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The Real and the Romantic in Literary Imagination
| Article
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16488 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
3,673 Words |
| Author
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Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue is professor of English at the University of
Dublin and visiting professor of English at New York
University. He is the author of The Ordinary Universe, and
Reading America: Essays on American Literature |
Let us start with chapter 19 of The Portrait of a Lady. Madame Merle, conversing with Isabel Archer, poses a crucial--and strikingly Jamesian--question: "What shall we call our 'self?'" Not: What is the self? Madame Merle is not an advanced philosopher, but she knows that whatever the self is, what we call it is to us a far more immediate question. What it may be, apart from our calling it such and such, is the philosopher's problem. The question arises, indeed, only problem. The question arises, indeed, only because our calling it such and such rather than something else bears emphatically upon our conduct of personal and social life. Even if it turns out that we were wrong in calling it such and such, the error will not matter as much as our agreement to act, in all innocence and ignorance, upon the calling:
"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."
Isabel disagrees:
I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed
in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else
expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of
me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a
perfectly arbitrary one.
I have referred to that episode not to remark that Madame Merle has the better part of the argument, or that Isabel is being pert in taking the line she takes, but to say that Isabel is being distinctly American in her protest. For reasons still opaque, we recognize, even before she says the word "arbitrary," that her sense of herself is of something unconditioned. She is claiming that although her visible life is lived among conditions and surrounded by things--some of which she is pleased to own--her true self, her true being, is an essence independent of her mere existence. Her essence is not arbitrary, as are her clothes and her fortune.
One of the oddities of Isabel's protest is that she does not realize that
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