The Portrait of A Lady

The Portrait of A Lady, is a novel about the failure fate of a Lady whose dream did not come true. It is about the contrast between wish and failure, the hope and disillusion. The main character Isabel Archer, a young, clever, quick , decent and charming American girl, across the Ocean of Atlantic escorted by her aunt who wanted to present Isabel a noble, classy and old English world. Her aunt thought she was the kind of clever girls who just need hope and opportunity.

Isabel is that kind of girl full of imagination as well as longing for knowledge. Her intimate friend Miss Stackpole is a correspondence of the Interview, a modern type of woman, who had great influence on Isabel. No sooner Isabel came to England than an English noble man Lord Warburton and another rich American man Casper Goodwood who followed Isabel to England had both proposed to Isabel out of pure love, however, Isabel refused their proposes, she wanted to see more of her life. She wanted to surf in it herself. She was so charming that her cousin Ralph also fell in love with here, but he got a disease and his life was limited. He hided his secret love and wanted to make Isabel an independent girl, so that she could choose her own life free. He suggested his father to give a large mount of surplus property to Isabel, thus, he made Isable, a rich woman. But to his disappoint, his selfless pure love of his cousin had brought a disaster to the inexperience innocent girl, she became a prey of a pair of greedy inscrutable fortune-hunters. Madame Merle, Isabel’s new friend, seeming charming and decentful, made the union of Isabel and Bilbert Osmond, who appeared charming and individual. In fact, Merle and Osmond had an illegal daughter pansy, then Isabel became the stepmother of pansy. Not long after her marrying, Isabel realized Osmond had no inner beauty at all, he lived in envious and prejudice. He was nothing but a narcissist. She had not supposed her own free choice is the worst. She lived in a world of darkness, a world of dumbness, a world of suffocation. It’s not in the end of the novel did Isabel know the secret of her inheriting money and the evil deeds of Madam Merle and Osmond. Yet her life had changed greatly, though Lord Warburton and Casper Goodwood still loved her, she chose to went back to her husband out of her deep love for her stepdaughter Pansy .

The fate of Isabel is so miserable in a desperate way, her cousin’s love had ruined her, which surely made Ralph feel regret and pain. Her wanting of seeing life had punished her.

Perhaps we all want us or even the character in a novel can have a happy ending. We want to see the brightness of the world and life, so we are accustomed to see the hopeless destiny of Isabel, anyhow, at the end of the novel, we can assume another hope, Isabel’s rescuing of another pure, decent spirit.