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Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady:
Isabel
Archer's
Choice
to Her True
Self
Haruki Lee
Introduction
Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady,
at the end of the story, though there are other alternatives, chooses to
go back to her husband, Gilbert Osmond, who trapped her into
mar-riage with him for money
and is the source of her present
predicament.
About this fact, we can make various literary comments on what
kind of ego Isabel has. But can we find and define Isabels self? What
is Isabel's self and how can we define it? This is what I would like to
discuss in this article. We have two concepts referring to ourselves,
the self and the ego. But in our daily life, we use "self" mixing up
these two concepts without accurate discrimination.
The ego is a person's mental and emotional structure which has an
energy
driving the person to feel, think and act in a certain way
pecu-liar to him or her.
The self, on the other hand, is the outcome of what the ego
con-structs. The self is something completed moment by moment after the
person's ego makes him or her feel, think or act in a certain way. The
self is an abstract existence which instantly becomes the person's
re-newed
ego as soon as one level of it is completed.
In this sense, the human self is something which, with an ego as a
-80-driving force, coping with incessant circumstances, transforming
it-self dialectically and dynamically, from a "former self" to a "renewed
self," is aiming at perfecting its "true" self. In short, the human self is not a pure or fixed substance but a process which is trying to become
itself; it is not something whose nature exists bef ore its existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre defines man in general as follows in one of his essays
Existentialism"' I believe his definition of man in general is perfectly
true of the human self. Thus, to think about the human self leads to a definition of what man is:
there is no human nature.... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (18)
In this sense, Isabel's choice at the end of the story is the existential choice which makes her "true" self. Of course, this way of interpreting the act of a fictive character can be applied to all fictive characters;
whatever choice a character in a novel makes, it can be interpreted as
an existential choice by which he or she will become his or her self.
But even so, I still insist that Isabel's choice to go back to Osmond
in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady is worth discussing. In the
following chapters, I would like to show how Isabel's "true" self can be realized and where we should find the meaning of our existance.
1
The aim of this novel, The Portrait of a Lady, as the title shows, is
to make a portrait of a lady. But this is not a painting but a novel.
How can the novel, an art whose medium is language, make a portrait
of a lady? Henry James recollects in his preface to The Portrait of a
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Lady what Turgenieffev, whom James respects as one of his masters
in his profession, mentioned about the art of the novel:
[Turgenieffev] then had to find for them [the persons o f the
fictive picture] the right relations, those that would most bring
them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the
situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the
crea-tures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel. (vii)
How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them -(via)
Henry James, as a novelist, follows this method. Naturally, the aim
of The Partrait of a Lady is to "bring out" the nature of the heroine,
Isabel Archer, through various settings or situations which Henry
James prepared.
When he touches the subject of this novel in the same preface, he says "Stick to.. that scale... the scale of her relation to herself" (xv). When one says, "one's relation to oneself," he or she makes a
distinc-tion between the self which is conscious of one's reladistinc-tion to the
ex-ternal world and the self, as an object, which is related to that world. In other words, he or she has to be conscious of a self which is alien-ated from his or her "pure" self.
But there are things here we need to think about: what is one's pure self? What is the difference between the self which is related to the
world and the self which is conscious of the relation? Does such a
"
pure" self, as an object, which is related to the world exist? As soon
as a person is in a relationship with another, cannot we help but see
the person's self from a restricted point of view and put our interpre-tations on his or her self? Isn't one's self always defined and
regulat-ed through the relation to the world? If so, when Henry James says "her relation to herself", we have to be careful about what her self is. Our self has two aspects: one which has a relation with the world and
the other which is conscious of the relation. In this respect, Soren
Kier-(2)k
egaard says in his The Sickness Unto Death as follows:
But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to
its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it]
that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the
relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself
to its own self. (146)
That is, our self, if we put it in a different way, could be said to be
consciousness. That is why Kierkegaard says in the same place "Man
is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self " (146). William James
describes our consciousness which is conscious of our self as follows: Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time
more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the
same time it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me,
be-ing as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly
object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in
it, of which for shortness we may call one the Me and the other I. (159)
As we can see from their explanations about the self, when we think
about a problem concerning the self, we cannot help thinking about
our consciousness. Henry James says in the same preface, "'Place the
centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness"' (xv).
