Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady

Gert Buelens

 

“Enter ethics, whose specialty is articulating the relation between freedom and necessity, desire and the law.” (Harpham 404)

 

In this paper, I want to use a definition of ethics taken from one of the leading writers on the subject of literature and ethics as a springboard for a reading of The Portrait of a Lady. Yet, though I find Harpham’s definition useful, I do not wholly share his view that the relation between his keyterms is best articulated by noting that “the stark ought of ethics [proclaims] the law to a creature who is presumed to be free to follow it or not. If human beings were not free, there would be no need for urging, but if they were not in fact bound by the law, there would be nothing to urge” (395). I want to complicate this picture by bringing in another pair of terms—metaphor and metonymy—that have the added virtue of belonging to the field of rhetoric and are thus arguably more properly literary than Harpham’s keywords. My intention is not to align either of these figures with one of the poles in Harpham’s definition. Rather, I aim to show how paying due attention to the complex operation of these tropes in The Portrait of a Lady enables us to see that freedom and necessity, desire and the law, are not the neatly opposed poles that they might appear to be. The most intensely charged ethical moments in this novel occur when the fraught interpenetration of these realms is at its most pronounced.

 

Since the time when Roman Jakobson offered powerful evidence for the deep structural distinction between metaphor and metonymy, most students of rhetoric have agreed that these two tropes together form a basic skeleton, to which all other figures may be related.[1] When one takes this perspective, then one is of course using metaphor and metonymy as what Hans Kellner calls “ ‘inflatable tropes’ that can be understood as ‘figures of words,’ ‘figures of thought,’ ‘figures of comprehension,’ and ‘figures of discourse,’ ” referring respectively to the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. For Jakobson, too, metaphor and metonymy are shorthand terms for what he calls the “two different semantic lines” along which a stretch of discourse may develop: “one topic,” he writes, “may lead to another either through their similarity [belonging to the same paradigm] or their contiguity [belonging to the same syntagm]” (63).

“Similarity” is the key feature of metaphor, yet this statement needs to be importantly modified. In the classic textbook example of metaphor, “he was a lion in the fight,” it is clear that the subject of the sentence displayed a similarity to a lion, yet it is equally clear that this subject was not, in actual fact, a lion. Metaphor, David Lodge comments, “creates a relationship of similarity between dissimilars” (112). Metaphor, to quote another rhetorical definition, “creates the relation between its objects,” a relationship that consists in the essential quality that the objects are thought to share, no matter how unrelated they are in actual fact (Bredin 52). Metonymy for its part deals in items that are intimately linked to one another in real, syntagmatic contexts, without anyone claiming that they share a paradigmatic quality—not even temporarily, not even for the duration of the figure of speech. When you say “The White House has decided,” the White House is a metonymy for the American President, not because that mansion would somehow (magically) enjoy the same power as this political leader, but because the White House happens to be the executive residence of the President of the United States. The link between that building and political power is “habitually and conventionally known and accepted. … We must already know that the [two things] are related, if the metonymy is to be … understood” (Bredin 57).

 

Delightfully unconventional creature that she is, the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady is of course drawn more to strikingly metaphorical ways of thinking about her own character than to socially sanctioned metonymical ones. In a famous passage early in the novel, the narrator thus recounts of Isabel Archer that “Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air” (56). There is, for Isabel, a likeness between her nature and richly appointed gardens that is hardly merely conventional; rather: it is the essential quality of her own self as opposed to other people’s that can thus be captured. “But she was often reminded that there were other gardens in the world than those of her remarkable soul, and that there were moreover a great many places which were not gardens at all—only dusky pestiferous tracts, planted thick with ugliness and misery” (56).

Isabel’s attitude is contrasted to that of Madame Merle, for whom context is of central importance. The point in one of their early conversations when, as the narrator informs us, Madame Merle becomes “very metaphysical” is worth quoting at some length:

 

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. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. 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. (175)

 

In this little speech, Madame Merle not merely points to the crucial role played by a person’s context—one’s “shell,” “circumstances,” “appurtenances”—; she goes quite a bit further in identifying such an “envelope,” such a “cluster,” as “expressive” of “one’s self.” The self for one thing cannot be restricted to some essential core that belongs solely to “an isolated man or woman”; rather, it “overflows” into the syntagmatic realm that envelops it. For another, the self is determined just as much by this context (“and then it flows back again”; “we’re … made up of some cluster of appurtenances”). As a whole, the speech gives voice to the metonymical idea that the context of a thing or person may stand in for the latter.

