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Structural and Functional Analysis of Henry James' s Novel "The Portrait of a

Lady" with a Comparison of Jane Campion's Adaptation of the Novel

Thesis · April 2005

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 STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF HENRY JAMES’S NOVEL
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
WITH
A COMPARISON OF JANE CAMPION’S ADAPTATION OF THE NOVEL

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
OF
MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

BY

HATİCE ÇELEBİ

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ART
IN
THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

JUNE 2003
Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences

_______________________

Prof. Dr. Bahattin Aksit

Director

I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of

Master of Arts.

________________________

Prof. Dr. Wolf Konig

Head of Department

This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully

adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.

________________________

Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz

Supervisor

Examining Committee Members

Prof. Dr. Meral Çileli ________________________

Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz (Supervisor) ________________________

Prof. Dr. Ayşegül Yüksel ________________________

 ABSTRACT

STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF HENRY JAMES’S NOVEL

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

WITH A COMPARISON OF JANE CAMPION’S ADAPTATION OF THE

NOVEL

Çelebi, Hatice

M.A., Program in English Literature

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz

June 2003, 89 pages

The aim this thesis is to analyse the narrative structure of the novel, The Portrait

of A Lady, with the aim of revealing how meaning is made and to show how certain

elements are transferred to the film version and the consequent changes in meaning and

emphasis. The structural analysis of The Portrait will chiefly rely on Shlomith Rimmon-

Kenan’s scheme she draws in her book Narrative Fiction. The functional analysis to

show the consequent changes in meaning and emphasis, on the other hand, will rely on

Roland Barthes’s theory of functions he discusses in his article “ Structural Analysis of

Narratives”. In order to explore the narrative structure of The Portrait of A Lady, this

iii
thesis will examine story, characterization, time and focalization and demonstrate the

techniques Henry James uses in narration. In the functional analysis of the novel, on the

other hand, the functions of the units discussed in the story and the characterization will

be compared to the functions of the same units that are transferred to the adaptation of

the novel to reveal how the meaning and emphasis of the novel changes.

Key Words: Narrative Structure, Embedded Story, Narrator, Focalizer, Cardinal

Function, Catalyser, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gennettte, Roland Barthes

iv
 ÖZ

HENRY JAMES’İN ROMANI BİR KADININ PORTRESİ’NİN YAPISAL VE

FONKSİYONEL ANALİZİNİN JANE CAMPION’IN FİLM

ADAPTASYONUYLA KARŞILAŞTIRILMASI

Çelebi, Hatice

Yüksek Lisans, İngiliz Edebiyatı Programı

Tez Yöneticisi: Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz

Haziran 2003, 89 sayfa

Bu tezde “Bir Kadının Portresi” adlı romanın yapısının incelenmesi, romandaki

anlamın nasıl aktarıldığı, bazı öğelerin fılme nasıl transfer edildiği ve bu transfer süreci

içerisinde romandaki anlamın ve vurgunun ne gibi değişikliklere uğradığının ortaya

çıkarılması amaçlanmıştır. Romanın yapısal analizi Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’ın

“Narrative Fiction” adlı kitabında topladığı öğeler açısından yapılacaktır. Anlam ve

vurgudaki değişiklik ise Roland Barthes’ın “Structural Analysis of Narratives” adlı

makalesinde öne sürdüğü fonksiyon (levels of functions) teorisine dayanılarak

incelenecektir. “Bir Kadının Portresi” ni incelemek için olaylar (story), karakterler

(characterization), zaman (text time), bakış açısı (focalization) irdelenecek ve Henry

v
James’in anlatımda kullandığı teknikler tartışılacaktır. Romanın fonksiyonel açıdan

incelenmesinin amacı olayların ve karakterlerin incelendiği bölümlerde tartışılan

öğelerin filme nasıl transfer edildiğinin ve bu transfer sırasında romandaki anlamın ve

vurgunun nasıl değiştiğinin ortaya cıkarılmasıdır.

Anahtar Sözcükler: Yapı (narrative structure), Yan Hikaye (embedded story), Anlatıcı
(narrator), Algılayan (focalizer), Esas Fonksiyon (cardinal function), Tamamlayıcı
(catalyser).

vi
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Prof. Dr. Nursel İcöz for her

continuous help, guidance, suggestions and patient supervision during the study. I would

also like to thank the members of the examining committee.

Special thanks to go to Prof. Dr. Aysegul Yuksel, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margaret

Sönmez and Prof. Dr. Meral Cileli.

I also want to thank to my friends Serpil Demir, Hatice Bayindir, Ercan Top and

Ahmet Colak for their help and my husband Abdullah Celebi for his patience and

encouragement.

vii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………….……………………….iii

ÖZ…………………………………………………………………………….…………..v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………….….……...vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………..………..viii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………...………...1

1. 1. Emergence of Structuralism………………………………….……..1

1. 2. Structuralism and Fiction……………………...……………………6

1. 3. Fiction and Film…………………………………..……………….11

1. 4. Henry James And The Potrait Of A Lady……………………….…13

2. ROLAND BARTHES’ THEORY OF STRUCTURAL

ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVES ………………………………………………17

3. STORY IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY……………..……………….……23

3. 1. The Main Story-Line of The Potrait of A Lady…………………....24

3. 2. The Story-Line of The Touchett Family…………………………..26

3. 3. The Story-Line of Madame Merle…………………………………27

3. 4. The Story-Line of The The Archer Family or of Isabel

Before Meeting Mrs. Touchett…………………………………………28

viii
 3. 5. The Relations between The Story and

Narration…………………………..…………..………………………...28

4. CHARACTERIZATION IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY…………………41

5. TEXT-TIME IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY……………………………..61

5. 1. Order…………………………..………………………..………….62

5. 2. Duration…………………………..………………………………..64

5. 3. Frequency………………………..………………………………...67

6. FOCALIZATION IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY……………………..….71

6. 1. Types of Focalization………………………….…………..………72

6. 2. Facets of Focalization………………………………………..…….75

7. CONCLUSION…………………………..………….…………..…………...82

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………..…………………………………………..88

ix
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1. 1. Emergence of Structuralism

The last part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century were

characterized by the fragmentation of knowledge into isolated disciplines to a degree

that they seemed beyond synthesis. This problem existed for every branch of science;

philosophers claimed that there is no possible correspondence between language and

the world beyond it, the existentialists spoke of isolated man, cut off from objects

and even from other men in an absurd condition of being, even philosophy was

regarded as “playing solitary word games” (Scholes, 1). In short, during the first part

of the twentieth century, from Russell to Sartre, the concept of fragmentation ruled

the intellectual world. However, towards the middle of the century, a fundamental

attack on such a fragmentation came from a scientifically oriented Marxist,

Christopher Caudwell, who opposed the “coherent system” of dialectical materialism

to “the chaotic confusion of discoveries in relativity physics, quantum physics,

Freudism, anthropology, genetics, psycho- physiology, which are based on exclusive

assumptions and contradict or ignore each other.” (qtd. in Scholes, 2). Therefore, as

Scholes also points out in his work Structuralism in Literature, structuralism

emerged as a response to the need expressed by Caudwell for a coherent system that

would unite the modern sciences and make the world habitable for man again. In its

1
broadest sense, structuralism is a way of looking for reality not in individual things

but in the relationships among them. As the philosopher Wittgenstein insisted “the

world is the totality of facts not of things” and “facts” are “states of affairs”:

1- In a state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a chain

2- In a state of affairs objects stand in a determinate relationship to one another

3- The determinate way in which objects are connected in a state of affairs is the

structure of the affairs.

4- Form is the possibility of structure.

5- The structure of a fact consists in the structures of the affairs in the world.

(qtd. in Scholes, 4)

According to the principles listed above, Wittgestein has argued that “states of

affairs” must be expressed not by a word but by a sentence, which has been

influential in language studies. His argument has invoked a detailed analysis of

sentences and the study of the sentences has led a leading linguist, Noam Chomsky,

to the conclusion that all men share an innate disposition to organize their linguistic

possibilities in a certain way, which has become the basics of structuralism.

Structuralism first found its centre in the linguistic theory and has taken much of its

impetus from the achievements of other linguists like Saussure, Jacobson and

Trubetzkoy.

Since structural methodology is not an exclusive property of literary study

and its roots are in the social sciences, such as linguistics and anthropology, the

application of structuralism depends upon the relationship between the language of

literature and the whole of language. That is why, in order to establish a theory of

literature, it becomes necessary to present the concepts of modern linguistics and

2
then to investigate the most important attempt, that is, to move from linguistics to

poetics.

In the Cours, Saussure begins by defining language and his definition

distinguishes three levels of linguistic activity: langage, langue and parole. Langage

is the broadest aspect, for it includes the entire human potential for speech, both

physical and mental. Langue, however, is the language as the word is used in

speaking of a “language” like English, French, Turkish, etc. Langue is the language

system that a human being uses to generate discourse that is intelligible to others. On

the other hand, the individual utterances are what Saussure calls parole. Thus

langage is “the linguistic potential”, langue is “a language system” and parole is

“individual utterances” (Scholes, 14). For Saussure the central object of linguistic

study must be the linguistic system because language systems are conventional in the

sense that they are special products. In speaking a language, an infinite number of

potential utterances are used but these utterances are based on a finite number of

words. Moreover, the grammatical relationships among the utterances are aspects of

a single system, which is the main argument for the groundwork of

narratology,which is the field of study of this thesis.

In order to establish a relation between structuralism and narratology, turning

back to Saussure, firstly, the conceptual tools for the description of the language

system Saussure emphasized should be defined. As the first step, Saussure

characterizes the basic element of linguistic structures, the sign. A sign is not simply

the name for a thing but a complex whole that links a sound image and a concept. In

languages the concepts are the same but the sound images are different. Then he calls

these two aspects, sound image and concept, signifier and signified, respectively. He

insisted that the relationship between the signifying sound and the signified concept

3
is arbitrary. The relevance of the issue of arbitrariness is that in all signs the sound

image is in no way dictated by the concept; if it were, we would all speak the same

language no other being possible. The connection between sound and concept has

appealed to and motivated some structuralists like Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes

to investigate the interdependence between the form and culture since the sound

images were different in different cultures.

Another Saussurean observation, more relevant to the foundation of

narratology, about the sign is that the sound image, or the signifier, is “a line”

(Scholes, 16) since it is auditory and is unfolded in time through the auditory system,

and also, only each sign is linear, each utterance is even more obviously so. Unlike

the picture, which can display various significant elements simultaneously, the

elements of a verbal utterance must be delivered in an order that is itself significant.

The sign then, as well as the sentence, and all larger units of discourse, are primarily

narratives, or in other words, any meaningful discourse is disposed in an orderly

arrangement.

Gerard Gennette, one of the most major narratologists, defines the word

“narrative” in his work Narrative Discourse. Narrative refers to the “narrative

statement that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events” (25), or to “the

succession of events real or fictitious… and to their several relations of linking,

opposition, repetition, etc.” (25). In this sense analysis of narrative means “the study

of a totality of actions and situations taken in themselves, without regard to the

medium, linguistic or other, through which knowledge of that totality comes to us”

(Gennette, 25) and it is essentially a study of the relationships between narrative and

story, between narrative and narrating and between story and narrating. Therefore

structuralism, in fact, gives the narratologists a necessity and chance to look deep

4
into the structure of a discourse of any medium by taking its parts into consideration

and finding out the connection of those parts both between themselves and to the

whole.

Although structuralism has been well praised for its virtue of enabling a close

investigation in various fields with its principles, it has also been criticized since it

requires a dissection at the expense of ignoring the whole. The reproach most

frequently addressed to structuralist literary criticism is that “It fails at the level of

the individual text” (Scholes, 142); however, a structuralist approach to reading a

text is worth the study. Reading is a personal activity, and there are as many readings

of any text as there are readers of it but all readings are not equally good. For

structuralism, the problem of reading a text must involve satisfactory ways of

incorporating the semantic dimension, the level of meaning, within the consideration

of structure. In his essay “ Comment lire?” Tzvetan Todorov reminds the readers of

three ways of reading a text, one of which is poetics, which seeks the general

principles that manifest themselves in particular works. Such a reading approaches

“the literary work as a system and seeks to clarify relationships among its various

parts” (Scholes, 144). Thus reading is a systematized commentary, but one who aims

at discerning the system of a work must give up hope of being truly faithful to the

text since he must emphasize some features at the expense of others. Todorov

remains close to if not entirely within the formalist domain of “literariness”, the idea

that studying an individual work will enhance the understanding of other works.

Todorov suggests that although a single text might be a multiple or duplicitous

message, the most important aspect of commentary should always be the semantic

one, which has been discussed further by Scholes in his book Structuralism in

Literature: “For structuralism, then, the problem of reading a text must involve

5
finding satisfactory ways of incorporating the semantic dimension within the

consideration of structure.” (147)

Structuralism is in fact a mental operation in which we give up a general

sense of observable data in exchange for a heightened sense of specific items. These

fewer items, which we now see related, forming a system or a structure, give us a

greater conceptual power over the material under scrutiny. As Scholes put it into

words, we give up a sense of some ‘whole’ in order to perceive some formal relation

of ‘parts’ and “what is lost in mass here is gained in energy” (Scholes, 41). In fact,

when we discover structures we find ‘wholes’ where only ‘parts’ existed before.

Knowing the structure of an atom gives us a certain power over whole masses of
matter. A major motive behind structuralist investigations of literary phenomena is
the desire to obtain a similar exchange of mass energy. But the only explosions to be
obtained here are mental ones: flashes of literary understanding that come from a
thorough grasp of fundamental literary structures. (Scholes, 41)

The desire to look for simple structures behind or within complex literary

phenomena has led to some interesting experiments in criticism undertaken by

structuralists especially in its treatment of narrative. Since the field of narrative

extends from myths on the one hand (simple, short, popular, oral, prehistoric) to the

modern novel on the other (complex, long, individual, written, historical) while

preserving certain structural features (character, situation, action, resolution), it offers

a superb field of study to the structuralist and the field has been well cultivated

especially when fiction is concerned.

1. 2. Structuralism and Fiction

‘Le roman’ writes Philippe Sollers, ‘ést la moniere don’t cotte société se

parle’ which means that more than any literary form, more perhaps than any other

type of writing, the novel serves as “the model by which the society conceives of

6
itself” and “the discourse in and through which it articulates the world.” (qtd. in

Culler, 189). It is mainly for this reason that the structuralists have concentrated their

attention on the novel: in the novel, the creation and organization of signs are not

there simply in order to produce meaning but in order to “produce a human world

charged with meaning” (Culler, 189). Jonathan Culler endorses this idea even more

by claiming that in a novel words must be composed in such a way that “ through the

activity of reading there will emerge the model of a social world, models of the

individual personality, of the relations between the individual and the society” (190)

and he quotes from Sollers: “our identity depends on the novel, what others think of

us, what we think of ourselves, the way in which our life is imperceptibly moulded

into a whole” (qtd. in Culler, 189).

What Culler asserts is that “the novel is the semiotic agent of intelligibility”

(190), that is, in reading the novel the reader expects to be able to recognize a world,

thus the novel may become a place in which the models of intelligibility can be

deconstructed, exposed or challenged. In a novel, conventional expectations make

any deviation more troubling, therefore, potentially more powerful; and it is in here

“on the edges of intelligibility” (190) that the structuralist interest has come to focus.

In S/Z Roland Barthes begins his discussion of Balzac with a distinction between

readable, readerly, and unreadable, writerly, texts, between the texts which are

intelligible in terms of traditional models and those which can be written in the sense

that the reader fills in the gaps that are given in the text. Although Barthes’s own

analysis suggests that the distinction between the readable and unreadable text is not

a way of classifying texts, every analysis of a traditional novel will criticize or

investigate the models of intelligibility and every radical text will be valued as

readable and intelligible from some point of view.

7
 Even when the novel is not explicitly engaged in undermining reader’s notions of
coherence and significance, by its creative use of these notions it participates in
what Husserl would call ‘the reactivation of models’ of intelligibility: that which is
taken as natural is brought to consciousness and revealed as process, as construct.
(Culler, 190)

Considering the range of the novels available to the readers, it is still obvious that

various novels force the readers to deploy different models of personality, causality

and significance. Even when the novels themselves do not serve at an aim of

questioning the models they rely on, a critical reader would be confronted with the

necessity of comparison and reflection; thus the experience of the reading will

perform a critical function, which is what is desirable in any experience of reading.

The distinction between the readable and unreadable texts implies the

difference between the traditional and Balzacian and the modern novel usually

represented as nauveau roman or implies the difference between what Barthes call

the “texte plaisir” and the “texte jouisssance” in his work The Pleasure of the Text.

Such a distinction has been central to the structuralists since both the texte plaisir and

texte jouissance demonstrate functional concepts rather than the classes of the texts.

Barthes observes that some people would appear to desire a text that was fully

modern and properly unreadable since they think “a text with no shadow, severed

from the dominant ideology” would be “ a text with no fertility, with no productivity,

a sterile text” (57). In other words, an unreadable text has “some ideology, some

mimesis, some subject” (58). However, the readable or traditional text is not the

opposite of the modern or unreadable text, that is, it is not wholly predictable and

obviously intelligible because “the meanings experienced when reading a novel

would have a bearing on the reader’s own life and would enable him to look upon it

in new ways” (Culler, 192). In short, the modern novel in general relies on the link

between text and ordinary experience just as traditional novels did.

8
 As Barthes recognizes, there is only a difference of degree between the

traditional texte plaisir and the modern text, texte jouissance: the latter is only a later

and freer stage of the former. Within a novel, there has always been a tension

between the intelligible and the problematic, that is why, when the structuralists

write about traditional texts, they end up discovering gaps, uncertainties, instances of

subversion and other features that are rather too easy to consider specifically modern.

