After I finished the novel, I was relieved to discover that nearly everyone, including Henry James, thinks the first third of the book is entirely too long and slow. And this is by the standard of other 19th century novels. Events do happen, and rapidly once they’re underway, and it’s no surprise that the 1996 film version compresses the first 300 pages into 20 minutes and the remainder of the book is covered more or less faithfully.
By the end of the book I thought I understood Isabel Archer’s character thoroughly, but I’ve been surprised to find readers who view her as an innocent and a hero. Certainly, there’s a lot for a 21st century female reader to admire: Isabel states that she may never marry, that she wants to spend her youth travelling and experiencing the world. I suppose these readers view her ultimate marriage to Gilbert Osmond as simply a fateful mistake borne out of her trusting nature. Instead I saw it as an inevitable consequence of her pride and her stubborn desire to subvert the wishes of the people who care about her.
Isabel does get to travel the world, but it’s an experience so uninspiring that it’s completely elided in the novel (the movie depicts it, bizarrely, in the style of a silent film). I read this episode as illustrating two points. In the 19th century, even a wealthy and unattached woman did not have much opportunity to actually do anything engaging — she can be at best merely a spectator. As Isabel’s “friend” Madame Merle remarks, “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl.” Beyond that, Isabel’s fault is that simply moving about in the world does not satisfy her. From the moment the book opens, she is flattered or proposed to by an astonishing number of men, and her response upon returning from this empty journey is to rush to the one person for whom none of her friends are advocating. She is self-centered and willful at heart, but charming and intelligent on the surface.
The movie makes some questionable changes to the story’s chronology. Readers are uncertain about Osmond’s motives until well after the marriage; in the film, well, he’s played by John Malkovich with the sneer factor cranked way up. While I’m on the subject of casting, I was disappointed to find Martin Donovan to be both sickly and mustached. Christian Bale is about 15 years old. Aragorn does get to make out with Nicole Kidman but his lack of scraggly beard and her 19th century beehive hairdo do not flatter either one of them.
I was a little baffled by Kidman’s Isabel jumping into bed with her dying cousin and making out with him, and then shortly after his funeral getting it on with Aragorn. The film also changes the ending from definitively tragic to ambiguous and hopeful. I was predictably enraged, but overall it’s not bad.
Next: Roman Polanski. The movie Tess does not star anyone from The Lord of Rings, and while it features both “Peter Firth” and “John Collin,” Colin Firth is disappointingly absent. I’ve already finished the novel and am plowing through Middlemarch.