Is the Ending of "Portrait of a Lady" Ambiguous?

If you have to ask if something's ambiguous, it's ambiguous, right?

People say the ending of Portrait of a Lady is ambiguous. I think it’s ambiguously ambiguous. The 1881 edition leaves Isabel to choose between Osmond and Goodwood. But James systematically closes down her options in the 1908 revisions.

Warburton has taken himself out of the running as an endgame option for Isabel. He has allowed himself to be too degraded by Isabel’s marriage to be any help to her: to have an excuse to see her, he raises hopes that he will marry her stepdaughter, either lying to everyone around him or lying to himself, neither of which is great: “if his admiration for Pansy were a delusion this was scarcely better than its being an affectation.” Either way, Osmond tries to manipulate Isabel to manipulate Warburton, and Warburton consciously or unconsciously encourages it. He’s too involved in the most sordid aspect of their marriage to be a possible escape from it.

Realistically, “single Isabel” is not an endgame option either. She spent the first half of the book telling everyone she’d rather be single than married, and then chose Osmond over that—when she didn’t need anything from him, when her family and friends (except Madame Merle) were telling her not to marry him. As she says herself, “I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate.” Isabel is just a woman who needs a man, not for money or to conform to society or for any reason other than that she’s a person who needs to be linked to another person. There’s nothing wrong or degrading about that, or even particularly female: “It is not good for man to be alone.” And there’s even nothing wrong with her being wrong about it when she was twenty-two and then changing her mind. That’s just a pretty normal way people work. But it makes it seem pretty unlikely that she’s going to prefer being single to staying with Osmond.

I know this is insane, but I don’t get the impression that her marriage has taught her to prefer being alone. It’s taught her a lot of unhappiness, but I don’t think it’s taught her that she would be better off alone! And it would just be a structurally bad ending; it would take her back to who she was in the beginning, not in a “hero’s journey: return stage” way but in a sitcom way, where every episode teaches the characters not to change so that everything can be back to status quo for the start of the next episode.

So her best alternative to Osmond is Goodwood.

But the 1908 revisions close up this possibility thoroughly. In the 1881 edition, Goodwood kisses her “like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.” In the 1908 edition Goodwood still kisses her like lightning, “a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.” Emphasis mine. You see the difference: in the 1881 edition, it’s ambiguous whether she is free from Goodwood’s kiss, or whether Goodwood’s kiss has freed her from Osmond, like a fairytale kiss saving her from an evil wizard. In the 1908 edition, it’s very clear that Isabel is free from Goodwood’s “possession.”

Then there’s the revised ending. In both editions, Goodwood tries to meet Isabel at Henrietta Stackpole’s house, but Isabel has already left for Rome. In both editions, Henrietta sees his disappointment and tries to comfort him:

Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!”

On which he looked up at her.

In the 1881 edition, that’s that. But the 1908 edition adds, “—but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.”

So, obviously in 1908 James wanted to close off Isabel’s options. He doesn’t do it tackily or tastelessly, he doesn’t end the book like “And Isabel stayed with Osmond. The End.” He doesn’t mar the book’s subtlety of style as he closes up its ambiguity of plot. But is the closure better? Does this fit Isabel?