Taking his statement about the subject of this novel, "her ralation to
herself" and this one, into consideration, we cannot help thinking that
the theme of this novel is the heroine's consciousness which is
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scious of her self. So, I would like to paraphrase the theme of this novel from James's remarks as "What is the self which is conscious of
the relation to the self?
But what we can know about characters in a novel is at most what they do, feel or think through the context the author prepares for them, as Turgenieffev said. What we know from this is not more than an
ap-proximation to their self. No matter how completely the author tries
to describe a character's self, he cannot complete the description of
this self as it is; all we can know from it is its relations to the world; we can never know the self as it is. Henry James in his notebook
refutes the criticism that The Portrait of a Lady is not finished:
The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not finished that I have not seen the heroine to the and of the situation
that I heve left her en fair. 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. (18)
What he insists on here is the fact that we never know a person's self; it is impossible for an author to complete the description of a
charac-ter's self in a novel. No writer can ever complete the description of
the hero's or heroine's self because one's self is not, something we can
know as a whole. In this sense, The Portrait of a Lady is not a mere
portrait of a lady but a description of a process in the heroine's
con-sciousness which is conscious of "her relation to herself " in various
situations or environments surrounding her, and is trying to become
her "true" self.
human beings, that one's self "is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else
than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life" (38). What
Sartre says here is that our self is nothing but the ensemble of our life.
In the following chapters, I would like to show how Isabel's self
pro-ceeds to exist.
2
In this novel, there is a scene where the heroine, Isabel Archer, and a friend of her aunt, Madame Merle, discuss the problem of the "self." They show exactly opposite positions about it:
What has he?...'
I don't care anything about his house,' said Isabel.
That's very crude of you. When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account... There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurte-nances. What shall we call our "self " ? Where does it begin? where
does it end?... I know a large part of myself is in 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.'... 'I don't agree with
you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me.
No-thing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everyNo-thing's on
the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one.
Cer-tainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't
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press me;...(3:287-88)
Here, the position Madame Merle takes is that our "self" consists of things others can recognize such as clothes, house and so on. Perhaps we can include here manners in general, too, such as knowledge and
various accomplishments. Anyway Madame Merle's concept of the
human self is that it consists only of what others can recognize. If we accept William James's definition of the total self as duplex, consist of two aspects, "Me" and "I", Madame Merle's concepts of one's self obviously puts much emphasis on "Me." But putting too much
empha-sis on "Me" means to grasp one's self only in the relation to others
and the world, and to conform one's own self to the eyes of others.
But this way of constructing one's own self leads, as a result, to
weak-ening one's being; in extreme cases, it leads to diminishing one's self.
Lionel Trilling says in his Sincerity and Authenticity as follows:
The intense meaning which Wordsworth gave to the word 'be'
be-came its common meaning in moral discourse. And it came
com-monly to be f elf that being, which is to say the gratifying
expe-rience of the self as an entity, was susceptible to influences which either increased or diminished its force. There was a pretty clear consensus, for example, that among the things which increased the experience of self art was pre-eminent. And there was no
ques-tion at all of what diminished the experience of self the great
enemy of being was having. (122)
Furthermore Trilling says quoting Marx, "'The less you are... the more
you have... "' 022). To put it in the other way round, the more we
have, the weaker our being becomes.
Madame Merle is a kind of woman who is perfectly sophisticated,
(1:270). She has perfect manners peculiar to a woman who wanders
from one place to another in European high society. Naturally she is
equipped with the whole range of social accomplishments others can
enjoy, such as witty sophisticated conversations, the skill of playing
the piano, painting, embroidery and so on. For Isabel, who has had longing for a European life, Madame Merle must have seemed to be
the perfect model. But thus excessively sophisticated Madame Merle
lacks a certain "humanness." As the above dicussion between them
shows, Madame Merle has an excessive tendency which defines a
per-son's self by means of his social "appurtenances" and as a result, she
herself has been too much armed with such things. But this tendency,
as Trilling points out quoting Marx, deprives us of our peculiarity or
It ownness," in other
words, our being. Putting too much decoration
on our self with only things which others can recognize means an ab-sence of our own self. For Isabel, who says "Nothing that belongs to
me is any measure of me," no matter how perfect Madame Merle
seems to be as a model, Madame Merle's concept of self is unaccept-able. The doubt Isabel feels below about Madame Merle certainly has
something in common with the existential comment Trilling made on
human existence:
If for Isabel she had a fault it was that she was not natural; ...
