In Henry James novels such male characters as Rowland Mallet, Ralph Touchett, and John Marcher show evasive gestures to women when confronted with marriage problems. So many accuse James of avoiding the passion of love. But nowadays critic like Philip...
In Henry James novels such male characters as Rowland Mallet, Ralph Touchett, and John Marcher show evasive gestures to women when confronted with marriage problems. So many accuse James of avoiding the passion of love. But nowadays critic like Philip Sicker defends James's love as a passion of showing, as in James's symbolic observation, 'the boots and shoes that we see in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of room's more than actual descriptions of sexual encounters.
In The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph Touchett who is passive in his every day life always only watches Isabel Archer's life without showing any direct love. His habitual desire is to maintain distance between himself and the object of his adoration, Isabel.
By doing so, he is able to keep his love-image perfect.
Ralph loves Isabel indirectly and treats her not as an object but as a true beauty.
Though some argue Ralph interferes in Isabel's life, he shows his generous love
disinterestedly by way of bestowing his money to her in order to meet her requirements of imagination. Finally he confesses his true love on his death bed.
In conclusion, Ralph's expression of his love style becomes a virtual definition of 'living.' For example, it is his love for Isabel alone that prolongs his ife; it is Strether's fascination with Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors that inspires his impassioned advice of 'live, live all you can.'
Thus James portrays love as an image worshiped in the mind. A courtly lover does not love an actual woman, but rather a feminine ideal that crystalizes his dream of being in love.