excludes possessions. "Nothing that belongs to me," she tells Madame Merle, "is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one." Isabel is particularly indifferent to houses and dress. Madame Merle disagrees. "What shall we call our 'self?'" she asks. "Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us — and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! 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." James has Madame Merle give a working definition of the self appropriate to an expanding consumer and possessive market society. On this view, the self expands or contracts in relation to possessions. "There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman," Madame Merle argues; "we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances."
Until well after her marriage Isabel does not realize the extent to which Madame Merle and Osmond, two artists, two dramatists, have manipulated her. They present Osmond as a refined man indifferent to the opinion of the world, indifferent to money, indifferent to the "cluster of appurtenances." His relative poverty allows Isabel to feel generous. She is bestowing something on a worthy recipient. The power relations are the reverse of a marriage to either Lord Warburton or Caspar Goodwood. Osmond is also much less of a masculine sexual presence than either of his rivals. Isabel imagines a Gilbert Osmond and falls in love with her own creation. In the destabilizing crosscurrents of a changing market society, the imagination is both necessary and problematic. Isabel, committed to seeing for herself, is unable to see that Osmond worships money and the opinion of the vulgar society he professes to despise.
James tests and qualifies Isabel's view of the self and imagination. -166-
He probes the web of sexual and market society pressures that affect the way she sees. In a patrician green world apparently far removed from the vulgar street, James reveals that even for Isabel Archer, profit, money, and gain are at the center of her marriage, just as they have penetrated to the center of her self.
In James's version of psychological realism, he uses metaphoric language to take us deep into a character's consciousness. James repeatedly recognizes the intimate connection between houses and selves in a possessive market society, a relation that for him has moral, psychological, and sociopolitical implications. Isabel, for example, gradually becomes aware that in marrying Osmond she is being confined in a house of darkness, that she is being imprisoned in a mind that lets in no air or light, that is a dungeon. Osmond's hatred, contempt, and egotism are overwhelming. Isabel's terror builds. The imagery is dense and deep, as are Isabel's painful moral and psychological realizations. Rooted in American political culture, her concern with freedom and independence is as alive as her eventual sense that she has been turned into a commodity, another objet d'art for Osmond to add to his collection, like the antique Roman coin he meticulously copies. James does justice both to the gradual, oblique way the mind works and to Isabel's sudden flash of awareness as she watches the intimacy between the standing Madame Merle and the seated Gilbert Osmond. But for all his sensitivity to the inner workings of the mind, James's psychological probing is not privatized. James shows the relation between the inner self and the environing world of the vulgar street.
Ironically, under Osmond's fastidious surface, under the aspect of taste, he and Madame Merle come to embody money and the vulgar street. Through Madame Merle, James exposes not metaphysical evil but the socially constructed evil of a society that places money above everything. For profit Madame Merle, gifted, aware, and sensitive, nonetheless lies to and betrays her closest friends. "'I don't pretend to know what people are meant for,' said Madame Merle. 'I only know what I can do with them.'"
In a world where Osmond and Madame Merle are dominant forces, where their imagination, art, and dramatic skill are important, the world becomes a social text that may not be incomprehensible but that is also not easy to read. Osmond and Madame Merle em-167- body the deception, manipulation of appearances, and obsession with profit that many social observers regard as basic to consumer capitalism. In his way Ralph is also manipulative but, as opposed to Osmond, Ralph is generous and loving. Ralph sees clearly that Osmond is a sterile dilettante who will grind Isabel in the mill of the conventional. Although he accurately reads the social text, Ralph is unable to prevent the marriage. Isabel comes to understand but the inner and outer obstacles are formidable.