Thus the center of the study of the novel embraces both the models of coherence and

intelligibility that the novels employ and challenge and the cultural models such as

plot, theme, and character. Structuralist writings are

properly germane to the novel as a whole and not just a particular class of modernist
texts, and we center the study of the novel on the models of coherence and
intelligibility which it employs and challenges. There are three domains or sub-
systems where cultural models are particularly important: plot, theme and character.
Before turning to these models, however, one should consider the general
structuralist theory of the novel as a hierarchy of systems, the basic conventions of
narrative which this approach identifies, and the distinctions and categories that
have been applied in the study of narration itself. (Culler, 192)

Culler carries on with Benveniste’s principle that “the meaning of linguistic unit can

be defined as its capacity to integrate a unit of a higher level” (qtd. in Culler, 192)

and supports this idea further by referring to Barthes:

A text is not only to follow the unwinding of the story, it is also to identify various
levels, to project the horizontal links of the narrative sequence onto an implicitly
vertical axis; to read a narrative is not only to pass from one word to another, it is
also to pass from one level to another. (Culler, 192)

Though too little attention has been paid to the way in which the readers pass from

one level to another, the importance of levels in linguistic systems has led to the

assumption that in order to carry out a structural analysis in other areas “ one must

first distinguish several descriptive levels and place them in the perspective of a

hierarchy of integration” (Culler, 192). Culler claims that the process of reading is

that of implicitly recognizing elements of a particular level and interpreting them

accordingly. He focuses on two levels: a level of trivial detail and a level of narrative

9
speech act just like Roland Barthes does in his discussion of distribituonal and

integrational functions in his article “Structural Analysis of Narratives”. Therefore, a

structuralist analysis of a novel embraces both an exploration of the parts, the

narrative elements, and of the descriptive levels in order that the semantic structure

could be exposed. This thesis aims at discovering the structure of a novel, The

Portrait of a Lady, through an investigation of both the narrative elements described

in Shlomith- Rimmon Kenan’s book Narrative Fiction and the descriptive levels

discussed in Roland Barthes’ article “Structural Analysis of narratives”. In this

thesis, although the narrative elements, the tools for discovering the structure of

novels, will serve for the purpose of revealing the relationship between the semantic

structure and the form of The Portrait of A Lady, the analysis of distributional and

integrational functions that Barthes points out in his article, will serve for the purpose

of a revelation of the transferability of the “story” of The Portrait of A Lady to the

film The Portrait of A Lady to explore the changes in the semantic structure

emerging from attaching different amount of importance to the same functions. The

aim of this study is to analyze the narrative structure of the novel, The Portrait of A

Lady, with the aim of revealing how meaning is made and to show how certain

elements in the story are transferred to the film version and the consequent changes

in meaning and emphasis. At the end of the study the novel The Portrait of A Lady

will prove itself to be a “texte de joussiance” and a writerly text since Henry James

challenges intelligibility with various techniques. The thesis will also be a sample

study of a structuralist reading of a novel, The Portrait of a Lady in this case, to find

out the parts of its system that form a whole, which is the meaning, and inquire into

the semantic differences in the scenic interpretation of it due to the narrative

differences.

10
1. 3. Fiction and Film

“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word,

to make you hear, to make you feel- it is before all, to make you see”(Mcfarlane, 3)

is how Joseph Conrad explains his novelistic intentions in 1897. D.W. Griffith, who

was regarded as the father of film, echoes Conrad’s remark in 1913 when he is

talking about his cinematic intentions: “The task I am trying to achieve is above all to

make you see.” (Mcfarlane, 4). Later on, George Bluestone, who is known for his

significant work in theories of adaptation, draws attention to the similarity of the two

remarks at the start of his study of “The Two Ways of Seeing” in Novels into Film

as well as pointing out to the fundamental difference between the way the images are

produced in the two media and how they are perceived: “between the percept of the

visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the

two media” (Mcfarlane, 4). In other words, he connects the novel and the film with

the word “image”, still being aware of their difference. However, finally, he claims,

“conceptual images evoked by verbal stimuli can scarcely be distinguished in the end

from those evoked by non-verbal stimuli.” (Mcfarlane, 4). In this respect, Bluestone

shares the common ground with several other writers concerned to establish the links

between the two media.

D. W. Griffith and George Bluestone are only two well-known examples of

filmmakers who have linked the two media, the novel and the film, but such a link

has also been provoked by the writers in the English novel towards the end of the

nineteenth century, like Joseph Conrad. The changes that the writers made in the

English novel led to a stress on showing rather than telling which was the result of a

11
reduction in the element of authorial intervention. Such an account encouraged the

ongoing transmission between literature and film. Alan Spiegel, for example, in his

Fiction and Camera, takes Flaubert as his starting point. Spiegel regards Flaubert as

the first great nineteenth century exemplar of “concretised form”, a form dependent

on supplying a great deal of visual information. His line of inquiry leads him to

James Joyce, who, like Flaubert, respects “the integrity of the seen object and

…gives it palpable presence apart from the presence of the observer” (Mcfarlane, 4).

One effect of the focus of showing rather than telling in the nineteenth

century novel is to de-emphasise the author’s personal narrating voice so that we

learn to read the visual language of it. Such reading will, of course, anticipate our

experience of film presenting the verbal images of the novel. Some writers did not

hesitate to put forward their ideas about the cinema, such as Joseph Conrad and

Henry James. They both consider the cinema as a means of “ ‘decomposing’ a scene

for altering the point of view so as to focus more sharply on various aspects of an

object, for exploring a visual field by fragmenting it rather than by presenting it

scenographically” (Mcfarlane, 5).

As the comparisons of the novel and the cinema went on, the writers’

‘cinematic techniques’ began to be talked about. As a result of this, film came to

replace the representational novel of the earlier nineteenth century and the writers of

the latter century tried to keep up with the “scenographic” trend not with an intention

to be popular but to be visual. Henry James is a writer who provides a clear example

for those writers with his technique of ‘restricted consciousness’. He plays down

obvious authorial mediation in favour of limiting the point of view from which

actions and objects are observed and by this way he shows rather than tells. Keith

Cohen, who is also concerned with the transmission between art forms, sees Henry

12
James as a significant figure whose contributions to the comparison of the novel and

the film should not be skipped. Cohen claims that James breaks with the

representational novels of the earlier nineteenth century and ushers in a new

emphasis on “showing how the events unfold dramatically rather than recounting

them” (Mcfarlane, 5), and this is what makes him a major and a rather interesting

writer to be studied in an analysis of the novel and the cinema.

The more one considers the phenomenon of adaptation of novel into film, the

more he is drawn to consider the central importance of narrative because the two

mediations have a great potential and propensity for narrative. Christian Metz,

discussing the film narrativity, writes, “Film tells us continuous stories, it ‘says’

things that could be conveyed also in the language of words, yet it says them

differently” (Mcfarlane, 12). In fact, narrative is not the chief factor the novel and the

film have in common but is the chief transferable element. Still, words like

interference or violation imply dissatisfaction about the whole process of

transference and reveal misapprehensions about the workings of narrative in the two

media. In order to avoid misevaluation, a distinction should be made between what

may be transferred and what cannot be with the emphasis on how the present and

absent features function. At this point, Roland Barthes would be the most appropriate

source with his division of narrative functions.

1. 4. Henry James and The Portrait of A Lady:

In the spring of 1880, in Florence, James recorded in his notebook that he

began The Portrait of a Lady –“that is, …took up, and worked over, an old

beginning, made long before” (qtd. in Feidelson, 711). It is clear that James felt

13
himself to be at a turning point of his career, in some sense at a new beginning. He

was 37 years old; in the past years he had published some twelve volumes; including

two full-length novels of which he later approved enough to admit them to his New

York Edition. However, a little earlier, commenting on this most recent work to

William James, he had regarded his writings up to this time as merely “ a series of

experiments of form”; they were only the first stage of a “step-by-step evolution”

that he anticipated. If up to now he said, he had not wished to “run risk of wasting or

gratuitously using big situations,” it was precisely because he held strongly to “the

importance of subject” in fiction, and “big situations” were in the offing-“to these I

am coming now”. Some months later, planning The Portrait of a Lady, he wrote that

he now intended to test whether he could attain “form in big subjects” as he was

“determined that [this] novel…. [should] be big”(qtd. in Feidelson, 712).

Essentially, then, James at the time of The Portrait was intent upon

something more complex than advancing from experiments in form to a concern with

subject. More fundamentally, he was preoccupied with the meaning of form and

subject, the kind of form that would make a small subject big and the kind of subject

that would stimulate significant experiments of form. (Feidelson, 712). During the

years he wrote The Portrait, James had been writing and exploring the art of fiction,

the subject that was followed by a study of an experiment of writing for the theater.

He expressed indebtedness to the theater: “the precious lesson, taught me in that

roundabout and devious, that cruelly expensive way, for a singular value for a

narrative plan too of the…divine principle of the Scenario… a key that working in

the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both dramatic and the

narrative lock…” (qtd. in Powers, 17).Therefore he would make his fiction dramatic,

that is , immediate in its presentation to the reader, without the interference of the

14
mediating explanatory and omniscient author. He attempted to write a novel like the

text of a play on the stage. However, what he would mainly dramatize in his fiction

would be the psychological adventures of heroes and heroines. In The Portrait, there

is a main character and her “adventures” are dramatized again chiefly by her own

consciousness which is the main reason why the novel, The Portrait, is different

from other novels and why it needs a detailed narrative analysis.

Narrative represents a succession of events and “the term narration suggests

(1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by

addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the

message.” ( Rimmon-Kenan, 2) Therefore, the events, their verbal representation and

the act of telling or writing become the basic aspects of narrative. In Gennette’ s

terms they are “histoiré”, “recit” and “narration” respectively, but, in my study, I

shall call these aspects “story”, “text” and “narration” in line with what Rimmon-

Kenan labeled them.

The first basic aspect of narrative, “story”, points out the narrated events, free

from their disposition in the text but bound to their chronological order, together with

the participants in these events. Although story is a succession of events, the second

aspect of narrative, “text”, is a spoken or written discourse that undertakes their

telling. In text, the events do not necessarily follow a chronological order; the

characteristics of participants are displayed all through it and the contents of

narrative are “filtered through a prism” (Rimmon-Kenan, 3). Since the text is a

discourse, spoken, written or scenic as in film, it implies someone who speaks it,

writes it or produces it. The process of production, which is the third aspect of

narrative, is called “narration” and it needs a narrator and a narratee. Narration might

be real or fictional; this study will deal with fictional narrative and the composition

15
of the analysis of this study will be a reflection of Rimmon- Kenan’s organization of

narrative fiction as pointed out earlier. However, unlike Rimmon-Kenan’s analysis,

the aspect of “story” in this thesis will also include the term “plot”. Plot deals with

the succession of events and the actions of the participants, too, but different from

“story”, it is bound to the disposition of events in the text. The reason why the

analysis of this thesis discusses both story and plot line is that story is the chief

element that fiction and film share, therefore it functions as the standpoint, and that

plot is the most concrete element that shows that if an adaptation of a fiction does not

follow the same scheme with the plot of the fiction, a different story comes out

because of the difference in the reader’s expectations as discussed in Chapter II.

Thus, the exploration of the plot or the scheme of the succession of events in the The

Portrait will reveal the differences between the novel and the film version and allow

a structural investigation between cardinal functions and catalysers, the Barthesean

terms discussed in “Structural Analysis of Narratives”. Eventually, by means of such

a scrutiny, it will be possible to make inferences about the changes in the meaning

and the emphasis between the two mediums.

In her introduction to Narrative Fiction, Rimmon-Kenan points out that in

writing her book she aims “to present a description of the system governing all

fictional narratives” (4). Such an aim requires theoretical considerations, illustrations

from works of narrative fictions, and an organization around “differentia specifica”

of narrative (e.g. events, time, narration). A critical eye on Narrative Fiction would

see that Rimmon-Kenan has reached her aim with her careful elucidation in her work

and, thus conclude that Narrative Fiction would be very useful in a study aiming at

an analysis of narrative in any fiction and would allow an integration of Barthesean

theory of narrative levels in comparison with the film The Portrait of a Lady.

16
 CHAPTER II

ROLAND BARTHES’ THEORY OF LEVELS OF DESCRIPTION

AS A METHOD OF ANALYZING NARRATIVE ELEMENTS

In his article “Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image - Music- Text

Roland Barthes makes the relationship between language and literature explicit:

It is hardly possible any longer to conceive of literature as an art that abandons all
further relation with language the moment it has used it as an instrument to express
ideas, passion or beauty: language never ceases to accompany discourse, holding up
to it the mirror of its own structure- does not literature, particularly today, make a
language of the very conditions of language? (Barthes, 85)

He establishes an analogy by claiming that both linguistics and literature have a

system; a sentence is not just a sum of propositions because not every sum of words

is meaningful; likewise, a text is not just a sum of words, sentences and paragraphs

(Barthes, 85) because words, sentences and paragraphs do not come together by

chance to create meaning. According to Barthes, this starting point allows us to

classify the elements of narrative and the concept is called level of description. In

fact, he sums up the theory of levels set out by Benveniste: “a unit belonging to a

particular level only takes meaning if it can be integrated in a higher level” (Barthes,

85). According to this theory there are two types of relations; distributional and

integrational. If the relations are situated at the same level, they are distributional and

if they are grasped from one level to the next, they are integrational. For that reason,

for a structural analysis, first of all, it is necessary to distinguish several levels of

description:

To understand narrative is not merely to follow the unfolding of story, it is also to

recognize its construction in ‘storeys’, to project the horizontal concatenations of the

17
 narrative ‘thread’ onto a simplicity vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a narrative is
not merely to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from one level to
the next. (Barthes, 87)

Barthes takes up three levels of description in the narrative work: the level of

functions, the level of actions and the level of narration. These three levels are bound

together according to a mode of progressive integration: “a function has only

meaning insofar as it occupies a place in the general action of an actant, and this

action in turn receives a final meaning from the fact that it is narrated, entrusted to a

discourse which possesses its own code” (Barthes, 88). However, this chapter will

only discuss the level of functions of one of the aspects of the narrative, that is the

story together with the plot, since the depth and the scope of the study are framed by

not only an analysis of descriptive levels but also by an analysis of narrative

components. The Barthesean functional exploration of the story will lay out the

signification of the plot elements in the novel that will be compared to the novel’s

film adaptation, The Portrait of a Lady, in terms of the theory of literary dynamics, or

in other words, of primacy effect.

Roland Barthes claims that “A narrative is never made up of anything other

than functions: in differing degrees, everything in it signifies” (qtd. in Mcfarlane,

13), in other words, a function is the smallest narrative unit and the term of

correlation between different levels. The essence of a function is so crucial that

Barthes likens a function to a “seed” that “sows the narrative, planting an element

that will come to fruition later” (Barthes, 89). Taken from the point of view of

linguistics, the function is clearly a unit of content: “what it says is what makes of a

statement a functional unit, not the manner in which it is said” (Barthes, 90). To give

an example Barthes uses a statement “Bond saw a man of about fifty”, taken from

the book Goldfinger, that holds two unequal pressures in its functionality. The first

one is that the character falls into a certain age group, and his age fits into a certain

18
description of his characteristics. The second functionality, which is stronger in terms

of its usefulness, is that Bond is unacquainted with his future interlocutor:

establishing the man’s identity may involve a threat. Functions do not necessarily

coincide with the forms; they may imply strong correlations with actions, scenes,

paragraphs, and dialogues, interior monologues, modes of behaviour, feelings,

intentions, motivations, and realizations of characters. In other words, functions are

independent of linguistic units; they may be represented by a sentence, by sentences

of varying lengths, or the work in its entirety or by syntagm, word or, even within the

word, certain literary elements only.

Considering Barthes’s article “Structural Analysis of Narratives”, any

explanation made for the sake of this study about the concept of “function” would be

far from complete without a clarification about the subdivisions of the functions that

are called “distributional” and “integrational”. A distributional function has a

correlate for another unit on the same level: the purchase of a revolver has a correlate

for the moment when it will be used; picking up the telephone has a correlate for the

moment when it will be put down. Thus distributional functions are complementary

and consequential. As for the integrational functions, they are neither complementary

nor consequential; they are more diffuse but necessary for the meaning of the story.

They may be psychological providing data about the characters regarding their

identity, notations of atmosphere, wealth, etc. In order to understand integrational

functions one must move to a higher level, either to the level of characters’ actions or

to the level of narration; one needs to relate integrational functions to other elements

to assign a meaning. Thus distributional and integrational functions overlay a classic

distinction: the former ones correspond to a functionality of doing while the latter to

a functionality of being.

19
 Not all the functions are of the same importance: some constitute real hinge

points of narrative, while others merely fill in the hinge functions; real hinge points

are called “cardinal functions” and the others are called “catalysers” (Barthes, 93).

For a function to be cardinal, it is enough that “the action to which it refers open (or

continue, or close) an alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent

development of the story; in short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty.”

(Barthes, 94) Rimmon-Kenan also supports this idea in Narrative Fiction when she

talks about the constitutive units of the structure and develops further the idea that

cardinal functions open alternatives by claiming that “structural descriptions show

how events combine to create micro-sequences which in turn combine to form

macro-sequences which jointly create the complete story” (Rimmon-Kenan, 16) The

tie between two cardinal functions is invested with double functionality since they

are both chronological and logical, whereas the tie between catalysers is

chronological. Cardinal functions accomplish the task of telescoping logic and

temporality and they are significant; they entail risk. Between these points of

alternatives the catalysers lay out “safety, rests, luxuries” (Barthes, 95). Still they are

not insignificant because they accelerate, delay or, give fresh impetus to the

discourse: they summarize, anticipate or lead astray. They maintain the semantic

tension of the discourse of the text by saying there has been and there is going to be

meaning.

