이자벨은 어디로? : 『여인의 초상』의 행복/불행한 결말에 관하여

Where Does Isabel Go?: The (Un)Happy Ending of Henry James"s The Portrait of a Lady

&nbsp;&nbsp;Readers of Henry James are still grappling with multi-layered aspects of his ambivalence towards women and femininity. In order to assess more accurately the aesthetic and political achievements of James&quot;s novel as well as understand better the implications of femininity in his work, we need to study the ways in which James&quot;s ambivalent portrayals of women have been read and evaluated by the literary and critical audiences over the years. This essay is not merely a rereading of The Portrait of a Lady in the light of its open ending but also an attempt to review and analyze the tradition of reading a particular meaning into this text&quot;s ending.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Critics in general have viewed the ending of The Portrait as an unhappy surrender to (and even acknowledgement of) the patriarchal and institutional authority of marriage on the parts of both the heroine and the author. However, I call attention to James&quot;s profession that he left the heroine "en l&quot;air" as well as to subsequent implications in his aesthetic, and thus challenge the view that summarily equates Isabel&quot;s return to Rome with a voluntary subjection to a stifling marriage life. It is in itself a symptom, I contend, that critics tend to attribute to Isabel an unhappy ending which the author did not present and criticize the latter for falling short of representing a successfully liberated modern woman. It is important to analyze and interpret this symptom of reading, for only through carefully disentangling the text from such institutionalized symptomatic readings may we open a new perspective in which to view James&quot;s artistic merits and political insights.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Isabel, left en l&quot;air, does not tell us where she is headed ultimately. Neither does the author. Reading The Portrait of a Lady in the light of its intended open ending show that James&quot;s aesthetic principles are consistently interrelated with his heroine&quot;s fate. In such interrelations Isabel&quot;s "very straight path" remains open to all possibilities of action for Isabel herself, and all possibilities of interpretation for the reader.