that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her
angles too much rubbed away.... She was in a word too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; .... Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any
detachment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or
indirect,with her fellow mortals. One might wonder what
com-merce she could possibly hold with her own spirit. (3:273-74)
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Isabel rightly wonders "what commerce she [Madame Merle] could
possibly hold with her own spirit"; Madame Merle's self lacks its
own peculiarity, in other words, its own self. And this way of
build-ing one's self, as Trillbuild-ing pointed out, depreives us of our bebuild-ing. If
Madame Merle embodies negative values in this novel, it is not be-cause she takes advantage of others for her own benefits, that is, she embodies negative values from a moralistic viewpoint, but because her
way of building her self existentially makes her being weak and false.
But in the following chapters, we are going to see that Isabel's way of
constructing herself, the opposite way to Madame Merle's also makes
some problems from existential viewpoint, and we shall proceed to
of-fer further considerations on the human self.
3
By contrast with Madame Merle's concept of one's self, Isabel, as
her statement "Nothing that-belongs to me is any measure of me"
shows, tries to grasp her own self only in relation to her inner self
within: Isabel's self, she thinks, cannot be defined by external factors
such as appurtenances or manners; such external factors only distort
her self rather than define it; Isabel's self is independent of such exter-nal factors. This concept of one's self can be said to be transcendental and puts much emphasis on William James's "U'
But this way of seeing one's self sometimes builds an infantile or
autistic ego, which is isolated from reality. Such an ego makes a
per-son romantic or idealistic and does not allow him or her to see reality as it is. Richard Chase identifies Isabel's ego as follows:
it [Isabel's vision of things] emphatically is that of the
transcendentalism. Isabel subscribes to the American romance of
the self. She believes that the self finds fulfillment either in its
own isolated integrity or on a more or less transcendent ground
where the contending forces of good and evil are symbolized
ab-stractions. She sees her fate as a spiritual melodrama. Her grasp
of reality, though nanif old in its presumptions, is unstable, and
her desire for experience is ambivalent. (131)
And this type of ego is also one of the characteristics of Americans'
egos in general because, as Trilling points out quoting Tocqueville (113), the system of democracy which has developed in America requests of people's way of thinking a form of expression which can persuade
every-one, not a particular social class or circle. As a corollary, Americans'
forms of expression in general have a tendency to be not concrete but
abstract or general. Isabel's ego is similarly abstract, as we see in her
statement "Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me. " And it
is this idealistic American ego that leads her into Osmond's trap.
Lord Warburton, another character in this novel, is a perfect English
aristocrat whom, as for marriage, "Nineteen women out of twenty,"
"even of the most exacting sort, would have managed to do with" (3: 210-11). But Isabel rejects his proposal saying, as her reason, "I can't
escape my fate" (3:186). The fate she regards here as her own is not
to separate herself "'From life. From the usual chances and dances
and dangers, from what most people know and suffer."' (3:187).
Isa-bel insists that marrying Lord Warburton means to separate herself
from these things and to make her escape her fate because he is an
aris-tcrat. But where could we find a person who knows his or her own
f ate by himself or herself ? Can we know our own f ate by ourselves in
advance? Is not the attitude which dictatorially or authoritatively
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defines one's own fate and excludes what she arbitrarily thinks is not
part of it itself a presumptuous attitude which separates her from life?
Lord Warburton, though an aristocrat, is a person who has his own
peculiar personality and loves a woman on his own ground; he is not a mere cardboard being. It is Isabel herself, not regarding Lord
Warbur-ton as a person in himself and thinking that marrying such an
aristo-crat means detachment from her fate, who separates herself from life.