For Isabel, the things that Madame Merle rhapsodizes are more handicaps than assets. “Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one”. Far from being able to act as representative of the essential self, one’s context is a social imposition that stands in the way of true self-realization. This is one of the reasons, perhaps the key one, why Isabel Archer is unwilling to marry a suitor for her hand that would have struck many of her contemporaries as too good a catch to be true. “Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by [any] simple rule …. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he rather invidiously lived and moved” (95). To marry Lord Warburton would be to embrace all the extensions and limitations that, to reactivate Madame Merle’s phrase, a large “cluster of appurtenances” brings with it. “She couldn’t marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to support any enlightened prejudice in favour of the free exploration of life that she had hitherto entertained or was now capable of entertaining” (101).

            Isabel is eager for the freedom to discover not just life in general, but her own life in particular: “you could have made her colour, any day in the year, by calling her a rank egoist. She was always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress” (56). The “introspection” that she regularly indulges in is motivated by a desire to know what she is really like—how she may be paradigmatically understood. Her imagination is oriented towards the discovery of her true nature, and examines the latter by means of the metaphorical avenue that was illustrated earlier by the extended garden simile. Isabel Archer is bent on testing the limits of her world and is therefore grateful to her aunt for taking her from the provincial American town in which only books can feed her imagination to the European theater that provides a more appropriate stage for someone who wishes to develop her essential nature, perfect it, witness its progress. The portrait of a lady of the novel’s title may thus be thought of to some extent as reflecting Isabel Archer’s tendency to idealize her own person.

            Even more than his aunt, Ralph Touchett enters into the spirit of Isabel’s enterprise. Plagued by the weakness of his lungs, he cannot himself live up to the ambitions that he might have cherished. His desire to “put a little wind in [Isabel’s] sails,” to enable her “to meet the requirements of [her] imagination,” can be seen as an attempt to live vicariously through the young woman (160). When Ralph completes the statement I have just quoted by observing that “Isabel has a great deal of imagination,” his father’s retort, “So have you, my son,” makes explicit the paradigmatic link that exists between Isabel’s character and Ralph’s own (160). Pushing the point, we could say that Ralph treats Isabel metaphorically, in this sense that he recognizes a fundamental similarity between their natures, and wishes to see her act out the Ralph, as it were, that he cannot be due to the limitations that his health has placed on him.[2] He wishes to see Isabel behave as the enterprising explorer that he believes himself essentially to be; he wishes to see her flourish freely in the active worlds that have been closed to him by his handicap.

            Yet is such a metaphorical account of Ralph’s relation to Isabel the only one possible? Could we not say with equal justification that the life Isabel leads as a rich woman is actually metonymically indebted to Ralph? After all, it is really, unbeknownst to her, Ralph’s fortune that has transformed Isabel’s identity from a young lady with a great deal of imagination into one who commands the wherewithal to enact her imaginings. Regarded from Ralph’s perspective, his secret endowment of Isabel with half his fortune turns his cousin into a syntagmatic extension of his own self. Here is someone who will for the rest of her life be indelibly linked to him no matter what she does—no matter how different she may in the end prove to be from himself—merely by virtue of the fact that he has split “the whole envelope of his circumstances” (to quote another of Madame Merle’s phrases) neatly into two financially equal halves and ensured that she possess one.