A cardinal function cannot be deleted without altering the story and catalysers

without altering the discourse. Of course, when Barthes made such divisions he did

not have the cinema in mind but many critics made parallel divisions about the

functions of narrativity in cinema or adaptation. Seymour Chatman, for example,

carries “Barthesean” terminology, the cardinal functions and the catalysers, to

20
cinema as kernels and satellites respectively. When the kernels are deleted or altered

in the film version of the novel, the meaning and the emphasis utterly change.

However, even if the cardinal functions are preserved, varying the catalysers might

also be enough to re-form another narrative structure. Distributional functions,

whether cardinal or catalysing, since they are about the actions and happenings of the

story, are transferable from one medium to the other. However, of the integrational

functions that Barthes, later, subdivides as indices proper and informants, only

informants can be directly transferred.

“Indices proper” refer to the character of a narrative agent, a feeling, an

atmosphere or a philosophy whereas “informants” serve to identify, to locate in time

and space (Barthes, 96). Moreover, indices have implicit signifieds: a statement like

“The moon can be seen half-hidden by the thick clouds” implies a mysterious

situation and alarms that something undesirable will happen. Informants, on the other

hand, are pure data on the level of story such as the names of cities, characters and so

on.

A unit can be both a cardinal function and a catalyser. “To drink a whisky”

might be a cardinal function if it brings an alternative danger or a catalyser if it is just

a sign of modernity or relaxation of the atmosphere. The taxonomy Roland Barthes

makes would be functional in establishing what may be transferred from one medium

to another. Such a chart provides an access to this study since it raises awareness,

beforehand, about what can be transferred and what not. By means of the information

given above, the readers will realize that the novel and cinema have different

languages, that is, not everything the novel tells can be told in the film. Still, with the

help of narrative elements, the two mediums could be compared and consequently,

reader-viewers could find out what replaces the words and sentences of the novel in

21
the film, with what differences, if there are any, in the meaning and emphasis of the

novel. At the first glance, such discovery seems to be an issue about inconvertible or

non-transferable elements; however; add-ons or take offs of the inconvertible

elements are also crucial in understanding the process in which the meaning and the

emphasis of one medium is maintained in the other one. An approach to distinguish

convertible elements from inconvertible ones might imply that the filmmaker does

not have the freedom of making changes in the film version for his own purposes or

ideology. However, one of the purposes of this study is to alert the readers to the fact

that an awareness of the alterations, which are at times desperately needed for the

sake of cinematography, at times for the sake of ideology, can also be an eye opener

about the ideology of the text independent of the medium the text has been presented

in. Focus on the differing components of the film that could be converted in the final

product but were not will provide the readers with an insight into the probable

reasons why things happened the way they did. As a result, by such awareness, the

act of seeing a film version of a novel will be much more meaningful for the viewers

and for the readers who want to read and see a “text”. Thus this study also aims at

being a guide to the language or literature instructors who try to enrich their course

pack with a variety of materials such as the film adaptations of novels. It will also be

helpful for the filmmakers who still want to preserve the major narrative structure.

Still, the fact that not all the thesis deals with the comparison of the two mediums in

terms of levels of description, but with the narrative structure of the text, The

Portrait of a Lady, brings the readers back to the idea that the primary concern of

literature is the novel rather than the film version. Since cinema is most of the time

inspired by literature and makes use of pre-sold and appraised works of literary

world, such a study is crucial for those who consider themselves as a literate people.

22
 CHAPTER III

STORY IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Story can simply be defined as the incidents that take place in a narrative.

Although the definition seems simple, to abstract the story from the text is a complex

process because there may be many other stories embedded in the main story

especially in modern texts. Such a text is difficult to read because it demands that the

reader pay real attention to keep track of the events and characters. In modern texts,

it is almost impossible to make a sequential outline of events. If not explicitly

referred to, the time two embedded stories take place in text time could even occur in

the same period of time. Therefore, for an analysis of story, the main story, as well as

the embedded stories, should be abstracted from the text time in which they were

placed. Such an approach also exposes the hidden relation between the story time

and text time. The difference between story time and text time is usually tried to be

explored by the analysis of the story together with the “plot” but such an exploration

sets story time and text time apart, therefore this thesis will firstly, examine the story

with the embedded stories and, secondly, in Chapter IV, Narrative Time in The

Portrait of a Lady, it will discuss the story in relation with text time.

The Portrait of a Lady is mainly about the life of a deluded woman, Isabel.

There are two turning points in her life; the first, she becomes independent when Mr.

Touchett leaves her a fortune, and the second; she becomes a prisoner when she

marries Mr. Osmond.

23
3. 1. The Main Story-line of The Portrait of a Lady

1- Mrs. Touchett meets her niece, Isabel, in America.

2- She invites her to England.

3- Isabel leaves her family, Caspar Goodwood, her suitor, and her close

friend Henrietta Stackpole behind to live with the Touchett family.

4- In England, Lord Warburton, a rich aristocrat, proposes to Isabel but is

refused just like Mr. Goodwood.

5- Mr. Touchett, who has been ill for some time, gets worse.

6- During Mr. Touchett’s illness comes Madame Merle, a mysterious

woman.

7- Isabel gets to admire Madame Merle blindly and makes an idol out of her.

8- Mr. Touchett, talking to his son Ralph in his deathbed asks whether or not

Ralph considers marrying Isabel. Ralph points out the impossibility of it

since he believes Isabel would rather choose to lead her own way; he

kindly asks his father to leave her some money that would be enough to

satisfy her imaginative yearnings during her life- time.

9- Now that Isabel is rich, she starts traveling in the company of Madame

Merle.

10- Madame Merle introduces Isabel to one of her friends, Gilbert Osmond,

who has no title or property but has an exquisite taste.

11- Isabel is so much impressed with Mr. Osmond that she cannot help

thinking of him during her journey. She decides to get married to him and

devote herself to his thirteen-year-old daughter Pansy.

24
12- Mr. Goodwood visits her and asks for an explanation of such surprising

news, which makes Isabel feel awkward.

13- Ralph tries to warn Isabel against taking a faulty decision but is bitterly

scolded.

14- Isabel gets married to Osmond and starts a life of luxury, of balls and

social gatherings.

15- Lord Warburton comes to visit Isabel at her house in Rome and considers

proposing to Pansy, who is in love with Ned Rosier, a man who would

not be considered a good candidate for a husband by Osmond.

16- Osmond requests Isabel to hurry Lord Warburton to a marriage with

Pansy, and Isabel tries her best although she suspects the true intention of

the lord.

17- Lord Warburton returns to England without proposing to Pansy and

Osmond accuses Isabel of preventing the probable marriage.

18- Osmond sends Pansy to a monastery.

19- Ralph, getting worse, turns back to England.

20- Some time later Isabel gets a letter that tells her that Ralph is about to die;

she asks for permission from Osmond to go to England but is warned that

she might not be accepted as his wife if she leaves.

21- Mrs. Gemini, who is Osmond’s sister and knows all about the past,

encourages Isabel not to listen to her husband revealing the fact that

Osmond and Madame Merle had an affair and that Pansy is Merle’ s

daughter.

25
 22- Isabel, becoming aware of Osmond’s deception, goes to ask Pansy if she

wants to go with her to England since she wants to be some kind of help

to her.

23- She sets up for England on her own and has a chance to talk to Ralph

before he dies. Her grief intensifies since she learns that it is Ralph who

gave her all that richness.

24- Caspar Goodwood offers her a new life but Isabel prefers to go back and

face whatever her fate has to offer her.

Going through the scheme, it is obvious that the Touchett family and Madame Merle

play the most important part in Isabel’s life. Therefore, the narrator provides the

readers with the details of the lives of the Touchett family members and Madame

Merle.

3. 2. The Story-line of The Touchett Family

1- Daniel Tracy Touchett, who is a native of Vermont, married and with a

son, comes to England as a subordinate partner in a banking house.

2- After ten years he acquires a large amount of interest and becomes

wealthy.

3- Mr. Touchett sends his son Ralph to England to have a good education

but he wants him to keep his American spirit as well.

4- Ralph continues with his education in England and before he starts to

work one of his lungs fails. He prefers to stay at home with Mr. Touchett

who already suffers from gut.

26
 5- Mrs. Touchett, who cannot get used to England, starts to travel and comes

home for only three months a year.

6- She brings her niece Isabel with her when she turns back from one of her

usual journeys to America.

3. 3. The Story-line of Madame Merle:

1- Madame Merle gets married to a Swiss man and becomes very unhappy

with her marriage.

2- 10 years later she loses her husband having already developed an affair

with Osmond.

3- Osmond loses his wife when Merle is pregnant to Pansy.

4- In order to save her reputation, Merle leaves all her property to Osmond

so that Osmond announces the girl as his daughter from his wife.

5- As Pansy grows, Madame Merle takes an interest in her future.

6- One day, as a friend of Mrs. Touchett’s, she comes to Gardencourt and

meets with Isabel.

7- She admires Isabel and when she learns that Isabel has a fortune she

decides to introduce her to Osmond as she thinks Isabel will make a good

mother for Pansy both as a soul mate and financial source.

After the Touchetts’ and Madame Merle’s, the third fundamental embedded story

belongs to the heroine, Isabel, reflecting her life before she comes to England. Her

embedded story is important because it encourages the discussion put forward by

some critics that Isabel chooses Osmond for the fact that Osmond is a “father figure”

(Friend, 87) for her.

27
3. 4. The Story-line of The Archer Family or of Isabel before Meeting Mrs.

Touchett

1- Mr. Archer marries Mrs. Touchett’s sister and they have three daughters.

2- Mrs. Archer dies. When Mrs. Touchett interferes with the way Mr. Archer

brings up the girls, Mr. Archer asks Mrs. Touchett to mind her own

business,

Mrs. Touchett leaves.

3- The girls never go to school and the two elder sisters get married.

4- Although Isabel, the youngest sister, never goes to school, she becomes

fond of reading and gives the impression of an intellectual person. Praised

first by her father and then by her sisters, she develops a high sense of

self-confidence and freedom.

5- When Mrs. Touchett offers to take her to England, Isabel is gratified for

the fact that she will have a chance to realize her dreams about the life she

wants to lead.

6- She agrees to go and puts the ocean between Caspar Goodwood, a

businessman who wants to get married to Isabel, and herself.

3. 5. The Relations between The Story and Narration:

Story is strongly related to narration in two ways, by temporal relations and

subordination relations as Rimmon-Kenan discusses in his Narrative Fiction. As far

as the temporal relation is concerned The Portrait is an “ulterior narration”

28
(Rimmon-Kenan, 89) in the sense that the events are narrated only after they happen.

The distance between the narration and the events is never referred to in the text;

however, the distance seems so little that the ulterior narration gives the impression

of simultaneous narration. Such an impression is created through the use of dialogues

as well as extremely detailed acts and scenes. For example when Isabel meets with

Osmond at his house, the narrator describes the scene so vividly that the readers feel

as if they were watching the characters:

Isabel had got up on the assumption that they too were to go into the garden; but Mr.
Osmond stood there, with no apparent inclination to leave the room, with his hands
in the pockets of his jacket, and his daughter, who have now locked her arm into one
of his own, clinging to him and looking up, while her eyes moved from his own face
to Isabel’s. Isabel waited, with a certain unuttered contentedness, to have her
movements directed; she liked Mr. Osmond’s talk, his company; she felt that she
was being entertained. Through the open doors of the great room she saw Madame
Merle and the Countess stroll across the deep grass of the garden; then she turned,
and her eyes wandered over the things that were scattered about her. The
understanding had been that host should show his treasures; his pictures and
cabinets all looked like treasures. Isabel, after a moment, went toward one of the
pictures to see it better; but just as she had done so Mr. Osmond said to her
abruptly-
“Miss Archer, what do you think of my sister?”
Isabel turned with a good deal of surprise.
“Ah don’t ask me that-I have seen your sister too little.”
“ Yes you have seen her very little; but you must have observed that there is not a
great deal of her to see. What do you think of our family tone?” Osmond went on
smiling.
(Chapter XXIV, 281)

Narration could be either the narration of the story or narration in the story

(Rimmon-Kenan, 91). Narration in the story is an embedded story and the narrator

could be a character who engages in narrating the story. Within the character’s story

there might be another character who narrates another story. Such narratives within

narratives create levels of narration. The highest level of this hierarchical structure is

extradiegetic narration in which the incidents of the main story are told and it is

narrated by the extradiegetic narrator. Subordinate to extradiegetic narration comes

the diegetic level in which events narrate themselves since they happen in the present

time of the story. In other words, the actual events of the story that happen in the

29
present time of the story or in the diegetic level become extradiegetic narration when

they are told after they happen. Subordinate to diegetic level comes the hypodiegetic

level in which the incidents take place even before the incidents narrated in the past

in the extradiegetic level. The Portrait of a Lady is a complex novel when the all the

stories, the Touchetts’, Isabel’s and Merle’s, are considered in terms of subordination

levels. Moreover, Henry James is so successful in his transitions from one level to

another that the readers are usually carried away with the story rather than time.

In The Portrait the story of theTouchetts and of Isabel before she gets

married to Osmond are in the hypodiegetic level because they are embedded in an

extradiegetic level to the main story, which recounts the events after Isabel gets

married to Osmond. The narrator who tells the embedded stories that belong to the

Touchett family and Isabel before she gets married to Osmond is the omniscient

extradiegetic narrator, however, the narrator is not stable in terms of levels. Chapter

III starts with a description of Mrs. Touchett and as the extradiegetic narrator goes

back to the past, the level of the narration turns into hypodiegetic and the narrator

becomes the diegetic narrator:

Mrs. Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behavior on
returning to her husband’s house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She
had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a
character which, although it was by no means a benevolence, rarely succeeded in
giving an impression of softness….. (The level of narration turns into hypodiegetic
level, the narrator being diegetic) It had become apparent, at an early stage of their
relations, that they should never desire the same thing at the same moment, and this
fact had prompted her to rescue disagreement from the vulgar realm of accident. She
did what she could to erect it into a law- a much more deifying aspect of it- by going
to live in Florence, where she bought a house and established herself, leaving her
husband in England to take care of his bank.”
( 25-26)

This narration is hypodiegetic because in the novel it takes place in the text in

chapter III after the narrator tells us that Mrs. Touchett has come back to

Gardencourt, England, with Isabel in chapter II. In other words, compared to the

Chapter II, where Lord Warburton, Ralph, and Mr. Touchett meet with Isabel in

30
Gardencourt, the extradiegetic narration, the quotation above exemplifies the diegetic

narrator going down to hypodiegetic level to give information about Mrs. Touchett.

In the same chapter, the diegetic narrator goes on telling about the past. He

carries on with Mrs. Touchett’s story and and goes back to the day when Mrs.

Touchett first met with Isabel, which is again in the hypodiegetic level:

She [Mrs. Touchett] had taken up her niece-there was little doubt of that. One wet
afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young
lady [Isabel] had been seated alone with a book…. There was at this time, however
a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did
much to dispel. The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard at last walking
about the adjoining room. (26)

The next part, the description of the house Isabel lived in, functions as a transition to

change the focus from Mrs. Touchett to Isabel: “It was an old house at Albany-a

large square, double house, with a notice of sale in the windows of the parlor. There

were two entrances,…” (26) and the diegetic narrator starts to tell about Isabel’s

childhood, again in the hypodiegetic level:

She had been in the house at different periods, as a child; in those days her
grandmother lived there…There was a constant coming and going; her
grandmother’s sons and daughters, appeared to be in the enjoyment of the standing
invitations to stay with her,… On the other side, opposite, across the street, was an
old house that was called the Dutch House…The little girl had been offered the
opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this establishment; but having
spent a single day in it, she had expressed great disgust with the place, and had been
allowed to stay at home, where in the September days, when the windows of the
Dutch house were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the
multiplication table - an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of
exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. (p. 28)

Having finished with Isabel’s childhood, the diegetic narrator again turns back to the

day when Mrs. Touchett and Isabel meet in Albany: “It was in the ‘office’ still that

Isabel was sitting on that melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just

mentioned” (Chapter III, 29). The diegetic narrator is again in the hypodiegetic level

although he turns back from the past, from Isabel’s childhood, to the present when

Isabel is a young lady. The reason for the so-called present to be still the

hypodiegetic level is the extradiegetic level of the narration in Chapter II, where

31
Isabel is with Touchett family in England. To summarize, the narrator in The Portrait

constantly changes levels in relation to the story especially when he tells about the

embedded stories of the Touchetts’ and Isabel’s earlier lives but he does it quite

successfully by the help of the transitions between the subjects.

Subordinate to the extradiegetic level comes the diegetic level, when the

events narrate themselves. In The Portrait the diegetic level could be exemplified

with the epistolary form, with two letters one of which is written to Isabel by Caspar

Goodwood (Chap. XI) and the other one is written by Isabel to Lord Warburton

(Chap. XIII). Mr. Goodwood’s letter is as follows:

MY DEAR MISS ARCHER- I don’t know whether you will have heard of my
coming to England, but even if you have not, it will scarcely be a surprise to you.
You will remember that you gave me my dismissal at Albany three months ago, I
did not accept it. I protested against it. You in fact appeared to accept my protest,
and to admit that I had the right on my side. I had come to see you with the hope
that you would let me bring you over to my conviction; my reasons for entertaining
this hope had been of the best. But you disappointed it I found you changed, and
you were able to give me no reason for the change. You admitted that you were
unreasonable, and it was the only concession you would make; but it was a very
cheap one, because you are not unreasonable. No, you are not, and you never will
be. Therefore it is that I believe you will let me see you again. You told me that I am
not disagreeable to you, and I believe it; for I don’t see why that should be. I shall
always think of you; I shall never think of anyone else. I came to England simply
because you are here; I couldn’t stay at home after you had gone; I hated the country
because you were not in it. If I like this country at present, it is only because you are
here. I have been to England before, but I have never enjoyed it much. May I not
come and see you for half-an-hour? This at present is the dearest wish of, yours
faithfully,
CASPAR
GOODWOOD.
(Chap. XI, 109-10)

Considered on its own form, epistolary, this narration is diegetic because it is

subordinate to the upper level, and narrated by Caspar, an extradiegetic narrator

because “narration is always at a higher level than the story it narrates” (Rimmon-

Kenan, 92). The relation between extradiegetic and diegetic becomes even clearer

with the narration before the letter is exposed to the readers: “The letter bore the

London postmark, and was addressed in a hand that she [Isabel] knew-that seemed to

know all the better, indeed as the writer had been present to her mind then the letter

32
was delivered. This document proved to be short, and I may give it entire.” (Chap.