But Isabel, who rejects Lord Warburton saying "I can't escape my
fate", falls in love with Gilbert Osmond, a Europeanized American,
and marries him. Gilbert Osmond is the kind of man who, at the bot-tom of his heart, wants to be a man like "the Emperor of Russia," "the Sultan
of Turkey" or "the Pope of Rome" but since it is impossi-ble to be one of them and does not want to be "anything less", becomes indifferent to anything worldly and tries to live according only to his
own aesthetics, trying not to be vulgar. Taking into account Isabel's
ego structure which makes her say "Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me" in a way of looking at the human self, it is only natu-ral for her to consider Osmond who has "no property, no title, no
hon-ours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant
belongings of any sort" (4:74) to be "simply a very lonely, a very
cul-tivated and a very honest man" (4:74) "who has borne his poverty
with such dignity, with scuh indifference" (4:73) "with the kindest,
gentlest, highest spirit" (4:74). As Shitsuu Iwase points out quoting
Emerson's description of transcendentalists below, Osmond's ego is
transcental and that is the reason Isabel idealizes him and falls in love
with him.
many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from
and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of liv-ing, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their
separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the
dispropor-tion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the
degra-dation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can
pro-pose to them. (199)
With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
can-not be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivoli-ty in people. (202)3)
sabel's transcendental ego introjects her ideal self into Osmond, who
appears to her to transcend the "vulgarity and frivolity" of the
earth-ly world and, though poor, honestearth-ly and sincereearth-ly to live cherishing his own aesthetics, and thus she regards him as an individual
independ-ent self-respecting man. It can be said that it is only natural for the
kind of lady who has the vision of "romance associated with the
Amer-ican tradition of puritanism and transcendentalism, " to idealize
Os-mond. But in fact, as Ralph, Isabel's cousin, reveals later, no man
takes the values and judgements of the earthly world into
considera-tion as much as Osmond. He only pretends to be indifferent and
tran-scendental to them, but as a matter of fact, he is a man who lives only under the influence of the eyes of others:
under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretend-ed to be, he was its humble servant, and the degree of its atten-tion was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never
sus-pected the trick. Everything he did was pose ... His ambition
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel Archer's Chice to Her True
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was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It had made him feel great, ever, to play the world a trick. (4:144-45)
Osmond, like Madame Merle, puts much emphasis on "Me" and builds
his self only with the values of others. But what has led her into this
marriage, which will be unhappy is not Osmond, or Madame Merle,
who manipulates their marriage as a go-between but, as Isabel rightly
admits herself, is inside Isabel herself, who mistook Osmond for such a man with "the highest spirit."
It was impossible to pretend that she had not acted with her eyes open; if ever a girl was a free agent she had been. A girl in love was doubtless not a free agent; but the sole source of her mistake
had been with in herself. There had been no plot, no snare; she
had looked and considered and chosen. When a woman had made
such a mistake, there was only one way to repair it just
im-mensely (oh, with the highest grandeur!) to accept it. (4:160-61)
Thus, the ego which alienates one's self from the external world and tries to define it only in the relation to his or her "pure" self within
sometimes makes the person make a self-oriented presumptuous
mis-take as in the case of Isabel. But on the other hand, the ego which builds one's self according only to the values of others, as in the case of Madame Merle or Osmond, tends to make his or her self fake and weak.
Thus, vacillating between these two extremes, our ego is seeking for
our "true" self. In the next chapter, taking these considerations about
these two extreme types of ego into consideration, I would like to
pre-sent one possible interpretation of Isabel's choice, at the end of the
4
So far, we have discussed the two extreme types of ego observed in Madame Merle or Osmond and Isabel so that we may be able to
pre-sent one possible answer to the question, "What is one's self ? " But
these two extreme types of ego do not present a satisfactory answer
to the question. The ego of Madame Merle or Osmond tries to build
their self by taking only others' values and judgements into account.
This creates a false self and as a result diminishes their being.
On the other hand, the autistic ego observed in Isabel makes her
make a wrong choice in choosing her husband because such an ego which tries excessively to isolate her self from external world and shuts it in her internal one makes her too unrealistic and idealistic.
