Michael Gorra on The Portrait of a Lady

The critic Arnold Kettle once called The Portrait of a Lady a nineteenth-century version of Paradise Lost, a book about the end of a dream, about the loss of faith in individual autonomy; and the novel’s last pages will give that comparison some point. But many, indeed most, nineteenth-century novels are concerned with the limits of that autonomy. They work to fix the border between social order and tradition on the one hand, and individual desire on the other; it is the great question of the age even in those countries, like Russia, where the ancien regime has not yet died. Isabel has something else at stake and maybe something more, something that makes the novel into a particularly American version of that shattered dream. For what she learns is what the Old World has always had to teach us. She learns that her own life has been determined by things that happened before she was thought of, by a past of which she was ignorant and that she only understands when it’s already too late. What Isabel learns in talking to Amy Osmond is nothing less than the fact that America itself has had no separate or special creation. No fresh start, no city on a hill, no truly new world; no exception to or exemption from history itself. She learns what Hawthorne had realized already, and what almost fifty year later Fitzgerald would understand too, dreaming of a green light whose promise he knows is illusory; learns a truth so at odds with the American imaginary that it must be repeated again and again, an innocence lost in each generation.