Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

James’ Portrait of a Lady brilliantly and tragically speaks to the seductive powers of the narcissist, and the vulnerability of the young idealist to those dark arts. In astonishingly elegant prose, James walks us through a trap that is all too familiar in contemporary pop culture; our current obsession with the banal comings and goings of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities reveals us to be under the same spell as that cast over Portrait of a Lady’s heroine, Isabel. James deftly portrays the risk inherent to Isabel’s youthful ambition to do something great with her life, as it leaves her vulnerable to her seducer Osmond’s narcissistic stance of standing outside and above. Our entanglement with narcissism, while similarly disabling, has darker roots. We feed the cult of celebrity out of a collective failure of the imagination, and it is into this void that the celebrity slides. When the only accomplishment left is fame, the narcissist is king at last. Portrait of a Lady rests on what Isabel would choose, once she realizes she has fallen under the dominion of the narcissist. Would that we could choose, so deep is our own devotion. If Portrait of a Lady is “a novel about dreams that do not come true”, as the afterword to my edition, penned by Stephen Koch, asserts, then our cultural narrative is about not having any dreams, except to be famous. James’ prose remains poignantly relevant, speaking to the lasting accomplishment of his art, and to our need to reclaim a desire to do something great, whatever the risk. Especially if the risk is that no one might notice.