The reason these two extreme types of ego likewise reach negative consequences shown above is that these two extremes are two sides of
the same coin. A psycho-analyst, R.D. Laing describes the symptoms
and characteristics of the schizoid in The Divided Self. One
character-istic symptom of the schizoid is described as follows:
His view of human nature in general, based on his own experience of himself, was that everyone was an actor. (73)
As an actor, he wished always to be detached from the part he was
playing. Thereby he felt himself to be master of the situation,
in entire conscious control of his expressions and actions,
calculat-ing with precision their effects on others. To be spontaneous was
merely stupid. It was simply putting one7self at other people's
mercy. (74-75)
This diagnosis of the schizoid perfectly fits Osmond's way of living.
As Ralph's account of Osmond rightly reveals, "Everything he did was pose." He is afraid of showing himself as he is. Concealing his real
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"
self," he disguises himself with his pretended "self" so that he can
manipulate others for his own benefit. It is true that every human
being has this kind of disposition. But when it becomes extreme, it is
a disease.
Another diagnosis of a schizoid below is true of Isabel's way of buil-ding her self:
there is an attempt to create relationships to persons and things
within the individual without recourse to the outer world of per-sons and things at all. The individual is developing a microcosmos within himself; but, of course, this autistic, private,
intra-individ-ual 'world' is not a feasible substitute for the only world there
really is, the shared world....
Such a schizoid individual in one sense is trying to be omnipotent by enclosing within his own being, without recourse to a creative
relationship with others, modes of relationship that require the
effective presence to him of other people and of the outer world. He would appear to be, in an unreal, impossible way, all person and things to himself. The imagined advantages are safety for the true self, isolation and hence freedom from others, self-sufficiency and control.
The actual disadvantages that can be mentioned at this point
are that this project is impossible and, being a false hope, leads
on to persistent despair. (78)
As these descriptions of schizoids show, the self of the schizoid is
like-ly to be one of two opposing types. The one is the self which is
con-scious of his false self which is pretending to be his "true self" and the
other is the one which tries to sustain its own self by maintaining its
that of Osmond or Madame Merle and the latter is Isabel's. But both
types of self are characteristically schizoid, two sides of the same coin.
This is one of the reasons that Isabel is first attracted to both
Mad-ame Merle and Osmond and easily falls into their trap.
What makes Madame Merle's or Osmond's art of living, which takes advantage of others, negative is not moralistic point of view but exis-tential view point of the human self. Their art of living or building their self, making their own self false or their being weak, is not healthy, as Laing's diagnosis of the schizoid shows.
Hidekatsu Nojima, who translated Trilling's Sincerity and
Authenticity into Japanese, quoting one of T. S. Eliot's poems, "The
Hollow Men," points out in the afterword of his translation that
mod-ern people's selves in general are getting weaker and more unstable because we build or cannot help building our self as Madame Merle or Osmond does.
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed man Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (83)
What barely sustains "the hollow men" and fills up "the stuffed
men" is pieces of quotations from classics. "These fragments I
have shored against my ruins" is one of the concluding phrases of "The Waste Land." (4'
T. S. Eliot describes the sitution of modern people, who are losing their stable existence, as that of "the stuffed man." But we can already find people who have something in common with "the stuffed men" of the 20th century in Henry James' works. Medame Merle and Osmond
em-body negative values in The Portrait of a Lady. But the reason which
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makes them negative is not moral but existential insight into human
being. Their way of living leads to make their self weak and diminish-ing.
For human beings, the meaning of being one's self is not obstinately
or autistically to try to keep one's own "pure self" but to have an ego
which, having one's own self constantly threatened, subjectively contin-ues to overcome the threat and renew the previous self and realize a new self. Thus, Isabel's choice at the end of the story should be
inter-preted as the "plan"(5) to realise her true self as Sartre's explanation
of existentialism shows.
Of course, it could be argued that she could have chosen other possi-bilities, divorce from Osmond for example, and could have married Caspar Goodwood, another suitor; then the choice would have been al-so another of her "plan" toward her self. But although there was an
alternative, Isabel did not choose it. From the existential viewpoint,
a possibility embodies its value only when it is chosen.