XI, 109). This narration belongs to the extradiegetic narrator narrated in the

extradiegetic level. As far as the letter is considered within itself, on the other hand,

Caspar, while narrating the events that happened in Albany three months before

Isabel came to England, is the intradiegetic narrator narrating the events in the

hypodiegetic level. He is intradiegetic because he is one of the characters engaged in

the story and his narration is hypodiegetic because his narration happened before he

writes the letter, the diegetic narration.

Having referred to the Touchett family’s embedded story and Isabel’s

embedded story before her marriage to Osmond as hypodiegetic narrations narrated

by the diegetic narrator, the third story that belongs to Madame Merle should as well

be defined in terms of levels of narration. It is Countess Gemini who tells Isabel as

well as the readers about the nature of the relationship between Madame Merle and

Osmond; therefore, she is the narrator. As she is one of the characters in the novel

she is an intradiegetic narrator narrating events in the hypodiegetic level:

“I suppose you know that Osmond has been married before? I have never spoken to
you of his wife; I didn’t suppose it was proper. But others less particular must have
done so. The poor little woman lived but two years and died childless. It was after
her death that Pansy made her appearance.”…
“Don’t you perceive that the child could never pass for her husband’s?” the Contess
asked. “They had been separated too long for that, and Merle had gone to some far
country; I think to South America. If she had ever children-which I am not sure of-
she had lost them. On the other hand, circumstances made it convenient enough for
Osmond to acknowledge the little girl. His wife was dead-very true; but she had
only been dead a year, and what was more natural than that she should have left
behind a pledge of their affection? With the aid of change of residence-he had been
living in Naples, and he left it forever-the little fable was easily set going. My poor
sister in law, who was in her grave, couldn’t help herself, and the real mother, to
save her reputation, renounced all visible property in the child.” (Chap. LI, 583-84)

So far in this chapter the relations between story and narration have been discussed.

As far as the temporal relation is concerned The Portarit with its main story has been

defined as an ulterior narration. Regarding the subordination relations some

33
embedded stories in the novel have been examined both in terms of their levels and

their narrators.

The stories narrated in the hypodiegetic level may have various functions in

the narratives within which they are embedded and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

summarizes these functions under three items; actional, explicative, thematic

(Rimmon-Kenan, 92). Some hypodiegetic narratives “maintain or advance the action

of the first narrative by the sheer fact of being narrated, regardless of their content”

(Rimmon-Kenan, 92) just like Scheherezade’s stories in Thousand and One Nights.

Her life depends on narration, she can stay alive as long as she entertains the Sultan

with her stories. In The Portrait, the hypodiegetic narratives are never regardless of

the content; therefore, they function either as explicative or as thematic embedded

stories. A hypodiegetic story has an explicative function when it offers an

explanation of the diegetic level. In other words, such a story explains the events that

lead to the present situation. All the three embedded stories schematized above, the

Touchetts’, Isabel’s in her early life and Madame Merle’s, function as explicative

hypodiegetic narrations.

Just like Mr. Touchett and Mrs. Touchett, Ralph is also been introduced to

the readers by hypodiegetic narration. However, here, only the function of Ralph’s

hypodiegetic narration will be discussed since it is the most essential narration for

Isabel’s life, the extradiegetic narration. The diegetic narrator tells the readers about

Ralph’s education, his principles of life and how his illness affected those principles

in the hypodiegetic level. Ralph takes “the responsibility and honour” (Chap. V, 44)

of his father’s bank but after he catches a violent cold, he becomes “too ill for

anything but a passive life’ (Chap.V, 45). However, “the perfume of the forbidden

fruit seemed occasionally to float past him, to remind him that the finest pleasures of

34
life are to be found in the world of action. Living as he now lived was like reading a

book in a poor translation-a meager entertainment for a young man who felt that he

might have been an excellent linguist” (Chap. V, 45). Once Ralph’s illness gets

worse and he lies in bed “for several weeks between life and death” (Chap. V, 45).

When he recovers, he decides to live in the world of action by observing people: “the

simple use of his faculties became an exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him that the

delights of observation had never been suspected”(Chap. V, 45). This hypodiegetic

narration is explicative since it gives the reasons why Ralph asks his father to

bequest such a big amount of money to Isabel. He wants to observe Isabel while

Isabel drinks the cup of experience instead of him. Ralph makes it explicit when he

tries to warn Isabel against Osmond:

You were not to come down so easily, so soon….You seemed to me to be

soaring far up in the blue-to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of
men. Suddenly someone tosses up a faded rosebud-a missile that should
have never reached you-and down you drop to the ground. It hurts me… as
if I had fallen myself. (Chap. XXXIV, 372).

The hypodiegetic narration in which the information about Isabel’s earlier life

has been given is also explicative in the sense that it explains Isabel’s decision to get

married to Osmond. In Chapter III, the readers learn that Isabel has had some

irregular schooling, three brief stays in Europe and some youthful dancing and play.

She is a bright, alert, high-spirited, pretty, bookish girl, who has led a relatively

secluded, permissive and protected life. The room in which she reads is shut off from

the street on which it might properly have opened, for its door “had been

condemned” (Chap. III, 29) to be “secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl

found it impossible to slide” (Chap. III, 29) and the sidelights are covered with green

paper that prevents even a glance outside. Isabel has been content to leave things so:

as a child she took pleasure in imagining “a strange unseen place on the other

side…a region of delight or of terror”, as a young woman she has never opened the

35
bolted door nor removed the green paper….from its sidelights …never assured

herself that the vulgar street lay beyond” (Chap. III, 29). This hypodiegetic narration

symbolically reveals Isabel’s highly imaginative nature and resistance to facts. In this

sense the narration is explicative of her error, which is to get married to Osmond

without even considering the possibility of truth in Ralph’s warnings.

In the next chapter, Chapter IV, the hypodiegetic narration regarding Isabel

continues and the diegetic narrator tells about Isabel’s father Mr. Archer, what the

people think of him and what Isabel thinks of him. Mr. Archer “had squandered a

substantial fortune, he had been deplorably convivial, he was known to have

gambled freely” (38). Mr. Archer was quite unconventional in his daughters’

upbringing, too. Isabel, for example, never had a permanent home or a school and

every time she went to a school, at the end of a month she had to be removed in tears.

Mr. Archer had even once left his daughters at a hotel for three months “with a

French bonne, who eloped with a Russian nobleman, staying at the same hotel” (38).

People criticized Mr. Archer and declared that he made a very poor use of his life

and had not even brought up his children. However, for Isabel the childhood period

and Mr. Archer as a father meant happiness and protection:

It had been a very happy life and she had been a very fortunate girl - this was the
truth that seemed to emerge most vividly. She had had the best of everything….her
father had kept it [anything disagreeable] away from her- her handsome, much
loved father, who always had such an aversion to it. It was a great fortune to have
been his daughter; Isabel was even proud of her parentage. Since his death she had
gathered a vague impression that he turned his brighter side to his children, and that
he had not deluded discomfort quite so much in practice as in aspiration. But this
only made her tenderness for him greater; it was scarcely painful to have to think
that he was too generous, too good natured, too indifferent to sordid considerations.
(Chap VI, 38).

Even when Mr. Archer left the girls at the hotel with the French bonne, Isabel had

thought it a “ picturesque episode in a liberal education” because her father had a

large way of looking at life, of which his restlessness and even his occasional

incoherency of conduct had been only a proof” (38). This hypodiegetic narration

36
implies that for Isabel her father was an idol and his oddities had never been a source

of criticism for her. On the contrary, Mr. Archer’s “incoherency of conduct” meant

freedom for Isabel, which increased her admiration of her father. Therefore the

hypodiegetic narration is again explicative since it gives clues about what Osmond

might have meant for her, a father figure who was always free in soul, since he was

“indifferent to sordid considerations” such as conventions, values and people’s

criticisms. He was generous because he did not care for money, good-natured

because with great dignity he went on his way without taking care of what people

thought of him. The idea that Isabel has replaced her father with Osmond becomes

clearer when Isabel defends Osmond against Ralph’s accusations. Her words remind

the readers of her idealization of her father discussed above with the quotation in

Chapter VI on page 38:

…he wants me to know everything; that is what I like him for….Of more
importance to whom? It seems to me enough that one’s husband should be
important to one’s self!…. In everything that makes one care for people, Mr.
Osmond is pre-eminent… Mr. Osmond is the best I know; he is important enough
for me…He has a great respect for himself; I don’t blame him for that. It is the
proper way to respect others. He is not important- no, he is not important; he is a
man to whom importance is supremely indifferent. If that is why you call him
‘small,’ then he is as small as you please. I call that large-it’s the largest thing I
know… [He is] a man who has borne his poverty with such dignity with such
indifference. Mr. Osmond has never scrambled nor struggled- he has cared for no
worldly prize. If that is to be narrow, if that is to be selfish, then it’s very well…[he
has] no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor
reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It’s the total absence of all these
things that pleases me. Mr. Osmond is simply a man- he is not a proprietor!” (Chap.
XXXIV, 370-75)

In a sense the previous hypodiegetic narration, in Chapter VI on page 38, when the

diegetic narrator tells about what Isabel has been thinking about her past life and her

father, Mr. Archer, has also a thematic function. A hypodiegetic narration has a

thematic function when the relations between the hypodiegetic and the diegetic levels

are those of analogy such as similarity or contrast. Just like Mr. Archer, Mr. Osmond

is complete for Isabel despite his obvious shortcomings pointed out by people since

Isabel closes her eyes to the facts. The analogy between her impression of her father

37
and the father figure Osmond is of similarity; therefore, the hypodiegetic narration in

Chap. VI has also a thematic function.

The next hypodiegetic narration is the embedded story of Madame Merle’s.

The narrator of Merle’s story is the Countess, an intradiegetic narrator. As far as the

function of Madame Merle’s story is considered, it has both explicative and thematic

functions. Madame Merle’s story is explicative since it gives a clarification for why

Merle wanted to entrap Isabel despite the fact that she liked Isabel. Merle had already

lost the honor of being a wife to the man she loved and a mother to her daughter

because of the circumstances. If Osmond had not married before, Merle might have

had a happy family with Osmond and Pansy. Besides, she would not have lost the

money she had given to Osmond to save her reputation. In this sense Madame

Merle’s story gives an explanation of her cruel plan, thus, her hypodiegetic story also

has an effect on the readers, which is empathy rather than harsh criticism. Madame

Merle’s hypodiegetic narration has as well a thematic function because it

foreshadows Isabel’s story; Isabel will replace Madame Merle, she is going to be the

wife of Mr. Osmond and the mother of Pansy. Just like Madame Merle, she is going

to donate her money to Osmond. Merle’s hypodiegetic narration goes parallel with

Isabel’s main-story, her embedded story reveals the content of the extradiegetic

narration, that is why it has also a thematic function.

The Portrait of A Lady is about a woman who has an aspiration to see the

world and have lifetime experiences. She believes she can decide between what is

wrong and what is right, therefore she never listens to the warnings when she decides

to get married. She is so naïve that she does not realize the true nature her husband-

to- be who is in fact a rigid, conventional fortune-hunter who could be sinister

enough to deceive Isabel and ruin her life. Although the main extradiegetic story

38
belongs to Isabel in The Portrait, there are other stories in diegetic and hypodiegetic

levels that could have explicative or/and thematic functions.

Having discussed The Portrait as a fiction in terms of story, one could

obviously reach the conclusion that the film The Portrait is completely different

from the novel inspite of the fact that there is only one difference in the ordering of

the events. In the novel both the readers and Isabel learn about the intimacy of

Madame Merle-Osmond and Pansy towards the very end; however, in the film, the

viewers watch a scene from which they could obviously interpret that Merle is

Osmond’s mistress. This scene takes place even before Isabel meets Osmond.

Therefore, the text of the fiction and the text of the film of The Portrait motivate the

readers and viewers differently, which leads to a change in the emphasis of the story.

Menakhem Perry in his article about literary dynamics titled “How the Order of a

Text creates its Meanings” discusses the order as following:

Material appearing in the text may determine ‘shades of meaning’ to be activated in

later material which is to be assimilated to it, accentuating certain aspects and
weakening others; anticipating one bit of information about a character and delaying
another, of a different nature entirely, may ‘prejudice’ the reader in advance in favor
or against the character, building up a reservoir of sympathy or reservation that will
be hard to renounce and will condition details of a contrary nature later in the text.
(6)

While reading the novel the readers who know nothing about Osmond and Merle

concentrate on Isabel’s feelings quite objectively after her marriage; in watching the

film the viewers, from the very beginning pity Isabel. Therefore the film The Portrait

builds even more sympathy towards Isabel and more anger towards Merle and

Osmond on the viewers. While the novel motivates the readers to understand the

mystery delayed until the end, the film motivates the viewers to wish Isabel to learn

the truth and help herself to get rid of her delusion. That is why the emphasis of the

novel and the film is different. The difference is created by the order of an element

that reveals Merle-Osmond as having had an affair from which they had a daughter.

39
Since the order of this element deeply affects the readers/viewers expectations and

creates a change of emphasis on the whole meaning, it is a cardinal function. Going

back to the idea of transferability of story to another medium or language, what

should be pointed out is what Todorov strongly states: “Meaning does not exist

before being articulated and perceived…; there does not exist two utterances of

identical meaning if their articulation followed a different course.” (qtd. in Kenan, 8)

which supports Perry’s discussion of the order of elements in the text. One of the

reasons why the articulation of the meaning of the story could be different is related

to literary dynamics that deals with the text continuum, the ordering and distribution

of the story elements, the plot. Therefore, if the readers/viewers want to compare a

fiction with a film version, what they should consider first is the ordering of the

elements, how those elements change their expectations and feelings.

40
 CHAPTER IV

CHARACTERIZATION IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

The novel The Portrait of A Lady consists of 55 chapters and has 635 pages

in Konemann edition. However the movie that has been adapted from the same novel

lasts exactly 142 minutes, quite a short duration compared to a possible duration of

the reading of the book. Owing to the fact that it is impossible for an adaptation to

involve every detail of the text of the novel, the film maker has to be selective both

to be successful in expressing the meaning and in keeping the audience in the theater

during the film. The audience should also be attentive enough to get the utmost

understanding from what they are watching and to praise the performance outside.

Another reason why the producer is supposed to be as selective as possible is that

unlike the enthusiastic readers who turn back to former pages when they realize they

have forgotten the minutiae, the audience who have once seen a movie, for various

reasons, may not wish to watch the same film even if they suspect having skipped

some important detail. Such a probable reluctance to see a movie more than once

forces the filmmaker to choose the most striking and summative plot elements so that

the audience does not have any difficulty keeping up with the pace of the plot of the

adapted film.

Since the film is a pictorial medium rather than a verbal one, many of the

selected essentials of the fiction chosen by the filmmaker need to be transferred from

the verbal expression of the fiction to the pictorial visualization of the film. Thus the

41
words and paragraphs of fiction are replaced by shots and sequences at the end of a

careful process of selection and readjustment of functions. In other words, the

filmmaker differentiates between the cardinal functions and catalysers after reading

the text and decides which functions should and may remain for the final effect of the

text. If he chooses a cardinal function to be present in the film and if that function is

transferable, the producer starts thinking only about the technicalities of the scene.

However, if that cardinal function is not transferable, since it is indispensable for

conveying the meaning, the filmmaker has to find a way to formulate the same

function of the novel in the film, which means that more needs to be considered than

the mere technicalities of the scene. For example, one question is how can the film

version display what a cardinal function of a descriptive paragraph or a five-chapter-

long-omniscient- narrator- commentary, such as the first five chapters of The

Portrait of a Lady, signifies should be considered in detail. That is where the

language of the fiction needs to be translated to the language of the film. Therefore,

the characters and the techniques that formulated those characters, that is the

characterization, are two of the most outstanding challenges to the adaptations for the

filmmakers. The fact that the primary aim of this thesis is to analyze the narrative

elements and their functions in the novel The Portrait of a Lady, allows for the

discussion of the transferability and the meaning of the transferred functions in Jane

Campion’s film version only a limited scope. That is why although this chapter will

examine the notion of character together with the elements of characterization

thoroughly and exemplify them in as detailed a manner as possible as far as the novel

is concerned; it will only foreground some of the differences in the narrative

elements pointed out when the comparison of the novel with the film is concerned. In

this way while the readers will have a comprehensive knowledge of the narrative

42
elements in the analysis of the fiction, the reader-viewers will have a conscious

knowledge about the functions of the novelistic elements both in the novel and the

film as well as the comprehensive idea that the readers will get. Therefore, this thesis

aims at being helpful both to those who are interested in narrative elements and their

functions in narrative fiction and to those who are interested in narrative elements

and their functions and adaptation of those issues to a second medium, that is

cinema.