 

            The rhetorical complexity that marks Ralph’s philosophy and conduct is quite absent from Isabel’s course of action for most of the book. If her early exchanges with Madame Merle give voice to her preference for the metaphorical, Isabel’s conscious decision to marry Osmond is entirely based on this predilection too. Defending her choice to a sceptical Ralph, Isabel singles out the fact that Osmond is “so independent, so individual” (290). When Ralph points to Osmond’s lack of importance in the world, Isabel counters by saying that she is “far more struck with what he has and what he represents than with what he may lack” (291). It is clear that “what [Osmond] represents” is not to be taken metonymically, as it was in the case of a Warburton, but metaphorically, like Isabel’s view of herself. Indeed, the portrait that this lady paints of herself is matched by the idealized portrait she creates of this “gentleman” who she believes “knows everything, … understands everything, … has the kindest, gentlest, highest spirit” (293). Osmond to Isabel embodies the supreme realization of the very values that she had detected in her own beautiful nature. They thus belong to the same paradigm, and it is this fact that makes him stand out favourably in comparison with Lord Warburton, who can best be defined by his syntagmatic accoutrements.

            Isabel’s ethical life at this stage centers on a rearticulation of the concept of freedom, which now manifests itself in her strongheaded determination to marry a man who stands firm in his pursuit of non-material values, in his “wilful renunciation” of the “grubbing and grabbing” that goes on in the world (227, 296). Osmond, to Isabel, is a highly moral creature—“a very honest man” (293). The fortune she has inherited affords Isabel the opportunity to use her freedom to moral effect, by marrying a man whose material success has been negligible.

            There is an ironical contrast, of course, between the emphasis Isabel is constantly placing on her freedom, as well as the fondness she shows for a metaphorical understanding of the nature of the self, and the reality that she is the object of all sorts of manipulations that prove that her position in the world is heavily determined by metonymical processes. There is first of all Ralph’s role in making her rich; and Ralph’s ensuring that Isabel should not know about his agency by metonymically substituting his father’s “will” for what was in fact his own. Then there is Madame Merle’s scheming so as to “put” Isabel in Osmond’s “way” (207), and her arranging their first meeting so that it takes place at Osmond’s house, since she knows that “As cicerone of your museum you appear to particular advantage” (209). Serena Merle never wavers in her faith in the power of the metonymical—her belief that persons’ surroundings may perfectly stand in for them and show them in a much better light than anything they do or say. Finally, there is the curious role played by Osmond’s daughter Pansy in ensuring that Isabel accept Osmond, a role that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere. Let me here just mention my conclusion that a wavering Isabel is brought round when she pays a visit, on her own, to Pansy Osmond, at Osmond’s request, during which she is immensely struck by the very aspect that Pansy presents to the observer—“how prettily she had been directed and fashioned; and yet how simple, how natural, how innocent she had been kept!”. It is as though Osmond, sensing that he is not making much headway in his direct wooing of Isabel, decides to withdraw into the background himself (where he remains for something like ten months, while Isabel and Serena Merle tour the East), but not without first having ensured that he would in the meantime be indirectly represented to Isabel’s memory by the young girl that he has taken such pains to shape into a pleasing little thing—simple, natural, innocent. Osmond has cunningly put into practice Madame Merle’s insight that context may act more powerfully for a person than anything they themselves might undertake. Pansy, as a metonymical substitute for her father, has actually won Isabel for him.

 

            How can the framework I have been sketching help us make sense of the concluding scenes of The Portrait of a Lady? One fundamental point is that Isabel has come to recognize that the choices she believed she had made freely, independently, in this manner confirming her own paradigmatic essence, were in fact orchestrated by those around her. She has been caught in a web that was spun not just by the “evil”-intentioned Serena Merle and Gilbert Osmond but also, unintentionally, by the more happily inspired Ralph Touchett. The latter fact in particular makes it clear that life in society involves one in all sorts of contiguities, no matter how much one may be inclined to introspection and the cultivation of metaphors of the free and independent self. When Caspar Goodwood offers Isabel a chance to escape from what she has meanwhile come to regard as the misery of her marriage, his words are seductive indeed. They appeal forcefully to that side of Isabel that would still be swayed by the romance of freedom: “We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? .… The world’s all before us—and the world’s very big” (489). Goodwood’s understanding of the independent self is very much like Isabel’s in the earlier parts of the novel: “It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We’ve nothing to do with all that; we’re quite out of it; we look at things as they are” (488). A firmer rejection of Madame Merle’s strong emphasis on “the company one keeps” as an expression of the self is hard to imagine (175).

