Isabel as James

In the second half of Portrait of a Lady, Henry James reveals some of his own belief regarding industrialization and empiricism through the marriage of Isabel and Gilbert Osmond.

After all of Isabel’s fretting over her life and denying all the men who pursued her for the sake of individuality, she entwines herself with the one man who may very well be able to sap all individuality from her. James must have also seen industrial Western society (in which Osmond participates wholeheartedly) the same way.

In chapter 42, Osmond reveals himself to be an egotistic snake hidden in his flowery façade. He sees the world as something to be consciously calculated—and James apparently hated that as much as Isabel does. The last thing either of them wanted was to succumb to the meaningless and calculated life that the Western world presented in the late 1800s. James did not want to be told how to think and what to believe, and neither did Isabel.

James’s apparent repulsion with the emerging society provoked his belief in the idea of phenomenology, a belief totally rooted in the personal experience of the human and his consciousness of it. He claimed a well-defended philosophy that could not be easily disproved despite its inherent difficulty to be definitely proven. It undermined the empirical belief that both Westerners and his representative character Osmond held, refuting them not on their logic, but rather in their perception of the world itself. Without a universal perception, calculated people like Osmond would find it difficult to impose their beliefs upon others. Isabel could, by clinging to a phenomenological belief, defend and retain her life dreams and individuality without having to prove the worth to others.