Since the main element that determines the readers’ or viewers’ conception of

the meaning of the narrative is the story, or the actions, characters seem to be of

secondary importance. After some writers and theorists like D.H. Lawrence, Virginia

Woolf and Helene Cixous questioned “the belief in the ego’s stability” (Rimmon-

Kenan, 30), character has even been pronounced as dead. Due to the fact that

structuralists commit themselves to the ideology that “decentres” man and rejects

“individuality” and “psychological depth” (Rimmon-Kenan, 30), and this thesis

analyzes the narrative from the structuralist point of view, an analysis of characters

or any commentary about characters may seem pointless. Weinsheimer, a

structuralist, claims that:

Under the aegis of semiotic criticism, characters lose their privilege, their central
status, and their definition. This does not mean that they are metamorphosed into
inanimate things (a la Robbe-Grillet) or reduced to actants (a la Todorov) but that
they are textualized. As segments of a closed text, characters at most are patterns of
recurrence, motifs which are continually recontextualized in other motifs. In
semiotic criticism, characters dissolve. (qtd. in Rimmon-Kenan, 32)

However, as Ferrara puts it, the character is central to structural analysis in the sense

that it is a structuring element: “In fiction the character is used as the structuring

element: the objects and the events of the fiction exist-in one way or another-

because of the character and, in fact, it is only in a relation to it that they possess

those qualities of coherence and plausibility which make them meaningful and

43
comprehensible” (Rimmon-Kenan, 35). Henry James also supports this idea, stating:

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the

illustration of character?” (Rimmon-Kenan, 35); therefore, the discussion of the

character, covering the thematic web of the fiction, would only enrich a study of a

structural analysis of narratives. In fact, a structuralist analysis is far from complete

without an analysis of characters because the character is the key to narration due to

the reciprocal relationship between them. An X trait of a character is represented by

an X narrative element; the X narrative element is there because it functions as the

representation of an X trait of a character.

The first six chapters of the novel are of great significance for the fact that

they provide the readers with an insight about the personalities of the characters,

Mr.Touchett, Lord Warburton, and Ralph, who will be quite influential in Isabel’s

life, and Isabel, the heroine, too. However, the film The Portrait of a Lady starts with

Lord Warburton’s marriage proposal to Isabel, which falls into Chapter VI in the

novel. Due to the fact that the film is not a voice-over, a version in which an

omniscient narrator tells the events while the shots take place on the screen, it

requires the producer to come up with a composition of shots that will perform the

same function. To give an example for a description of a character, in Chapter VI,

the direct definition of the omniscient narrator draws a picture of Isabel’s impulsive

nature:

It may be affirmed without delay that Isabel was probably very liable to the sin of
self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she
was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, she was right;
impulsively, she often admired herself. Meanwhile her errors and delusions were
frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his heroine
must shrink from specifying. Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines, which
had never been corrected by the judgment of people who seemed to her to speak
with authority. In matters of authority she had had her own way, and it had led her
into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. Every now and then she found out she was
wrong, and then she treated herself to a weak passionate humility. After this she
held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable
desire to think well of herself…. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she

44
 should find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she might have the
pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. Altogether with her meager
knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her
temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness,
of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look well and to be if possible even better;
her determination to see, to try, to know; her combination of the delicate, desultory,
flame-like spirit and the eager and the personal young girl; she would be an easy
victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part
an impulse more tender and more purely expectant. (Chap. VI, 56-58)

This paragraph functions as a mirror held to Isabel’s personality; it signifies her

naive, impulsive and contradictory nature. These qualities are attributed to Isabel by

the most authoritative voice, the narrator, thus the truth of the information is not

questioned. The functions; naivety, impulsiveness and inconsistency, which have

been analyzed out of the narrator’s definition, are indices proper and catalysers

because they do not signify the possibility of alternative consequences or present

risky moments. On the contrary, they give information about a character,

complementary and supportive of a cardinal function, which is Isabel’s decision to

get married to Mr. Osmond. Since in the film version there is not a verbal

presentation about Isabel to show her flaws, at the scene where Isabel talks to Mr.

Touchette and Ralph about the reason why she does not want to get married to Lord

Warburton and says, “ I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself.

I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do’

(Chap. XV, p. 163), the viewers jump to the conclusion that Isabel is a woman who

tries to break the social restraints the women are tied up with. This serves for the

purpose of Jane Campion, who is known as a feminist filmmaker, since the viewers

will pity Isabel for being a victim of the social constraints and associate themselves

with her. Whenever Isabel fails, the audience sympathizes with the heroine, which

diminishes the distance between the audience and Isabel. In the novel, on the

contrary, with the functions pointing out Isabel’s shortcomings, the narrator ensures

that the readers will not sympathize with the heroine, owing to the technique Henry

45
James favors most and for which was favored mostly. The reason why the novel and

the film have such different effects is that the functions of the catalysers are changed:

Isabel’s negative personnel characteristics - naivety, impulsiveness and inconsistency

- turn into positive characteristics - courage, eagerness and challenge for freedom.

Consequently, the novel and the film create on the readers and viewers a clearly

contrasted emphasis or meaning and that is why seeing an adaptation could not

replace reading the novel. After all, all the catalyser and cardinal functions in the

novel should represent the same function in the film to maintain the same emphasis,

which seems impossible to achieve between literature and cinema, one being verbal

the other visual.

In the novel The Portrait of A Lady, Isabel’s impulsive and contradictory

personality is not only revealed by a direct definition, the narrator’s commentary, but

also by an action, an indirect definition. As Rimmon-Kenan puts it “ A presentation

is indirect when rather than mentioning a trait, it displays and exemplifies it in

various ways.” (Rimmon-Kenan, 61). A trait may be implied by action, speech,

external appearance or environment. An action could be one-time or habitual and

may fall into categories of act of commission, act of omission and contemplated act.

If an action is performed by a character, it is an act of commission; if the action is

something the character should do, but does not, it is an act of omission; and if the

character’s intention or plan is unrealized, it is a contemplated act.

In Chapter VII, after Mrs. Touchett, Ralph, Lord Warburton and Isabel have

dinner, they sit together until late at night. Finally, when Mrs. Touchett tells Isabel

that it is time they went to bed Isabel protests against going up and sleeping.

However Mrs. Touchett insists, pointing out the inappropriateness of staying up late

alone with men: “You can’t stay alone with the gentlemen. You are not- you are not

46
at Albany, my dear.” (p.74), Isabel is puzzled: “Isabel rose, blushing. ‘I wish I were,’

she said.” (p.74). In the end, although she gets annoyed, she complies with her aunt’s

wish. Moreover, surprisingly, she asks Mrs. Touchett to continue to tell her the

proprieties as they come up: “ ‘ Yes, I think I am very fond of it [my liberty]. But I

always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.’ ‘So as to do them?’ asked her

aunt. ‘So as to choose,’ said Isabel.” (p.75). Isabel seems to be very sure of herself

when she says she wants to know the proprieties so as to choose but anyway she

follows her aunt upstairs performing the act that “stirred” (p.75) her temper. This

example is an act of commission and an index proper, a catalyser displaying the

heroine’s personal traits, however indirectly.

The act of commission exemplified above revealing the heroine’s personality

is not a one-time action but a habitual action. Although Isabel says she is eager to

learn social restraints so that she can decide whether to comply with them, she uses

every chance to contradict herself by not protesting against what is expected from her

and her sex. In Chapter XIII, to Isabel, comes a proposal from Henrietta, an

enthusiastic American woman who defends social rights against aristocracy and

feudalism as well as women’s rights against exploitation, to go sightseeing to

London. When Isabel tells Ralph about the plan, Ralph laughs, saying in a

roundabout way that it is improper for two young women to go around alone in

London. Isabel responds: “ Dear me, isn’t anything proper here? With Henrietta,

surely I may go anywhere; she isn’t hampered in that way. She has traveled over the

whole American continent, and she can surely find her way about this simple little

island.” (p.137). Although Isabel is aware of the absurdity of not being able to go to

London with Henrietta, she does not ignore Ralph’s offer to go with them and

chooses to go with Ralph, which is again an example of an act of commission since

47
she complies with proprieties and goes with Ralph rather than going on her own with

Henrietta.

Isabel is a woman who tries to resist the victimization of women in a

patriarchal society where men are identified by their possessions. This is the case

when Mrs. Touchett, in Chapter XV, confronts Isabel about her rejection of Lord

Warburton and Isabel retorts: “ ‘I thought you disliked the English so much’, Mrs.

Touchett answers, ‘So I do, but it is all the greater reason for making use of them’.

Isabel protests against such an answer and asks, ‘Is that your idea of marriage?’”

(149). Mrs. Touchett’s idea shocks her but, later on, when she realizes how Osmond

wants Lord Warburton to marry Pansy, she decides to please Osmond by convincing

Pansy to marry Warburton though she knows Pansy loves Rosier, which is obviously

a sign of the imbalance of her personality. The thought of her own good forces

Isabel to leave aside the idea of marriage that she strongly held against Mrs. Touchett

before. That is why in her talk to Pansy she says: “ ‘Your father would like you to

make a better marriage,’ ‘ Mr. Rosier’s fortune is not at all large’” (Chap. XLIII,

470). Both of the two situations function as catalysers since they reflect Isabel’s

notion of marriage in the past and today. In the past, the idea of making use of people

sounded absurd to Isabel because she was an idealist but today the very same idea

seems to be acceptable. Now that Isabel has become a pragmatist, the idea of getting

married for financial benefit sounds acceptable and even necessary. On the whole,

such an idea serves a sacred purpose, that is, to please Osmond and save her own

marriage. It is clear that the act of commissions unveils the writer’s, Henry James’s,

main purpose: to depict a society in which women are like toys having no liberty of

standing on their own. However, the picture James draws is not completed yet; he

also unfolds a weakness on the part of women because even the most marginal one,

48
Isabel, yields to social restraints and even loses the courage to maintain her real

personality.

The catalysers, which are taken from the novel and discussed above, reveal

the fact that Isabel is impulsive but at the same time not brave enough to stand up

against society. The narrative elements used to represent her reluctance to stand up

against society have been acts of commission as exemplified. As for the

characterization of Isabel in the film version, the same function is implied by not an

act of commission but by a different type of act, that is act of omission. In the film,

when Isabel is in London with Ralph and Henrietta, they visit a museum. There,

having seen so many historical treasures and sculptures reminding her of her thirst to

see the world, Isabel becomes extremely excited. Symbolically, she wants to touch

the works of art meaning that she is determined to live through many experiences

and still endure the test of time just like the works did. Thus, whenever Isabel goes

closer to one of the sculptures, she leans towards the sculpture and reaches to touch

it. Every time she is about to, an officer whistles to warn her not to touch anything

and Isabel does not. This scene is repeated three times and brings the reader-viewers

back to the same function stated about Isabel’s nature; she is impulsive because she

cannot stop the urge to touch even though she hears the whistle. The expression on

her face shows an extreme confusion; despite the whistle she still seems to be

thinking of touching, but changes her mind and turns back to other sculptures

foreshadowing confusion and failure in her life. Since both fiction and film welcome

the use of metaphors and symbols, a literate person could easily make transfers in

commentary between the two mediums, and the previous interpretation is one of

those commentaries. It is clear that what is stated in the novel about Isabel by means

of act of commission, is also stated in the film by means of an act of omission. Such

49
a functional comparison between the novel and the film leads to a better

understanding of the text The Portrait of a Lady both as a fiction and a film since it

lays bare the underlying meaning created by the symbols. Still since this thesis aims

at exposing, with the help of narrative elements, how the text is written and, with the

help of descriptive levels, how the meaning is created, the rest of the chapter will be

exploring the techniques of constructing the characterization.

Since Isabel is a character who goes after her sudden impulses, she suffers for

what she has done rather than for what she has not done. In other words, her acts of

commissions bring her soul to decay, which was due to her arrogance, whereas the

acts of omission give her time to know herself better. There is a direct commentary

by the narrator, the most authoritative voice in the text, which proves the fact that it

is Isabel’s self-esteem that provokes her to err:

Whether or no she were superior people were right in admiring her if they thought
her so [superior]; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly than
theirs, and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confounded with
superiority. It may be affirmed without delay that Isabel was probably very liable to
the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own
nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence that she was
right; impulsively, she often admired herself. Meanwhile her errors and delusions
were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his
heroine must shrink from specifying.
(Chap.VI, 56)

Despite the fact that the narrator makes direct interpretations, the narrator, being

aware of his authority that would force the readers to accept his interpretations, tries

to avoid being judgmental and puts the emphasis on the active role of the reader.

Although the readers are provided with the information about the character’s inner

thoughts from time to time, in general, they are left on their own to interpret the

character’s personality by evaluating the character’s actions. For example, when

Lord Warburton proposes to Isabel, the narrator prefers not to make any direct

comments about the heroine’s refusal. Instead, in his characterization of Miss

Molyneux, Lord Warburton’s sister, he makes an indirect characterization that adds

50
poignancy to Isabel’s refusal of the offer. Through Isabel’s focalization and the direct

speech between the characters Miss Molyneux, Miss Stackpole and the Lord, the

narrator makes it clear that Isabel would never fit into the life of a lord’s wife.

Between Isabel and Miss Molyneux there is an analogy that emphasizes the

contrast between the two. Isabel who has an immense curiosity about life is

“constantly staring and wondering” (Chap. IV, 39); she likes to express herself at

every chance and could be skeptical of things such as English people because of their

social conventions and class system (Chap. VI). Unlike Isabel, Miss Molyneux is a

Lady, who shows her acceptance of the class system with the cross she wears

because “The silver cross is worn by the eldest daughters of Viscounts.” (Cap. XIV,

141) and is quite happy with the quiet life she leads. Therefore, Isabel, who is aware

of the kind of life she will be living with a lord, does not get married to Lord

Warburton, although she has considered it, and indirectly, the narrator diminishes the

distance between the reader and Isabel by the heroine’s focalization:

Of the two ladies from Lockleigh, She [Miss Molyneux] was the one Isabel had
liked best; there was such a world of quiet in her. Isabel was sure, moreover that her
mild forehead and silver cross had a romantic meaning- that she was a member of
High Church sisterhood, had taken some picturesque vows. She wondered what
Miss Molyneux would think of her if she knew Miss Archer had refused her brother;
and then she felt sure that Miss Molyneux would never know-that Lord Warburton
would never tell her such things. He was fond of her and kind to her, but on the
whole he told her little. Such at least was Isabel’s theory; when, at table, she was not
occupied in conversation, she was usually occupied in forming theories about her
neighbors. According to Isabel, if Miss Molyneux should ever learn what had
passed between Miss Archer and Lord Warburton, she would probably be shocked
at the young lady’s indifference to such an opportunity; or rather (this was our
heroine’s last impression) she would impute to the young American a high sense of
general fitness. (Chap. XIV, 139)

Even the readers, becoming focalizers through Isabel’s focalization, agree with the

heroine’s act of omission not to marry since the paragraph clearly reflects Miss

Molyneux and Lord Warburton’s treatment of her through Isabel’s objective point of

view. Just as Isabel could guess the readers guess that Isabel’s life would be no

different than Miss Molyneux’s life.

51
 The direct speech between Henrietta (Miss Stackpole) and Miss Molyneux

and the Lord in the same chapter, also enlightens Isabel’s character since it makes an

analogy between the two women characters, the heroine and the lady. Isabel and

Miss Molyneux are presented in similar circumstances in the sense that they live in

the same era and the same place and both are single. The only difference between

them is the advantage of Miss Molyneux since she is independent financially and

free to do whatever she wants to even tough she prefers not to. In chapter XIV, Miss

Molyneux reminds Lord Warburton that they should go home since they have invited

some guests to tea, and the lord agrees immediately. Miss Stackpole, a feminist who

likes to watch and warn and even insult women for their indifference whenever there

is a chance, is not satisfied with the Lord’s docile gentility: “I hoped you would

resist!” Henriettta exclaimed. “I wanted to see what Miss Molyneux would do.”

(146). The Lady answers, “I never do anything,” and comes the reply from Miss

Stackpole: “ I suppose in your position it is sufficient for you to exist!” (146). This is

an indirect representation of the traits of the three women, especially of Isabel.

Because Isabel yearns for more than just to exist, that is “to drain the cup of

experience” (chap.15, 163) put in words by Ralph’s symbolization, and it is enough

for Miss Molyneux just to exist, the contrast between Isabel and Miss Molyneux is

reinforced since the difference between the two women shows Isabel’s nature more

clearly.

Although the actions that the characters perform or do not perform could

signify characteristic traits and be catalysers, they could as well be cardinal functions

since they create risky moments. There are two notable examples of contemplated

acts, which function both as catalysers representing characteristic traits and as

cardinal functions creating other possibilities to take place in the narration. The first

52
example is a contemplated act of Countess Gemini. In Chap. XXV, when Isabel first

comes to see Mr. Osmond together with Madame Merle, the Countess and Madame

Merle go out for a walk leaving Isabel and Osmond alone. During the walk, talking

to Madame Merle, the Countess implies that she is going to warn Isabel against

Merle and Osmond: “You are capable of anything, you and Osmond. I don’t mean

Osmond by himself, and I don’t mean you by yourself. But together you are

dangerous- like some chemical combination.” (p.290). Here the readers realize that

the Countess knows something that the readers are not allowed to know for the time

being and begin to wish the “secret” to be revealed. However, the events concerning

the intimacy between Osmond and Isabel are carried on without the secret being

revealed. The readers do not learn what Countess knows until she explains it herself

in chapter LI. Thus, the fact that the Countess does not tell Isabel the nature of the

relation between Osmond and Merle is a contemplated act and as a catalyser

functions to demonstrate Gemini as a woman who is ineffectual in serious matters

just as she is in her life. In this sense the contemplated act is a catalyser but at the

same time a cardinal function for the continuation of the narrative. If the Countess

had told the truth to Isabel, Isabel probably would not have got married to Osmond

or even if she got married, things would have been different between Osmond and

her.