            It is not just Goodwood’s words that are seductive; so is his manner. Especially in the version James revised for the New York Edition, the final scene of the novel is as erotically charged as one is likely to find anywhere in James (cf. Heron). The imagery is of “float[ing] in fathomless waters,” and undergoing “a rushing torrent.” Even before Goodwood acts, Isabel is thinking that “she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden” (488). Isabel believes that “to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying,” a belief that is “a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink.” These descriptions indicate a vividly aroused desire, to be sure, and when Isabel finally “felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips,” the sensation is not an unpleasant one that she tries to get rid of immediately. Rather, “His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.” What is more, the narrator notes that “while she took [the kiss]”—note the active involvement that the verb “to take” implies—“it was extraordinarily as if … 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.” What is so extraordinary is that what Isabel had disliked from a distance, now becomes “justified” in the close proximity of the kiss, in her submission to “this act of possession” that is so much in line with the “intense identity” of these traits of Goodwood’s “hard manhood.”

            But the upshot of this emotional experience is not, as one might have thought, that Isabel accepts the sensuous side of her character, acknowledging that, for the sake of desire, she has to allow herself to be thus possessed by a man. In fact, the reverse may be said to happen. The imagery of the scene is sensuous, yet it also clearly brings out the bound and unfree condition that giving in to such sensuality involves, a condition that is like being drowned, exposed to lightning and submitted to possession. There is, in other words, a sharp contrast between Goodwood’s talk of freedom and independence and the force with which he imposes his sexual power on Isabel, appealing directly to what she has called early in the book “the deepest thing” within her soul: the “belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely” (56). It is such a complete surrender of the self that Caspar Goodwood is really demanding of Isabel, and on which depends the sexual fulfilment that he holds out.

            It is worth recalling here Harpham’s description of ethics as an articulation of “the relation between freedom and necessity, desire and the law.” What is so crucial about the long scene with Goodwood, it seems to me, is that it helps Isabel to realize that the opposition between “freedom and necessity, desire and the law” can be a fatuous one. Implying as it does that freedom and desire belong together, just as do necessity and the law, Harpham’s formulation cannot do justice to the final scene of The Portrait of a Lady, and the ethical decision in which it culminates: Isabel’s choice of the “very straight path” that leads back to Rome. As we have just seen, Goodwood’s “act of possession” makes it clear that desire can be the opposite of freedom. Sexual fulfilment may depend on a complete relinquishing of a person’s freedom and independence. The choice that Isabel faces at the end of the story is between a bound condition that masks itself in metaphors of freedom while exacting a surrender of the essential self (Goodwood) and a bound condition that is situated at the more superficial level of “the observance of a magnificent form” that Osmond expects of her (446). Osmond’s “wish to preserve appearances,” we could say, amounts to a metonymical bondage only: it requires Isabel to live by Madame Merle’s rule that “One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; … one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, …, the company one keeps” (175). It does not draw on her fund of “passion,” guarded “within herself, deep down,” hoarded “like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend” (263). Paradoxically, there is likely to be more freedom for Isabel at Palazzo Roccanera—Osmond’s “house of darkness” (360)—than in the “very big” world Goodwood proposes to explore with her, causing her to respond “as if he were pressing something that hurt her,” and sealing their putative compact with a kiss that is “like white lightning” (489).

            We should not be misled by James’s imagery of light and dark here. The white lightning that Goodwood produces may be erotically pleasurable. “But when darkness returned she was free” (489). Adrian Poole cogently argues that the privileged term in The Portrait of a Lady is “dusk,” rather than light (150-51). It would seem that the overabundance of white light that Goodwood produces (recall also that “if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely”—a prospect that Isabel has consistently dreaded [56]) needs to be first offset by complete darkness before a measure of freedom can be recovered. The location that then allows the heroine to come to a final decision about the direction of her life is the highly liminal one of the Gardencourt doorsill. She is attracted to the house on her flight from Caspar by the “lights in the windows,” yet is never shown to enter its brightness, instead pausing with “her hand on the latch,” in the dusk of that threshold (489-490). It is here that Isabel sees “a very straight path.”

