Osmond's Complaint: Gilbert Osmond's Mother and the Cultural Context of James's The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

By referring to Gilbert Osmond's mother in The Portrait of a Lady as "the American Corinne," Henry James alludes not only to the eponymous heroine of Madame de Stael's high-Romantic novel but also to the well-known epithet of Margaret Fuller, thus foregrounding his novel in an antebellum transcendental America far removed from the novel's actual place and time of Gilded Age America and post-Risorgimento Italy. In likening Portrait's heroine Isabel Archer to Osmond's mother in her spirit of inquiry and individualism, James provides a motive for Osmond's inscrutable hatred of Isabel and ties Isabel to the antebellum intellectual and spiritual fervor of transcendentalism, thus adding an additional historical, aesthetic, and philosophical layer to his novel.