Why does Isabel Archer Choose Gilbert Osmond?

My attempt at an answer.

Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond’s unhappy marriage in Portrait of a Lady (volume one, volume two) is unquestionable and questionable. The unhappiness is the unquestionable part. You can definitely see that these two people, once they got married, would be unhappy, and James does a great job showing how: it’s one of the best-painted unhappy marriages in literary history. The questionable part is that they got married in the first place. In The Daemon Knows, Harold Bloom understates it by calling it an “implausible choice.”

The implausibility is diegetic. It’s not that Henry James is failing to make something clear; the confusion exists in the world of the book. Isabel can’t explain the match herself—as the reader sees over and over again, because the people closest to Isabel find the match weird enough that they ask her for explanations: “Do you think I could explain if I would?” she says, and “I don’t think it’s my duty to explain to you. Even if it were I shouldn’t be able.”

James disposes of half of the implausibility with very explicit explanation. Gilbert Osmond is a man whose exquisite good taste usually does not permit him to make any visible effort, especially any effort he might fail at. And Isabel is not exactly easy. How does Osmond get her? Well, James explains, someone else has done much of the work for him, behind the scenes.

But, obviously, it doesn’t take as much explanation to explain why Gilbert Osmond marries Isabel Archer, as it does to explain why Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond.

She clearly wasn’t swept away by the force of sexual passion. Even when she remembers the peak of her love for him, he is only “[t]he finest…manly organism” with the qualifier “in the sense of being the subtlest.” It’s hard to imagine any woman feeling passionate about Osmond, who collects miniatures and “has a genius for upholstery.” I’m not just saying that to a modern reader, Gilbert Osmond seems as gay as Henry James. Obviously, a man can seem gay, or even be gay, and still have women falling for him; in the words of the bard, “Chicks dig guys that are queer/ guys that don’t dig chicks.” Osmond’s miniatures could be Warhammer miniatures; the issue is less that his interests are gay-coded, more that they’re all so petty.

She doesn’t marry him for his money; she has money, he doesn’t. She doesn’t marry him for his “bibelots.” She doesn’t marry him for lack of other options: she turns down proposals from an American industrialist and an English Lord, who, even after their respective rejections, both present themselves again and again as alternatives to Osmond.¹ It’s not even that Osmond catches her at the right time, because he doesn’t; like the other two men, he proposes, she turns him down, he says the option remains open. Only after a year is she satisfied, even surfeited, with life experience and ready to settle down. Structurally, James sets up the situation to make it very clear that at this point, she has three options, and chooses Osmond. James methodically, structurally closes off any easy answer to the question of why she marries him. So what is the not-easy answer?

Here are a couple of lines of dialogue—Isabel and her aunt arguing about Osmond after Isabel announces her engagement—which made my stomach drop when I first read them:

“There’s nothing of him,” Mrs. Touchett explained.

“Then he can’t hurt me,” said Isabel.

Isabel answers very quickly, very cleverly, very wrongly. Nothing can hurt you. “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind…It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.” (Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters.)

Isabel could have a strong, active husband. She could have a man who is not just an English peer, but a political radical; she could have an American industrialist who not only has the good fortune to inherit a cotton factory, but the “judgment and temper” to expand the business.² I think she chooses Osmond not in spite of, but because, “there’s nothing of him.” Isabel cares a lot about her independence, her liberty; she’s afraid that Goodwood or Warburton would overpower her; that is not unreasonable. But it’s unreasonable for her to think that she can protect her independence in marriage by marrying someone who isn’t strong and active.

If I’m right, and this is how Isabel was weighing her decision, it’s a mistake you see men make much more often than women.³ And it’s not only a moral mistake but a practical mistake—it often doesn’t work! The most blatant and vulgar failure of this kind is the man who takes a mail-order bride because Latinas are feminine, or Slavs are trad, or Asians are submissive, or whatever—and then finds himself with a wife who sees marriage as much in terms of power-struggle as he does, and who is better at the power-struggle than he is.

I don’t think Isabel is as bad as those men. I think she’s more afraid of someone exerting power against her, than she is eager to use power against someone else (although maybe that’s also how the husbands of mail-order brides feel?). I think she chose Gilbert’s nothing only because she thought it meant he couldn’t hurt her, not out of any desire to hurt him.⁴ I don’t think Isabel deserved Gilbert Osmond.

But I do think she was trying to do something that just couldn’t possibly work. If you’re afraid of linking yourself to someone strong because you’re afraid of their power over you, you can’t save yourself from that by trying to link yourself from someone weak. The henpecking-mail-order-bride thing is one example of how it can go wrong, you can be wrong that the other person is weak. But even if you’re right, and the other person is weak, you are necessarily giving a weak person power over you. It can be worse to give a weak person power over you than to give it to a strong person! When a strong person wants something, they have a lot of options besides manipulating their partner; a weak person has fewer options.

If Isabel is trying to get away from Warburton’s power, from Goodwood’s power, by choosing Osmond, then one of the most tragic ironies of her marriage is that Osmond is weak enough to be obsequious to Warburton and Goodwood, to try to make his wife do the same. He wants things that they have the power to give him. He wants to use his power over Isabel to make her toady for favors from the men from whose power she’s tried so hard to be free. It’s impossible to imagine that if Isabel had accepted Warburton or Goodwood, they would have put her in such a degrading position. Why would they have needed to?

1. Here I disagree strongly with Harold Bloom, who says “What choices does James give Isabel? Goodwood and Warburton do not much appeal to my women students.” Well, I like them both, especially Goodwood. Goodwood and Warburton both have a muted appeal. Which is to say: the appeal is there, and strong, but someone is muting it. We see them mostly through the lens of “Isabel Archer’s aversion to the erotic drive.”

2. I’ll point out something that would be a little more obvious to James’ readers when the novel first came out in 1880-1881. Published in 1880, the novel must have taken place in the 1870’s. So Goodwood’s father would never have used slave labor directly in Massachusetts, but during the earlier days of his business, the raw materials were the product of slave labor. But Goodwood manages and expands the business after the end of slavery.

3. Men make this mistake more than women because women are more likely to be protected from making it by a sexuality that deeply, essentially revels in the power and strength of the other. Isabel Archer is a pretty normal girl in that sense. Which is why she has to suppress her sexuality, in a way that the mail-order-bride-orderer doesn’t.

4. And it’s her moral luck, if not her practical luck, that his nothing is the kind of nothing that doesn’t budge, not the kind of nothing that she could easily push around; if she could have, she might have given in to the continuously present temptation.