Abstract
The Portrait of a Lady offers in its insistent foregrounding of language a veritable treatise on ‘style’: style both in the sense of pretence and façades of language, and style as a questioning of these, a liberation within the exigencies language imposes on the ‘fabulist’. The Portrait is for James an interrogation, what might be called the first in a series, of his own problematic ‘archi-écriture’ as ‘fabulist’ and architect of fiction. Exposing ‘the representational presumption on which it relies’ (Culler, 1982, p. 249) as an artificial construct, The Portrait offers to undo any preconceived notions about ‘art’ that its characters, readers, even its author, begin with. At the same time as it relies upon the hope of some unifying support from its careful method of composition, The Portrait ultimately is the result of its own contingencies.
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She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark alley with a dead wall at the end.
(PLII, p. 189)
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Notes
Linda A. Westervelt, in ‘“The Growing Complexity of Things”: Narrative Technique in The Portrait of a Lady’ Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 13 (1983) 74–85] advances the interesting thesis that the first half of the novel illustrates a Victorian mode of fiction that is transformed in the second half as the ‘discovery’ of the modern novel, ‘with ambiguous circumstances, direct presentation of character, and the resulting increased participation of the reader’.
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© 1993 Mary Cross
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Cross, M. (1993). The Verbal Portrait. In: Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_3
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