Sigi Jöttkandt

Portrait of an Act: Aesthetics and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady

More than a hundred years have passed and still we are left wondering “Why,” to rephrase Dorothy Berkson, “Does Isabel Return to Osmond?” Readers have puzzled over this since the novel was first published in 1881, and the question continues to polarize critics today. There has been no shortage of reasons proffered. Strong arguments have been made across the ethical spectrum, ranging from fear, misguided renunciation, pragmatic realism, a mature acceptance of suffering, or a renewed sense of responsibility towards Pansy that obliges her to return to the “house of darkness, the house of suffocation” (360). Like most critics, I take this question to be central for understanding the novel’s overriding concern which, again with others, I consider to be the philosophical problem of Isabel’s freedom. But I find that the very persistence of the question of her return, and our collective inability to answer it satisfactorily is emblematic, indeed the result, of our prevailing critical tendency to regard the novel as a novel of education, specifically as a female Bildungsroman.