The second example of a contemplated act functioning both as a catalyser and

a cardinal function is Lord Warburton’s. In one of the famous balls in Osmond’s

house, Lord Warburton makes clear that he intends to get married to Pansy. Such an

intention makes Osmond extremely happy because all he wants is to marry Pansy to

a wealthy man and see her as a lady. However, contrary to Osmond’s dreams, the

Lord changes his mind and, in chapter XLVI, he comes to say goodbye to the

53
Osmonds, not even mentioning anything about Pansy. Not surprisingly, Osmond

accuses Isabel of preventing the Lord from getting married to Pansy and it becomes a

turning point in their marriage. Isabel for the first time starts to accept the fact that

she has made a mistake. Therefore, the Lord’s contemplated act emphasizes Isabel’s

naivity in the past and stubbornness not to change today. Talking to Henriaetta,

Isabel confesses: “I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to but it

seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him

before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more

deliberate. One can’t change, that way.” (Chap. XLVII, 525), “that way” meaning to

leave Osmond. The reason why Lord Warburton’s contemplated act is also a cardinal

function is that Isabel becomes self-conscious, and knows what to do after Ralph’s

death:

She never looked about her; she only darted away from the spot. There were lights
in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily
short time-for the distance was considerable- she had moved through the darkness
(for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here she only paused. She looked all
about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not
known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path. (Chap. LV,
634)

The quotation above takes place at the end of the novel when Isabel has chosen not

to turn back to her previous life with Osmond. She could have stayed in Gardencourt

with her aunt or gone with Goodwood to America where she could have been happy.

She could even have waited for Lord Warburton and live like a lady. However, she

decides to go back to Osmond, for one reason, Pansy. Lord Warburton’s

contemplated act speeds up Isabel’ s recognition of the extent of Osmond’s cruelty,

which expands Countess Gemini’s sorrow for Isabel and motivates Gemini to tell

Isabel the truth, which causes Isabel’s rebellion against Osmond about going to

England to see Ralph and, the most important of all, prepares the background for

54
Isabel’s final decision. Having learned the truth from the Countess, Isabel visits

Pansy at the monastery where she makes a promise:

“Oh, I will do everything they [Osmond and Merle] want. Only if you are here I
shall do it more easily”
Isabel reflected a little.
“I wont desert you,” she said at last. “Good-bye, my child.”
Then they held each other a moment in a silent embrace, like two sisters; and
afterwards Pansy walked along the corridor with her visitor to the top of the
staircase. “Madame Merle has been here,” Pansy remarked as they went; and Isabel
answered nothing she added, abruptly, “I don’t like Madame Merle!”
Isabel hesitated a moment; then she stopped.
“You must never say that-that you don’t like Madame Merle.” Pansy looked at her
in wonder; but wonder with Pansy had never been a reason for non-compliance.
“I never will again,” she said, with exquisite gentleness.
At the top of the staircase they had to separate, as it appeared to be part of the mild
but very definite discipline under which Pansy lived that she should not go down.
Isabel descended, and when she reached the bottom the girl was standing above.
“You will come back?” she called out in a voice that Isabel remembered afterwards.
“Yes- I will come back.”
Isabel has already adopted Pansy as her own child and has always wished the best for

her even when Osmond tortured her about Lord Warburton’s proposal to Pansy.

Isabel has been more considerate about Pansy’s feelings than her own marriage. Now

that Isabel knows the true nature of Madame Merle and Osmond, she does not want

to leave Pansy alone. Pansy is sensitive and fragile but much wiser than Isabel. Being

aware of these, Isabel decides not to let Pansy to be overruled by her father. In this

scene, the setting also supports such a commentary if it is interpreted symbolically.

While Isabel and Pansy are parting, Pansy does not go down the stairs because it is

one of the rules and she has to follow the rules. The rules are of the monastery, but at

the same time, they are Osmond’s and Pansy has no choice but to follow them.

However, unlike Pansy, Isabel is on the move, she is free and the one who is

powerful, therefore, should help. All the chain-like events emerging from Lord

Warburton’s contemplated act, that is not to propose to Pansy, show that his act has

also a cardinal function. As a result, a function could sometimes be both a catalyser

and a cardinal function and the fact that The Portrait of A Lady is full of such joint

functions makes it a texte plaisir in Barthes’ terms.

55
 “Character, as one construct within the abstracted story, can be described in

terms of a network of character-traits.” (Rimmon-Kenan, 59) The construction of the

network of the character traits is done by “assembling various character indicators

distributed along the text continuum and when necessary, inferring the traits from

them.” (Rimmon-Kenan, 59) The two basic indicators are direct and indirect

representation. So far, in the chapter, they have been exemplified by two narrative

elements, action and speech. The examples for the indirect representation of a

character have covered all the three types of action- act of commission, omission and

contemplated action- and the examples for speech have covered the two types: direct

“speech” belonging to the character describing herself/himself, and conversational

“speech” taking place between characters emphasizing the differences between them

and giving a clear idea about all of them. The next narrative technique for the

indirect representation of a character is “external appearance”.

External appearance might refer to a character’s physical features brought

from birth such as the shape of the nose, the eyes, and lips. It might also refer to the

character’s habitual behavior such as how he uses his hands, combs his hair or what

he wears. The best examples of the usage of external appearance are Caspar

Goodwood, and the shape of his chin; and Ralph Touchett, with his hands always in

his pockets. Caspar Goodwood has a square jaw that seems to add masculinity and

power to his appearance as well as his personality. His chin is referred to many times

by either Henriettta or Isabel. However unlike Isabel, Henrietta never hesitates to

emphasize how attractive Caspar Goodwood is: “…I see his face now, and his

earnest, absorbed look, while I talked. I never saw an ugly man look so handsome”

(Chap.XI, 106). Caspar gives the same impression to Isabel but Isabel is determined

to hide her feelings and not to be attracted by Caspar’s masculinity. Whenever Isabel

56
looks at Caspar, she notices his jaw and tries to suppress what she really feels: “As

Isabel looked at him it seemed to her that his jaw had never been more square. This

might have displeased her; nevertheless she rejoined inconsequently-…” (Chap.XVI,

166) Thus the shape of the jaw indirectly demonstrates Caspar’s masculinity, which

is perceived differently by the two women, Henrietta and Isabel. On the day Caspar

sends Isabel a letter to ask for a permission to visit her, Isabel easily guesses that

Caspar is coming to make sure that Isabel is not getting married. As Caspar enters

the room, Isabel observes him and the narrator gives the inner thoughts of the

heroine: “ Isabel perceived that he had quite the same voluntary look that it had worn

in the earlier days; but she was prepared to admit that such a moment as the present

was not a time for relaxation” (Chap. XXXII, 352). As they talk, Isabel continues to

think: “there was a dumb misery about him which irritated her; there was a manly

staying of his hand which made her heart beat faster” (Chap. XXXII, 357).

The second example for the external appearance is Ralph’s. The fact that his

hands are always in his pockets implies his social standing; he does not have to work

and he is quite mature in evaluating the events. Knowing what Isabel wants, that is to

realize her dreams to see the world, Ralph asks his father to leave a large amount of

money to Isabel in his will. However, he does not consider the possibility his father

brings up: whether or not Isabel is ready to handle that much money and will be able

to keep away from the fortune-hunters.

The last narrative technique used for the indirect representation of character is

“reinforcement with analogy”. “The analogy may emphasize either the similarity or

the contrast between the two elements compared, and it may be either explicitly

stated in the text or implicitly left for the reader to discover” (Rimmon-Kenan, 68).

The name of the heroine, Isabel Archer, is a good example for the analogous names.

57
The surname Archer brings to the mind the virgin Goddess who carries a bow, and

the name Isabel, is a variant name of Elizabeth, the Hebrew etymon of which is “God

‘is’ my oath” (Friend, 88). Isabel is a girl in whom innocence and moral rigor are

combined. As she is innocent, she could easily be a prey to Merle and Osmond, and

she has a high sense of morality because she chooses to suffer for Pansy by turning

back to Osmond.

The second analogy of names is not an actual name but a nickname, that is of

Mrs. Touchett’s. Isabel and her sisters have known Mrs. Touchett by a nickname and

the first time they meet Isabel utters the name: “ ‘You must be our crazy Aunt

Lydia!” and Mrs. Touchett accepts it: “ ‘…I am your aunt Lydia but I am not

crazy…’” (Chap. III, 30) Lydia is a biblical character who is known to be the first

Christian converter in Europe. She was in the right place at the right time with the

right heart and with the right attitude thus she was baptized and became a Christian.

Since she was a dealer and quite wealthy, she was independent of her husband and

could travel a lot with her own money. She was also very generous and hospitable,

and after she became a Christian she opened her house to a group of Christians and

served them as much as she could. Thus Aunt Lydia is a perfect name for Mrs.

Touchett because when she goes to see Isabel, Isabel has been looking for a change

for a long time in her life, and therefore the timing of Mrs. Touchett is as miraculous

as “Lydia’s” being at the right place at the right time. Just as Lydia was, Mrs.

Touchett is independent, wealthy and is fond of traveling. After she takes Isabel with

her to England, she is generous and kind and never tells Isabel that it is, she herself

who pays for Isabel’s expenses and that Isabel does not have money of her own. For

all these reasons the nickname ‘Lydia’ matches with Mrs. Touchett’s personal traits.

58
 The name Osmond also has two analogues. The first possible meaning of the

name Osmond may be derived from old English, meaning “protection of God”, or

“divine guardian” (Friend, 89). When the character of Osmond is taken into

consideration, it could be said that the analogy is ironic because rather than a divine

guardian, Osmond has been merciless predator. On the other hand, the name could

as well have a straight analogy with the character Osmond meaning “protection of

God” or “divine guardian” as a reinforcement to emphasize how Isabel perceives

Osmond before he traps her. Isabel rejects both Lord Warburton, because of his

English hereditary traits, and Caspar Goodwood, because of his hard masculinity and

power. She seeks to find a gentle, courtly, tender and exquisitely civilized man and in

her quest she mistakenly thinks Osmond is the right man. The second meaning that

could be attached to the name Osmond may also be derived from Medieval Latin

with the gloss “world mouth” (Friend, 89). It suggests that Isabel swims rapturously

into the mouth or symbolically is trapped by Osmond. The three names Isabel

Archer, Aunt Lydia and Osmond have etymological analogues, but the name

Osmond is also visual not in the sense that Osmond is a round and fat character but

in the sense that Osmond has a deep hole to entrap.

Due to the fact that film is a visual version, some details of a fiction could be

exposed more clearly in an adaptation of a novel. The information that the name

Osmond could mean ‘world mouth’ is a catalyser and it fills in the blanks about the

characteristic traits of Osmond and always reminds the readers of his cruelty. As far

as the film version is considered, since the names are kept the same in the film “The

Portrait of a Lady”, Osmond also functions in the same way as a catalyser. However,

considering the possibility that the film viewers may not know the meaning Osmond

signifies, Jane Campion places a scene in the film where Osmond opens his mouth

59
by repeating the statement “ I am absolutely in love with you” and Isabel, getting

smaller, swims into his mouth. This scene does not seem to be part of the events; it is

more like a description about Osmond’s hidden motivations concerning Isabel.

Henry James could have exposed the possible meanings of the characters’ names in

his novel but he did not for the reason that he did not want to influence the judgments

of his readers about the characters.

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 CHAPTER V

TEXT-TIME IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

The notion of time for human beings is “uni-directional, an irreversible flow,

a sort of one- way street”(Rimmon-Kenan, 44). Natural processes also support this

notion: days follow nights and seasons come after one another in a succession

followed by a new year. Just like the existing linearity in nature there is also linearity

in personal thoughts in the sense that they follow a certain sequential form. Apart

from the natural and the personal time there is also an intersubjective temporality

which people establish to facilitate living together. Narrative time is not different

FROM these three temporalities because it is also linear; however, unlike natural,

personal and social time, narrative time is spatial. In other words the temporality in

text emerges from the process of its reading.

Time in a narrative is described as ‘the relations of chronology between story

and text” (Rimmon-kenan, 45). Since the narrative text has no other temporality than

the one derived from its reading, time in narrative is pseudo-temporal which means

that the incidents taking place in the narrative are fictitious; therefore, so is the time.

The sense of temporal linearity in narrative is created by means of “representation

(language), and object of the represented (the incidents of the story)” (Rimmon-

Kenan, 45). There is a difference between text-time and story time, which is directly

related to the notion of story, and plot discussed in Chapter, I. The text unfolds in a

linear succession and this linearity does not necessarily correspond to the

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chronological succession of events. On the contrary, it deviates from it and creates

different kinds of discordances.

Time in general may be viewed in three aspects: order, duration and

frequency. Statements about order would answer the question “When?” in terms like

first, second, last, before, after and etc. Statements about duration would answer the

question how long in terms like an hour, a year, long, short, from X to Y. Statements

about frequency answer the question “How often?”, the number of times an event

appears in the story and the number of times it is narrated in the text.

5. 1. Order

The main types of discordances between story order and text order are known

as flashback and retrospection. However, since this thesis follows Gennette and

Rimmon-Kenan’s terminology, the two concepts, flashback and retrospection, will

be referred to as analepsis and prolepsis respectively. An analepsis is “a narration of

a story-event at a point in the text after later events have been told”. (Rimmon-

Kenan, 46) Prolepsis, on the other hand, is “a narration of a story event at a point

before earlier events have been mentioned” (Rimmon-Kenan, 46). In other words the

narration takes a short journey into the future of the story. In order to discuss the

analepsises and prolepsises in a novel, one needs to define “the first narrative”. The

first narrative is the narrative onto which analepsises and prolepsises constitute a

temporarily second narrative. The idea of the first narrative reminds one of the

concepts of extradiegetic level of the narration discussed in Chapter III about story.

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 The function of an analepsis is to provide past information either about the

character, event or story line mentioned at that point in the text- homodiegetic

analepsis, or about another character, event or story line- heterodiegetic analepsis.

The novel The Portrait of a Lady starts with a scene where Mr. Touchett,

Ralph and Lord Warburton are at Gardencourt waiting for Mrs. Touchett and Isabel

to appear. The first two chapters take place at Gardencourt and the three men meet

with Isabel. However, the following two chapters, III and IV, give information about

the characters that were introduced, referring back to the past; therefore, these two

chapters supply many examples of analepses.

Considering the fact that the present time in the novel is the day the three men

are enjoying the sun and waiting for the ladies, Mrs. Touchett and Isabel, the first

narrative is defined as the chain of the events that follow what happened in the first

and second chapters. Chapter III opens with the information about Mrs. Touchett:

why she left England and her husband, and what she did after she settled in Florence:

“Mrs. Touchett indulged in no regrets nor speculations, and usually came once a year

to spend a month with her husband, a period, during which…” (26) This turning back

to the past is an analepsis and since Mrs. Touchett is a character that takes place in

the first narrative, although not physically, the analepsis is homodiegetic. In the same

chapter the narrator goes on with Isabel, the day she met with Mrs. Touchett in

Albany: “One wet afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately

narrated, this young lady {Isabel} had been seated alone with a book.” (26). Isabel is

also a character that takes place in the first narrative; thus, the information about her

is a homodiegetic analepsis. However, in the same chapter there is information about

Mr. Archer, Isabel’s sister Lilian and her husband Edmund: “{Isabel} knew, knew,

finally, that Edmund Ludlow, Lilian’s husband, had taken upon himself to attend to

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this matter, in consideration of which the young couple, who had come to Albany

during Mr. Acrher’s illness, were remaining there for the present, and as well as

Isabel herself, occupying the mansion.” (31). Because of the fact that Mr. Archer,

Lilian and Edmund Ludlow do not take place in the first narrative, the narration

about them is a heterodiegetic analepsis.

In The Portrait of a Lady, the events unfold themselves according to the

cinematic technique discussed in Chapter I about Henry James and The Portrait of a

Lady. As stated, James tried to make The Portrait “dramatic”, immediate in its

presentation to the reader, without the interference of the mediating explanatory and

omniscient author, attempting to write a novel like a play on the stage for its

audience. Therefore, it is obvious that, in The Portrait, the reader does not see

examples of prolepses. Prolepses replace the kind of suspense, deriving from the

question “What will happen next” by another kind of suspense “How is it going to

happen?” because the reader is confronted with the future event before its time,

which is contrary to the idea of dramatic fiction. Thus, in The Portrait, prolepses do

not take place.

5. 2. Duration

The notion of duration is more complex compared to the notions of order and

frequency. It is not difficult to arrange the events in the text time to talk about order

or to count how many times an event is told in the text to talk about frequency.

However, it is much more difficult to describe duration if duration is considered as

the relation between the time period that reading the text takes and the time period

that the events in the story take. That is because there is no way of measuring text-

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duration, that is, the time of reading varies from reader to reader, providing no

objective standard. In order to provide the notion of duration with strong grounds

rather than a subjective standard, Gennette proposes a temporal-spatial relationship.

The measure yielded by this relation is the speed. Gennette claims “Constancy of

pace in narrative is the unchanged ratio between story-duration and textual length,

e.g. when each year in the life of a character is treated in one page throughout the

text” (Rimmon-Kenan, 52). In other words, to talk about duration means to talk

about the relation between the duration in the story measured in minutes, hours, days,

months, years and the length of the text devoted to it in lines and pages. There are

two main forms of modification of pace: acceleration and deceleration. The effect of

acceleration is produced by devoting a short segment of the text to a long period of

the story while the effect of deceleration is produced by devoting a long segment of

the text to a short period of time. The maximum speed created by acceleration is

ellipsis and the minimum speed created by deceleration is descriptive pause.

