On Reading Portrait of a Lady (2nd Edit)

The paperback


contained questions for a reading group

from Barnes & Noble

of presumed retired women.

My assumption, of course.



James writes in an agnostic style,

meaning he does not judge

characters' choices,

only states things as they are

from a distance.



Isabel Archer is naive,

and therefore the only character

in the story of any importance.

As the naïve often do, she is convinced she is brilliant.

The author states many times that she is

remarkably pretty.



called me ugly.)

(Boys in junior high band



Isabel wants to make her own choices

at a time

when who a woman should marry was everything.

(She turned down a marriage proposal from a young, handsome baron,

and marries an older, divorced artist instead.)

When she has the chance to leave with a better husband,

according to the narrator,

she doesn't.



She returns to Italy.

That's the whole plot of the book:



Isabel Archer learns of her mistake when it is too late.

It is still true today once one reaches a certain age.

I chose this book for myself at the library because

the back cover copy promised a naïve young woman

in worldly, wise corrupted Europe.



I thought I could profit from that, I could learn

But that wasn't James' intention

as an agnostic writer.



The London Post accused James of amorality

in 1892,

whereas by modern 21st century standards it seems

overwhelmingly moral

like the Tammy Wynette song

“Stand By Your Man,”

and Mr. Osmond doesn't hit her.



So she doesn't have physical abuse as an excuse

that would work with the morality I learned

from reading the pamphlets my mother received in the mail

in courier type with red underlining

already included in the print,

giving them a false personal touch.

I found the letters quaint and infuriatingly amusing.

They always wanted money, of course.



Isabel Archer has no clear-cut reason to leave her husband,

but if she's unhappy I suppose she should leave him

though she'd be poor without.



Ah, if I could only give up the old school morality I try to scorn

the way one would try to kiss up to the popular crowd in school

or decide to like indie rock or underground death metal

certain obscure bands that would give me punk or feminist cred.



But it's my lot to be the observer: aware of other ways

but as spiritually bankrupt as those tracts suggested

Secular but religiously, obsessively so

like Mr. Osmond was.

Sophisticated but in a stiff, unlikeable way.



I suppose it would be better to

follow my compulsions to shout out “Praise Jesus!”

but that's not me.



I have to cobble together some other way

And be on the wrong side of history against

the freedom of lesbian marriage

because I just can't do it



(yet).



But it's a performance for them, too.

I know it is.



The obese middle aged woman in the motorized wheelchair

with the rainbow flag

checks her blood sugar before eating a muffin.

That was unkind. I will have to think of another portrayal.



My Republican aunt and uncle

celebrate 50 years of marriage in Tempe, AZ.

They pay for my hotel room

or else my Republican grandmother

who stayed with an alcoholic husband

I know he hit her once, and then my adult uncle

(who died of cancer when I was 8)

threw him against the wall

paid for it.



Mozie stayed with Papa because the Texas

farmgirl in her,

stubborn and willful when she was young,

grateful for a thick skirt as she endured her father's belt,

when he caught her walking with a boy,

finally achieved suburban security and normalcy

respectability in marriage at age 18 to an Air Force veteran

with a union machinist's job.



To raise three children penniless

in a hotel

was not a choice she would even consider.

The greatest generation knew how to survive.



A man I rejected as a suitor,

Even blocked his number from my cell phone

said at a screening for local filmmakers

that its “cool” to be liberal.

I was angry like Isabel was that these

men thought they knew what was best for her.



My neighbor

with a shaved head and a tattoo that said “white boy,”

noticing my black eye, said

no, he didn't think it was from a boyfriend

because I was too smart for that.



When my internship at the university press ended

I went into a downward plunge,

and it makes me an unlikeable

narrator that I think of my own well-being

to the exclusion of others.



What about doing the thing itself

for its own reasons

and not ascribing motives of class or

gender politics, because we, after all,



are in the age of the end of history?