            Thus, desire and freedom are surprisingly at odds in the denouement of James’s novel. But so, it could be argued, are necessity and the law, to turn to the two remaining terms from Harpham’s schema. If Isabel, in the early parts of the novel, tries to base her decisions on moral principles (which Harpham would dub “laws”) that Ralph thinks of disparagingly as “fine theor[ies]” with little relation to reality (294), joined in this sentiment by Isabel herself in the fireside chapter,[3] this tendency is much reduced by the end. Though Harpham is not talking about James in his observations on the ethics of literature, his other keyterm, necessity, may be usefully invoked not as the near-synonym of “law” that he intends it to be, but as a shorthand phrase for another type of ethical imperative, that I have elsewhere summarized as “the ethics of metonymy.”[4] Reaching the insight that a bound condition is unavoidable in social life, Isabel Archer is well on her way towards embracing an ethical attitude that will become much more pronounced in later Jamesian works, such as The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. This attitude places less emphasis on abstract laws and general principles—on the need to find a “good … formula” to account for one’s actions, as Isabel puts it to herself in chapter 55 (481)—and more on the need to react to the demands of a situation in which one finds oneself. These two alternatives may be termed metaphorical and metonymical in character respectively, the basic modus operandi of metaphor as a figure of thought applying to the former in that a paradigmatic connection is perceived between discrete ethical decisions that share their rootedness in a certain law or principle; that of metonymy to the latter because a syntagmatic connection is seen to exist between a moral agent and the situation that calls for an ethical decision. Like the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy, neither of these ethical alternatives should be thought of as superior to the other; rather, they are complementary. If I here tend to privilege the metonymical it is because it has received scanter attention than the metaphorical, even though its relevance to many of the ethical problems posed in modern literature is high.

            In the closing scenes of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer’s recognition of the decisive role played by metonymy in her life also results in her tentative embrace of an ethics of metonymy. When she arrives in London, en route for Gardencourt to be with the dying Ralph, Isabel already indicates to Henrietta Stackpole her intention to return to Rome, explaining that this is the promise she made to Pansy Osmond. When Henrietta questions the rationale for this undertaking, Isabel agrees:

 

“I’m not sure I myself see now,” Isabel replied. “But I did then.”

“If you’ve forgotten your reason perhaps you won’t return.”

Isabel waited a moment. “Perhaps I shall find another.”

“You’ll certainly never find a good one.”

“In default of a better my having promised will do,” Isabel suggested. (469)

 

The fact that Isabel is “not sure … now” but was “then” can be explained in respect of the type of ethical attitude that I have briefly sketched: an ethics in which the demands of a particular situation at a particular time prompt one to take up a responsibility that one cannot easily explain with reference to any clear law; rather, one undertakes to fulfil the obligation simply because one is there. Isabel has “forgotten [her] reason” because there never was “a good one”—there never was a readily identifiable ground on which to commit herself to the daughter of her tyrannical husband and his deceptive one-time lover. The Isabel who strongly disagreed with Madame Merle over the nature of the self—insisting on its supreme sovereignty over against her friend’s assertion that we are intimately tied up with what happens to be our context—that Isabel seems to have changed considerably when she is prepared to return to a husband (who she knows will make her “a scene of the rest of my life” [469]) for no other reason than that she made a promise not to abandon this man’s daughter.

            It is also this altered Isabel who ultimately proves resistant to Goodwood’s siren song of absolute freedom. In fact, as we saw, it may well be in the dissonant clash between the metaphors of the sovereign self that he spouts and the imprisonment of a sexual bondage that he really exacts that Isabel finds that “better” reason for returning to her husband that she is looking for upon her arrival in England (469). Thus Isabel’s adoption of the “very straight path” back to the Osmonds must be regarded as a high-level ethical negotiation of the relation between freedom and necessity, desire and the law. Recognizing that her earlier pursuit of lofty principles could not protect her from the mundane manipulations of down-to-earth reality, and that the hot breath of desire extinguishes any measure of freedom, Isabel willingly submits to the necessity that the situation in which she finds herself presents. The “abrupt and unsatisfactory” ending that many readers have noted reflects the tentative nature of the ethical resolution that James here develops (Updike 16). It will only be in later works that he arrives at a more fully elaborated ethics of metonymy that can stand the test of further plotting.