The most significant example of ellipsis in The Portrait of a Lady takes place

when Isabel leaves Rome with Madame Merle to travel around the world. Just before

Isabel leaves with Madame Merle, in Chapter XXX, Isabel goes to see Pansy to

please Mr. Osmond and the chapter ends with a sentence “ And the small figure

[Pansy] stood in the high, dark doorway, watching Isabel cross the clear, grey court,

and disappear into the brightness beyond the big portone, which gave a wider gleam

as it opened.” (Chap. XXX, 343). The next chapter opens with an ellipsis:

Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months, an interval sufficiently
replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely
concerned with her; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late
springtime, shortly after her return to the Palazzo Crescentini, and a year from the
date of the incidents I have just narrated. (Chap. XXXI, 344)

The narrator prefers not to give the incidents that took place during the year Isabel

traveled around the world and leaves it to the reader to imagine what might have

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happened and what that might have changed for Isabel. The omission forces the

readers’ imagination while it significantly reduces the number of the pages to go

deep into the cardinal events such as Isabel’s marriage to Mr. Osmond.

The descriptive pause on the other hand is a segment of the story that

interrupts the action with a longish description. A good example of it takes place in

Chapter XLII in The Portrait when Isabel is alone in the drawing room trying to

figure out the relationship between her husband Osmond and Merle. Her feelings are

described in detail; the whole chapter is devoted to a few hours starting from the

moment Isabel asks the servant to attend to the fire and bring fresh candles to the

moment when the fire and all the candles are gone out. Although the duration of the

text is about three or more hours, the space that is allotted to Isabel’s internal

analysis is 13 pages long, starting on page 454 and continuing to page 468. Here the

narrator does not tell any events related to the main story line; that is why, Chapter

XLII is a descriptive pause.

In between the two poles, ellipsis and descriptive pause, come two other

paces the summary and the scene. In the summary the segment of story period is

compressed to a relatively short space in the text time. For example, in Chapter XL,

the narrator tells what Madame Merle has been doing during her absence from

Rome: “At one time she [Madame Merle] had spent six months in England; at

another she had passed a portion of a winter in Paris. She had made numerous visits

to distant friends, and gave countenance to the idea that for the future she should be a

less inveterate Roman than in the past” (Chap. XL, 431). In this summary a year in

Madame Merle’s life has been narrated in four sentences. Thus, the summary serves

the purpose of filling in the time the narrator does not want to tell about for many

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possible reasons, which, in this summary, is that the narrator does not want to detract

from the main story line.

In the scene, story-duration and text-duration are considered identical. In The

Portrait of a Lady, the form used for scene is the purest scenic form, dialogue:

“You must stay here.”

“I should like to stay, as long as it seems right.”
“As seems right-as seems right?” He repeated her words. “Yes, you think a great
deal about that.”
“Of course one must. You are very tired,” said Isabel.
“I am very tired. You said just now that pain is not the deepest thing. No-no. But it
is very deep. If I could stay-”
“For me you will always be here,” she softly interrupted. (Chap. LIV, 620)

The readers usually have a tendency to evaluate acceleration and deceleration as

indicators of importance and centrality. The more important events or conversations

are given in great detail in deceleration, and the less important ones compressed in

acceleration. Henry James in The Portrait of A Lady prefers not to surprise the

readers by summing up briefly the most central event or rendering trivial events in

detail. He sticks to the conventions as far as the notions of acceleration and

deceleration are concerned.

5. 3. Frequency

Frequency is the relation between the number of times an event appears in the

story and the number of times it is narrated or mentioned in the text. In other words,

frequency is about repetition. A narration could be singulative, repetitive or iterative.

Singulative narration is the most common narrative form since it is telling

once what happened once. An example from The Portrait of A Lady would be: “ She

[Countess Gemini] entered the room with a great deal of expression, and kissed

Isabel, first on her lips, and then on each cheek, in the short quick manner of a bird

drinking” (Chap. XXXV, 383).

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 Repetitive narration is telling a number of times what happened once. The

repetitions of the narrative do not necessarily have to belong to the same narrator or

focalizer. In The Portrait, the repetitive narration is Isabel’s marriage and every time

it is narrated there is a change in the focalizer. The first reference to Isabel’s

marriage takes place when Isabel and Caspar Goodwood meet: “Mr. Goodwood

fixed his eyes for a moment on the floor and then at last raising them- ‘Does she

know Mr. Osmond?’ he asked. ‘A little. And she doesn’t like him. But of course I

don’t marry to please Henrietta,’ Isabel added.” (Chap.XXXII, 355). This is also the

first time the readers realize that Isabel has decided to get married to Mr. Osmond.

The fact that the exradiegetic narrator does not provide the information for the

readers before this conversation adds to the surprise because if the exradiegetic

narrator addressed the actual readers and gave the information there, he would create

a distance between the readers and the fictional characters. However, since the

readers get the information during a conversation between the characters, they feel

more intimate with the story since they are not reminded that they are readers.

The second time Isabel’s marriage is referred to is again during a

conversation, between Mrs. Touchett and Isabel: “ ‘Aunt Lydia, I have something to

tell you.’ Mrs. Touchett gave a little jump and looked at the girl almost fiercely.

‘You needn’t tell me. I know what it is.’ ‘I don’t know how you know.’ ‘The same

way that I know when the window is open-by feeling a draught. You are going to

marry that man.’” (Chap. XXXIII, 360). The next and the third time the reference to

Isabel’s marriage is made is when Isabel and Ralph are talking: “ ‘I [Ralph] feel

tired. But I wasn’t asleep. I was thinking of you…At the point of expressing properly

what I think of your engagement…You were the last person I expected to see

caught.’” (Chap.XXXIV,367-68). All the references made to Isabel’s marriage

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indicate that all of the characters that are involved in Isabel’s life have negative

impressions of Mr. Osmond, and therefore, are trying to warn Isabel against

marrying him. In Chapter XXXV, the extradiegetic narrator gives Isabel’s feelings

and emphasizes Isabel’s stubbornness and resistance to seeing the facts:

The discreet opposition offered to her marriage by her aunt and her cousin made on
the whole little impression upon her; the moral of it was simply that they disliked
Gilbert Osmond. The dislike was not alarming to her; she scarcely even regretted it ;
for it served mainly to throw into higher relief the fact, in every way so honorable
that she married to please herself…She felt herself disjoined from everyone she had
ever known before –from her sisters,…from Henrietta, who , she was sure would
come out, too late, on purpose to remonstrate; from Lord Warburton, who would
certainly console himself, and from Caspar Goodwood, who perhaps would not,
from her aunt, who had cold shallow ideas about marriage, for which she was not
sorry to manifest her contempt, and from Ralph, whose talk about great views for
her was surely but a whimsical cover for a personal disappointment. (Chap. XXXV,
377)

This reference to Isabel’s marriage before she gets married to Mr. Osmond is the

fourth. Here the narrator is the extradiegetic, God-like omniscient narrator; however,

the focalizer is Isabel. Thus, it is obvious that the narrator avoids making any

commentaries about Isabel’s decision, which brings the idea that the events talk for

themselves without the need for the narrator’s interference.

The last time Isabel’s marriage is mentioned is when Isabel and Pansy are

talking to each other: “ ‘Papa has told me you have kindly consented to marry him,’

said the good woman’s pupil. ‘It is very delightful; I think you will suit very well.’

‘You think I shall suit you?’ ‘You will suit me beautifully; but what I mean is that

you and papa will suit each other…You will be a delightful companion for papa.’

‘For you too, I hope.’” (Chap.XXXV, 382) This is the last reference and the fact that

it is Pansy who brings it up makes it more important because she is the only one who

is enthusiastic for the marriage. Her enthusiasm and need for a mother turn out to be

the strongest urge for Isabel to live with Osmond. Therefore, Pansy is the only

person Isabel trusts and listens to about the marriage and the fact that Pansy’s

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reference is the last to take place in the text tells the readers that the moment Pansy

and Isabel talk over the marriage, Isabel decides not to consider anyone’s idea but

Pansy’s. That is why, in the novel after the occasion where Isabel and Pansy talk,

another chapter starts with a scene that takes place at least four years after Isabel gets

married to Osmond, which is disposed of with a singulative narration of Madame

Merle to Ned Rosier: “…She had a poor little boy who died two years ago, six

months after his birth…” (Chap.XXXVI, 389)

Apart from singulative and repetitive narration in The Portrait, there is also

iterative narration that is telling once what happened a number of times. When

Caspar Goodwood goes to visit Isabel at her house after years of her marriage, he

becomes one of Mr. Osmond’s friends. Mr. Goodwood repeats his visits and the

narrator tells about what he and Mr. Osmond usually do: “Osmond asked him

repeatedly to dinner, and Goodwood smoked a cigar with him afterwards, and even

desired to be shown his collections….Caspar took to riding on Campagna, and

devoted much time to this exercise; it was therefore mainly in the evening that Isabel

saw him.” (Chap. XLVII, 531) The use of past simple and selection of words, the

verb ‘to devote’, or the adverbs, ‘repeatedly’, ‘mainly’, indicate the events narrated

in this description happen regularly, and therefore, the narration quoted above is

iterative.

The Portrait of A Lady is a rich fiction to supply examples for the analysis of

text-time. Due to the fact that it is a long novel, it is not surprising to see many

examples of order, duration and frequency.

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 CHAPTER VI

FOCALIZATION IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Every story is presented through a “prism”, a “perspective”, or an angle of

vision verbalized by the narrator but the angle of the vision does not necessarily have

to be the narrator’s. The phrase “point of view” used to be the term for this “angle of

vision verbalized by the narrator” until Gerard Gennette introduced the word

“focalization” into the terminology of narratology. Gennette refused to use “point of

view” for the reason that the phrase embraces visual associations while it disregards

verbal discourse. Although Rimmon-Kenan follows Gennette and uses the term

“focalization” instead of “point of view”, she does not hold the same reason

Gennettte does. According to Rimmon- Kenan, the term “focalization” also covers

cognitive, emotive and ideological orientations as well as visual connotations and

verbal discourse while the term “point of view” refers only to visual aspect.

Since the focalizer and the narrator do not always have to be the same person,

in order to find out the answers to the questions “Who is the focalizer?” and “Who is

the narrator?”, firstly, the answers of the questions “Who sees?” and “Who speaks?”

should be given. Since there has been differences between the answers put forward

by different theorists, the issue of focalization has been controversial in narratology.

Narratologists such as Booth, Friedman, and Romberg have taken up the issue and

presented different points of view and definitions. For Rimmon-Kennan the basic

principles of focalization are:

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 1- Focalization and narration are distinct activities

2- In so-called “third-person center of consciousness”, the center of

consciousness is the focalizer, while the user of the third person is the

narrator.

3- Focalization and narration may sometimes be combined as it happens

with free indirect speech.

The term focalization both needs a focalizer and a focalized subject or object:

“the subject (the ‘focalizer’) is the agent whose perception orients the presentation,

whereas the object (the ‘focalized’) is what the focalizer perceives” (Rimmon-Kenan,

74). There are types of focalization, facets of focalization and verbal indicators of

focalization. Each aspect will be discussed in this chapter with the examples taken

from the novel The Portrait of a Lady but the verbal indicators of focalization will be

taken up only when a need to point them out arises.

6. 1. Types of Focalization

Focalization could be external or internal to the story. According to the

position, the focalizer could be external or internal and the focalized could be seen

either from within or from without. If the focalized is seen through his inner thoughts

or feelings, he is focalized from within but if he is seen through his outlook, he is

focalized from without. Focalization might be fixed throughout the narrative, but it

might also alternate between different focalizers. The degree of persistence changes

from one text to another.

When the perception through which the story is rendered is that of the

narrating self rather than the experiencing self, it is external focalization and when

the narrating self and the experiencing self are the same, it is internal focalization.

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Since external focalization is felt to be close to the narrating agent, its vehicle is

called “narrator focalizer” (Rimmon-Kenan, 74). In Chapter XV, in The Portrait of a

Lady, there is an example of external focalization by the narrator-focalizer:

…and that he [Ralph] remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he
should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper. I say
he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at
these moments of Isabel. To think of Isabel could only be for Ralph an idle pursuit,
leading to nothing and profiting little to anyone. His cousin had not yet seemed to
him so charming as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps
and the shallows of the metropolitan element. (Chap. XV,152).

This narration is a focalization of an external focalizer, since the narrator does not

take part in the story, and the vehicle is the narrator-focalizer, “I”. The focalized,

Ralph, is seen from within since his feelings towards Isabel are been described. In

this narration, the fact that the external focalization by the narrator-focalizer appears

in the first person “I” is striking and surprising because, when the narrator shows

itself in the first person “I”, the readers tend to think that the narrator is internal or

will participate in the events; however, that is not the case. In The Portrait, the

narrator likes playing such games with his readers and keeps surprising them. In

Chapter I, the first paragraph starts with the narrator-focalizer’s narration:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour
dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in
which, whether you partake of the tea or not-some people of course never do- the
situation is in itself delightful. Those I have in mind in beginning to unfold this
simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements
of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country house,
in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the
afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left of the finest and the
rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer
light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the
smooth, dense turf. (Chap. I, 7)

In this narration, the narrator-focalizer provides his readers with a detailed

description of the setting and uses many verbal indicators of internal focalization

such as “admirable”, “perfect”, “splendid”, “finest” and “rarest” and sounds like an

internal focalizer. However, it is doubtful since the narrator also implies that he will

not be participating in the story by saying “Those I have in mind…” (Chap. I, 7)

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Therefore, in The Portrait of A Lady, it is tricky to define the narrator and the

focalizer due to different use of “I” as the external narrator-focalizer.

The focalization could be internal when the focalizer participates in the story.

Usually the focalizer is a character in the story. The narration when Isabel meets with

Mr. Goodwood to announce her engagement is an example for internal focalization

and change of focalizers:

1) Caspar Goodwood stood there-stood and received a moment, from head to foot,
the bright, dry gaze with which she rather withheld than offered a greeting. 2)
Whether on this side Mr. Goodwood felt himself older than on the first occasion of
our meeting him, is a point which we shall perhaps presently ascertain; let me say
meanwhile that to Isabel’s critical glance he showed nothing of the injury of time. 3)
Straight, strong, fresh, there was nothing in his appearance that spoke positively
either of youth or of age; he looked too deliberate, too serious to be young, and too
eager, too active to be old.4) Old he would never be, and this would serve as a
compensation for his never having known the age of chubbiness. 5) Isabel perceived
that his jaw had quite the same voluntary look that it had worn in earlier days; but
she was prepared to admit that such a moment as the present was not a time for
relaxation.6) He had the air of a man who had traveled hard; he said nothing at first,
as if he had been out of breath.7) This gave Isabel time to make reflection.8) “Poor
fellow,” she mentally murmured, what great things he is capable of, and what a pity
that he should waste his splendid force! What a pity, too, that one can’t satisfy
everybody!” It gave her time to do more… (Chap.XXXII, 352)

In the first sentence there are two focalizers: the narrator and Caspar. The narrator-

focalizer tells the readers about the movements of the characters: “Caspar Goodwood

stood there-stood and received a moment, from head to foot…” and Isabel rather

“withheld” a look “than offered a greeting”. In this narration, there are two focalized

subjects: Caspar and Isabel, both seen from without. However, the adjectives

“bright” and “dry” describing Isabel’s gaze gives idea that Caspar is also a focalizer,

although internal and Isabel is focalized from without by Caspar. In the second

sentence, the narrator tells his readers that Caspar felt himself older compared to the

first time he was introduced to the readers, thus the narrator is again the focalizer and

focalized, Caspar, is seen from within. In the rest of the sentence, “to Isabel’s critical

glance he showed nothing of the injury of time”, Isabel is the focalizer and the

focalized is Caspar from without. Isabel is the limited observer since she does not

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know that Caspar feels older now while the narrator- focalizer has a bird’s eye view,

being able to read through Caspar’s feelings. The third sentence is a narration of

Isabel’s focalization of Caspar Goodwood from without since his appearance is

described. The next sentence, the fourth sentence, is the continuation of Isabel’s

focalization. The fifth sentence is still Isabel’s focalization by an internal focalizer,

and Caspar is the focalized from without. The sixth and the seventh sentences are

still Isabel’s remaining internal focalizer and Caspar’s being the focalized from

without. The last sentence is more complex because the narrator is the external

focalizer and Isabel is focalized from within since her thoughts about Caspar, such as

“Poor fellow”, are revealed. However, Isabel is also a character-focalizer and an

internal focalizer, since she perceives Caspar as the focalized from within when she

thinks about his capabilities.

Obviously in The Portrait of a Lady, the focalizer does not remain fixed, it is

sometimes external, sometimes internal and there could be shifts among several

focalizers even in a one-paragraph narration, which adds to the richness of the

narrative techniques used in The Portrait.

6. 2. Facets of Focalization

In Narrative Fiction, Rimmon-Kenan discusses “facets of narrative” and

makes a categorization of three of these facets: the perceptual, the psychological and

the ideological.

The perceptual facet of focalization involves space and time. The focalizer,

external or internal, either takes a panoramic or simultaneous view, a bird’s eye

view, or takes a limited view if the focalizor is internal. As far as time is concerned,

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external focalization might be “panchronic” in the case of an unpersonified focalizer,

who knows all the temporal dimensions of the story, that is, past, present or future, or

retrospective in the case of a character focalizing his own past whose knowledge is

limited to his own past and present. In The Portrait of A Lady, only the narrator-

focalizer could take a bird’s eye view since he can provide the readers with the

characters’ past and go into the characters’ minds to narrate their focalization both in

the past and the present time of story as the narrations quoted above in Types of

Focalization. Still, due to the fact that the narrator- focalizer never gives information

about what will happen to the characters in the future in the story time, his view

cannot be considered exactly “a bird’s eye view”. For example, the novel ends when

Isabel turns back to Italy to Gilbert Osmond and to Pansy leaving Caspar Goodwood

to wait for her. The readers do not have any idea about what will happen in the future

between Isabel and her husband in regards to their marriage. There are many

possibilities regarding what will happen to Isabel: Isabel might get divorced, begin to

live on her own and support Pansy. Or Mr. Osmond might forgive her for going to

England and they might go on with their unhappy marriage trying to find a good

husband for Pansy. Or Isabel might get divorced and turn back to America to get

married to Caspar Goodwood. The narrator leaves the readers in curiosity since he

refuses to take a bird’s eye view for the future and does not tell the future in the story

time.

