Source criticism

Abstract

To study literary influence is to encounter two dominant opinions on the matter: one, argued largely by scholars, decries the significance of influence altogether, while the other, voiced largely by writers themselves, cheerfully admits to wholesale borrowings from contemporaries as well as forebears. Virtually all of the source studies of The Portrait of a Lady argue that James began with a particular literary source but then built upon and improved on it or, at the very least, changed the source material to suit his own purposes. The greatest number of source studies revolve around James’s debt to George Eliot, but the earliest sources appear to be drawn from fictions by authors of much less renown. For example, Andrea Roberts Beauchamp argues convincingly that one source may have been a brief didactic tale entitled ‘Isabel Archer’ that appeared in a popular family magazine during James’s youth (1977). While there is no evidence for James having read the story, which was written by someone known to posterity only as ‘Professor Alden, D. D.’ and which was published in the 1848-49 volume of The Ladies’ Wreath, there are striking parallels between it and James’s novel. In Alden’s four-page story, a country-fresh Isabel Archer comes to New York and, though reluctant to marry, finds herself succumbing to a polished gentleman who later turns out to be ‘unkind, irreligious, ruined’ (p. 270). The difference between the two fictions is that Alden’s Isabel remains mired in a miserable marriage, thus serving as a warning to other naive young women, whereas James’s heroine pursues a much more complex destiny.