Isabel, in order to be Isabel herself, could not help choosing to go back to Osmond. Dorothea Krook says that the reason Isabel decides to go back to Osmond is her "devotion or loyalty as a function of the
moral consistency that springs so naturally, it seems, from her moral
seriousness" (358). I understand this but I would like to ask where
"her moral seriousness" comes from. I would say that it comes from her ego which tries to make her no other person but Isabel herself. For Isabel who says, nothing else [but me] expresses me," other choices cannot express her; they only lead to a "stuffed self."
Conclusion
a possibility which we believe makes us become ourself. I paraphrased the theme of this novel into the question, "What is one's self?" But as I am trying to show, our "self" is not semething fixed. It is a dynamic process of our being. Our self is what we become by subjectively choos-ing a possibility which we believe makes us become ourselves.
I know this statement is too romantic and abstract. This might be
only another form of the cheap romanticism which made Isabel make
a mistake in choosing her husband. But as F. O. Matthiessen points
out,"' Henry James tried to emphasize Isabel's romantic disposition
when he revised The Portrait of a Lady for its New York Edition.
Isabel from the begining to the end is "incorrigibly" romantic. And it
is her romanticism that makes her choose to go back to her husband,
the source of her predicament, at the end of the story. But it is this
romanticism that creates for her a way to her "true" self, her freedom.
This romanticism, what I call aufheben-ed romanticism, is the one
which we need to have to make our existence free in the true sense of "f
reedom" and to realize our "true" self
In this sense, Isabel's choice of going back to Osmond can be
inter-preted as the way to her "true" self. And this is one possible answer
to the question I presented, "What is one's self? " Our self is not some-thing we can define but somesome-thing we become by subjectively choosing
with positive romanticism a possibility which we think will make us
ourselves. This is the meaning of the fact that we exist and this is
the way our self is realised, if at all.
Of course, for us who are living in the 20th century, the phrase, "
sub-jectively choosing with positive romanticism a possibility which we
think will make us ourselves" itself sounds too romantic because we
are no longer able to believe in our subjectivity; we do not know where
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our subjectivity comes from. But at least, we can say that Henry
James already in the previous century presented one fundamental prob-lem for human beings and tried to show a possible direction for the solution which the 20th century people have not yet found.
One of the reasons that Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady is
the masterpiece among his works is that it represents a universal
prob-lem of human beings, beyond the mere international theme, American
Innocence v. s. European Experience, which many critics see in his
works.
Notes
(1) This book is an English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's
L'Exist-entialisme est an Humanisme originally written in French in 1946. (2) This essay is included in a book entitled Fear and Trembling, an
English translation of Kierkegaard's essays which includs two
es-says, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death originally written in Danish in 1843, 1849 respectively.
(3) This quotation from Emerson is quoted in "The Portrait of a Lady" by Shitsuu Iwase in Symposium: Henry James Kenkyu [Symposium: A Henry James Study] (Tokyo: Nan'un-Do, 1977) 81-99.
(4) This quotation from T. S. Eliot is quoted in Japanese by Hidekatsu
Nojima in the afterword of Seijitsu to Hommono (Tokyo: Hosei UP, 1989)
246. Japanese translation of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity andAuthentic-ity translated by Hidekatsu Nojima.
(5) This word is an English translation of French word, "projet" used
in Sartre's L'Existentialisme est an Humanisme.
(6) F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford UP, 1944) 155.
Works Cited
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Doubleday Company, Inc., 1957.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1969.
Emerson, Ralhp Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.
James, Henry. The Notebooks of Henry James. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1981.
The New York Edition of Henry James. The Portratit of a Lady. Scribner Reprint Editions. Vol. 1H, IV. Fairfield: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1976, 1977.
James, William. Psychology: Briefer Course. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Frear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1941. Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James.
London: Cambridge UP, 1962.
Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. London: Tavistock Publications Limit-ed, 1959.
Matthiessen, F.O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1944.
Nojima, Hidekatsu. Seijitsu to Honmono. Japanese translation of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity. Tokyo: Hosei UP, 1989. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism. Trans. Bernard Frechtman.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Massachusetts Harvard UP, 1971.
<キ ー ワ ー ド> Henry James
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel Archer's Chice to Her True
