I’ve just finished reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady again and have mixed feelings about the era and the characters. It’s difficult to read about Victorian morés from a 21st Century perspective. Not only do I need lenses that will give me a bi-cultural perspective, but I also feel squashed between a culture clash. Just after I finished with Portrait, I read a review of A. M. Homes’ latest book May We Be Forgiven in The New York Review of Books. One of her main characters says,
There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we “friend” each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to—we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a commitment of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version—it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.
Homes captures the modern dilemma accurately, and while this new world is vastly different from the one James was illuminating, it bears some similarities. The characters James creates have similar problems to those that Homes describes. The people in Isabel Archer’s realm definitely suffer from dissociation. Manners and the proper form for all behavior, while offering a structure that can keep a society intact, also can shut down any meaningful contact, especially in the parlors that James inhabits and dissects. Similarly, Archer’s friends and acquaintances are limited to discussing safe topics. Rarely do they reveal themselves in any depth. For many of them, there is no depth, no inner life, no true self. They flutter on the surface of life, rarely making more than peripheral contact with one another.
Even parents and their children perform this charade. Ralph Touchett, the man responsible for Isabel Archer receiving a large inheritance from his father, and one of the few genuine individuals in the book, seems left untouched by his mother. On his deathbed, she can’t break through the barriers she’s erected, some personal, some societal. She remains aloof from her son emotionally. Though she’s freer in many ways than some of the women in this sphere, she still remains trapped in her persona.
It seems ironic that for all of our concerns about this new age, the 21st Century, and the dislocation many of us experience, it isn’t all that different from James’ world in terms of its lack of manners and sense of decorum. We still suffer from the same malady, the difficulty of making meaningful connections.