Opposite to the bird’s eye view, panchronic view that enlightens the past,

present and the future time of the story, comes the limited, retrospective view that

only enlightens the past since a character focalizer could only know what happened

in the past and if only it happened to him or her. In The Portrait, limited and

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retrospective focalization usually comes from Isabel especially at times when she

regrets marrying Osmond:

She had effaced herself, when he first knew her; she had made herself
small, pretending there was less of her then there really was. It was because she had
been under the charm of extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken points
to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of
courtship any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature than, as one saw
the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. (Chap.
XLII, 458)

Here the focalization is retrospective since Isabel goes back to the past and focalizes

her feelings at the time. In other words, now, in the present time of the story, Isabel

focalizes the feelings that she had for Osmond in the past. Also, she compares them

with what she feels in the present time about Osmond and the narrator tells her

retrospective focalization using past perfect tense and present focalization in simple

past tense. In this narration, Isabel knows the past and the present, but she does not

know the future, what she will feel for Osmond in the future, that is why her

focalization is limited.

The psychological facet of focalization is about the cognitive and emotive

orientations of the focalizer towards the focalized. The cognitive component signifies

the opposition between unrestricted and restricted knowledge while the emotive

component signifies the opposition between the objective and the subjective. The

ideological facet, on the other hand, represents the ideology the text discusses,

sometimes put forward by a character or by a narrator.

The psychological facet of focalization involves a cognitive and an emotive

component. Knowledge is the key word for cognition. Thus, the cognitive

component of focalization is about restricted and unrestricted knowledge. The

knowledge of an internal focalizer is restricted by definition since the focalizer is the

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part of the represented world. When Isabel is on the way to Gardencourt to see Ralph

in his deathbed, she thinks about her future about which she has no idea:

She saw herself, in the distant years, still in the attitude of a woman who had her life
to live, and these intimations contradicted to the spirit of the present hour. It might
be desirable to die; but this privilege was evidently to be denied her…. It couldn’t
be that she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many
things might happen to her yet…She should not escape she should last. Then the
middle years wrapped her about again, and the grey curtain of her indifference
closed her in. (Chap.LIII, 603)

It is only natural that Isabel does not know about her future and, just like her, the

readers are curious to know the future. The only agent who might know the future,

the narrator-focalizer, on the other hand, does not provide the readers with the future

events that might happen to Isabel. The idea that the narrator-focalizer does not have

a restricted knowledge comes from the fact that he is not an internal focalizer, thus,

he has a bird’s eye view, and he uses past perfect, past simple, or dialogues to

narrate, which means he knows both the past and the present. The narrator-focalizer

is most likely to know the future and, if so, his not telling the future is done on

purpose, that is, to leave the rest to readers’ imagination.

The emotive component, on the other hand, is about focalization being

neutral, objective or colored, subjective. Both external and internal focalizers could

be objective or subjective. When the focalization is colored or subjective, the

focalizer adds his/her feelings into what she has perceived. In The Portrait of A Lady,

since Isabel is the heroine, the narrator usually enters her mind and narrates her

focalization, which is subjective most of the time. For example, when Isabel travels

from Rome to England to see Ralph, despite her husband’s discontent, she does not

enjoy the places that she has seen, which is extremely surprising since she is the

same woman who had been looking forward to seeing different places of the world

and had gone to travel around the world for a year as soon as she had inherited

money. The narrator tells her feelings during the journey:

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 On her long journey from Rome her mind had been given up to vagueness; she was
unable to question the future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes, and
took little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out though they were in
the richest freshness of spring. Her thoughts followed their course through other
countries-strange-looking, dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no
change of seasons, but only, as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of winter. She had
plenty to think about; but it was no reflection, nor conscious purpose, that filled her
mind. (Chap. LIII, 601)

The reason why Isabel feels blue is that, now, she knows it will be hard to turn back

for the fact that neither herself nor Osmond will be the same in their marriage.

Moreover, she does not know what to do about it. Thus, she perceives the rich spring

as if it were a dull, cold winter and reflects her feelings to nature. She is the internal

focalizer and the focalization is subjective, which emphasizes the way she feels.

Similarly, in Chapter LII, when Isabel goes to visit Pansy before leaving for England,

the narrator describes Isabel’s impression of the monastery:

Isabel had been at this institution before; she had come with Pansy to see the sisters.
She knew they were good women, and she saw that the large rooms were clean and
cheerful, and that the well-used garden had sun for winter and shade for spring. But
she disliked the place, and it made her terribly sad; not for the world would she have
spent a night there. It produced today more than before the impression of a well-
appointed prison; for it was not possible to pretend that Pansy was free to leave it.
This innocent creature had been presented to her in a new and violent light, but the
secondary effect of the revelation was to make Isabel reach out her hand to her.
(Chap. LII , 593)

Here, again Isabel is the internal, subjective focalizer because although the

monastery is a peaceful place, she compares it to a prison because she is aware that

for Osmond the monastery is a way to put Pansy away from Isabel and Ned Rosier.

In The Portrait, subjective focalizaton takes place more than objective focalization

since it is a psychological novel. Even in the narration of actions with the verbal

indicators, focalization becomes subjective: “Henrietta kissed her, as Henrietta

usually kissed, as if she were afraid she should be caught doing it; and then Isabel

stood there in the crowd, looking about her, looking for her servant” (Chap. LIII,

603). In this sentence, the clause “ as if she were afraid she should be caught doing

it” is a subjective perception either coming form the narrator-focalizer or Isabel

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emphasizing the fact that Henrietta is a person who is not comfortable with physical

contacts.

The last facet, the ideological facet of focalization consists of “ a general

system of viewing the world conceptually” (quot. Rimmon-Kenan, 81) in accordance

with which the events and the characters of the story are evaluated. Since the

dominant perspective is usually that of the narrator-focalizer’s, the additional

ideologies become subordinate to the narrator-focalizer. However, in The Portrait of

A Lady it is not the case. Since the narrator avoids being authoritative as discussed in

previous chapters, the dominant ideology becomes a character-focalizer’s, Isabel’s

ideology about the world. In the beginning of The Portrait of A Lady, Ralph tells

Isabel that in order to see the ghost of Gardencourt, “You must have suffered first,

have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge” (Chap.V, 54). Isabel

as a young, happy, innocent person evidently does not qualify; however, she remains

eager to see the ghost. Finally, by the end of the novel, on the night of Ralph’s death,

“She apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition; for… in the cold, faint dawn,

she knew that a spirit was standing by her bed” (Chap. LV, 621) It is as though a

quest has been achieved: she has sought her suffering and miserable knowledge and

found them. Although she is engaged in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, she

has been driven by their opposites, and has devoted herself to death, and immobility,

and suffering by marrying Osmond. Still, in the end when she has a chance to be

happy by refusing Caspar Goodwood and going back to Osmond, Isabel seems

determinate to live in darkness and suffering. The reason why Isabel chooses to go

back is due to her ideology. Isabel believes in perfection “It was only on this

condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best…should move

in a realm of light, of natural wisdom of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully

80
chronic…” (Chap. VI, 56) and that she will never be wrong “ She thought it would

be detestable to be afraid or ashamed…She had an infinite hope that she should

never do anything wrong…It was wrong to be mean, to be jealous, to be false, to be

cruel…”(Chap, VI, 57). Due to the ideology Isabel holds about the world, it is

impossible for her to turn back to happiness, that is, why, Isabel’s refuses Henrietta’s

advise to leave Osmond:

“I can’t change, that way,” Isabel said.

“Why not, I should like to know? You won’t confess that you have made a mistake.
You are too proud.”
“I don’t know whether I am too proud. But I can’t publish my mistake. I don’t think
that is decent. I would much rather die.”
“You won’t think so always,” said Henrietta.
“I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall
always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him before all the
world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One
can’t change, that way,” Isabel repeated. (Chap. XLVII, 524)

Thus, the reason why Isabel chooses to suffer is that she cannot swallow to have

been wrong in marrying Osmond. Perhaps she turns back to Osmond since she hopes

to compensate for her mistake at least to herself by suffering. Knowing the ideology

Isabel holds for life, the end of the novel does not surprise the readers, on the

contrary, it proves that Isabel insists on her idea that one needs to be perfect and

failure in perfection is not excusable and the responsibility for the failure should be

shouldered even at the expense of suffering until the last day.

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 CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

In this thesis, although the main aim has been to explore the narrative

structure of The Portrait of a Lady, since Henry James has been considered to be one

of the most “sceneographic” writers of the nineteenth century, a comparison of his

novel The Portrait of A Lady with its adaptation, Jane Campion’s adaptation of The

Portrait of a Lady has also been taken into account. However, the theory for the study

of the adaptation with a comparison of the novel has been Roland Barthes’ theory of

functional units, cardinal functions and catalysers, which he discusses in his article

“Structural analysis of Narratives”. Such a comparison serves the purpose of

showing how certain elements are transferred to the film version and the consequent

changes in meaning and emphasis. Still, not all the narrative elements of the novel

have been compared to their transferred forms in the film due to the limited scope of

the study. The functional comparison of the narrative elements has only been carried

out in Chapter III, “Story” and in Chapter IV, “Characterization”.

In Chapter III, related to the order of events, it has been pointed out that in

comparison of the novel with the film, although there is one main difference in the

main story-line, the meaning and the emphasis of the novel utterly change for the fact

that the element that is transferred differently to the film is a cardinal function. The

concerned cardinal function in the novel The Portrait of A Lady shows itself when

Isabel learns how Osmond and Madame Merle entrapped her. Also, the readers are

exposed to the mystery at the time when Isabel, as a character taking place in the

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story of the novel, learns it. However, since in the film version the viewers are given

the information that Osmond and Merle have sinister plans for Isabel before Isabel

knows anything, the viewers start to sympathize and identify themselves with the

heroine. Thus, the viewers lose their objective point of view, which closes the

distance between the character and the viewer and change the effect.

In Chapter IV, it has been pointed out that the names, especially analogous

names in the novel, play an important role to help the readers to determine

characters’ personalities. “Osmond” has been one of those important analogous

names because it also means the “world mouth” that has been referred to with a

striking scene in the film where Isabel swims into an Osmond’s mouth, although

there is no reference to the name in the novel. Such a difference is not a cardinal

function because, instead of creating risky moments, it reinforces Osmond’ cruelty.

To summarize, to adapt a novel with fidelity concern demands all the cardinal

functions in the novel to be kept in its adaptation.

Any differences in the cardinal functions change the meaning and the

emphasis of the novel utterly. As for the catalysers, if they are kept the meaning and

emphasis will remain the same in the film and if they are enriched with scenes in the

film version, the meaning and the emphasis will even be more powerful. To reach a

conclusion, what the film maker wants to achieve in his adaptation is the main

determiner for the functions to be kept or changed, which is also related to the

ideology that the film maker wants to argue.

Everyone who sees a film based on a novel feels able to comment at levels

ranging from the personal remarks to professional observations both about the nature

and the success of the adaptation involved. Thus, unlike the other technical matters

with the film, the issue of adaptation interests everyone. The commentaries on

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adaptation move backwards and forwards from those who talk of novels as being

betrayed by filmmakers to those who disregard the original work by claiming that

reading the book instead of watching its adaptation would be a waste of time. As for

the filmmakers adaptation is an appealing phenomenon either for financial reasons or

for high-minded respect for literary works. It is not surprising that many filmmakers

choose adaptations for the security of a pre-sold title. It is almost for sure that the

respectability and popularity achieved in one medium will infect the work created in

another. Moreover, it is easier to buy the rights of an expensive book than develop an

original subject. Still not everyone has the same attitude. Dewitt Bodeen, co-author

of the screenplay for Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962) claims that ‘adapting literary

works to film is, without a doubt, a creative undertaking, but the task requires a kind

of selective interpretation along with the ability to recreate and sustain an established

mood’ (qtd. in Mcfarlane, 7). That is, the adaptor should see himself as owing loyalty

to the source work but the idea of loyalty has been a controversial topic for both

filmmakers and literature society.

As to the audiences, whatever their complaints about the violation of the

source work are, they have continued to want to see the film as what the books ‘look

like’. Since they are constantly interested in the mental images they created while

reading the novel, all they want to do is to compare their images with those created

by the filmmaker. Of course, as Christian Metzt, says, the reader ‘will not always

find his film, since what he has before him in the actual film is now somebody else’s

fantasy’ (qtd. in Mcfarlane, 7). In other words, despite the uncertainty that the audio-

visual images of film will coincide with their conceptual images, the reader-viewers

persist in forming audiences in order to find in the film their imaginative world of the

novel. There is also a curious sense that the verbal account of the people, places and

84
ideas that make up much of the appeal of the novel can be easily transmitted into

another medium. In this respect, one is reminded of Anthony Burgess’s view about

adaptation: ‘every best selling novel has to be turned into a film, the assumption

being that the book itself whets an appetite for true fulfilment- the verbal shadow

turned into light, the word made flesh’ (qtd. in Mcfarlane, 7). It seems that there is an

urge to have verbal concepts bodied forth in perceptual concreteness. Considering

that the novel and the film have been the most popular narrative modes of the

nineteenth and the twentieth century respectively, it is not surprising to see that

filmmakers have found a source of ready material in the novel with its pre-tested

stories and characters. Sometimes they do not even care how much popularity was

tied to the verbal mode. Unlike the filmmakers, who are mainly interested in

financial profit, the critics are judgemental especially about fidelity. From newspaper

reviews to longer essays in critical anthologies and journals fidelity to the original

novel has been the major criterion for judging the film adaptation.

Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of a single, “correct” meaning. This

correct meaning is the one the intelligent reader makes out of the text and the

filmmaker adheres to or in some sense violates or completely changes. Whatever the

situation is, he cannot ensure the spirit and the essence of the work because it is

almost impossible to determine if the filmmaker’s reading of the original will

coincide with that of many other readers/viewers. Since such coincidence is unlikely,

the fidelity approach seems a doomed venture and unilluminating, that is, the critic

who criticizes an adaptation by using fidelity approach is in fact saying no more than

“this reading of the original does not match with mine in these and these ways”,

which is really a subjective judgement.

85
 Few writers on adaptation have specifically questioned the possibility of

fidelity; though many seem not to embrace it, they still regard it to be a criterion to

be considered both by the filmmaker and the viewer. Still, if one asks questions such

as “Should an adaptation be faithful to the original source? Could it be? To what?” as

Morris Beja asks in Film and Literature, one is led to recall those efforts at fidelity to

times and places remote from present day life. In the film version of period novels,

like Dickens’s or Austen’s, one often senses exhaustive attempts to create an

impression of fidelity, which does not go beyond producing a distracting quaintness

since novels are made up for literature fans while films are made up for a wider

audience of all societies. In short, the issue of fidelity is a complex one and critics

should not encourage filmmakers to see it as a desirable goal in the adaptation of

literary works.

For the reasons discussed above, it seems obvious that the insistence on

fidelity has led to a suppression of more rewarding approaches. In fact, the fidelity

approach fails to take into account that not everything in the novel can be directly

transferred into film, even if it could be, still there might be differences for the sake

of art: literature is literature, film is film. Thus the deviations from the source work in

the film might be caused by either impossibility of direct transference or filmmaker’s

own conscious or unconscious purposes. In reality, in the film, every deviation from

the original leads to a change on a number of facets, such as their effect and

ideology. However, a study on the two mediations to find out the effects of the

alterations made in the film version of the novel could only be carried out if the

narrative is taken as the central phenomenon.

Some writers have proposed strategies that seek to categorize adaptations so

that fidelity to the original loses some of its original position. For example, Geoffrey

86
Wagner categorizes adaptations into three as transposition, commentary and analogy.

Wagner is not the only one who made attempts at such classifications, which had

important implications for those who were concerned in the issue of adaptation. Such

classifications changed the course of the approach of fidelity in the meantime and

proved that words like violation suggests misapprehension in adaptation. The modern

understanding of adaptation now requires that literature be treated as literature while

film as film, which needs to be pointed out for the sake of this study.

Jane Campion is considered to be a successful film maker because, rather

than trying to be loyal to the text, she adds her ideology in to the film she makes.

That is why while Henry James’s novel is a novel in which events tell themselves

without the interference of the extradiegetic narrator’, Jane Campion’s film The

Portrait of A Lady is accepted as feminist adaptation of the novel. The close-ups

when Isabel is crying, different camera angles when she feels betrayed, touchy

scenes where Osmond slaps Isabel presents Isabel as more helpless and miserable

than the “Isabel” presented in the novel, which is due to Henry James’s desire to

write The Portrait mainly as narrated without the interference of the narrator.

The structural analysis carried out through the study has aimed to show how

the elements of a narrative come together to make meaning and how Henry James

makes use of those elements and creates his own technique. This study has also

aimed to reveal how Henry James makes use of narrative technique conventionally

and, at times, how he makes use of those narrative techniques unconventionally;

thus, turns his readers’ expectations upside down and plays with them. In revealing

Henry James’s use of narrative elements, this thesis claims that The Portrait of a

Lady is a “texte de plaisir”.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andreas, Osborn. Henry James and the Expanding Horizon. Seattle: U of

Washington P, 1948

Barthes, Roland. “Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Image, Music, Text. London:

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Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976

Bloom, Harold. ed. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Chelsea
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Boggs, Joseph. The Art of Watching Films. 4th ed. London: Mayfield, 1996

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Penguin, 1991

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