This thesis examines the narrative act of the first person narrator in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and traces the gender of the narrator’s voice which becomes ambivalent in the course of narrating. My approach reads the novel as a critique of the narrative form based on heterosexual contract, which reproduces and consolidates the gender dichotomy as well as the myth of phallus. The narrator’s perspective skeptical to the way conventional masculinity is formed influences the relationship between the narrator with masculine voice and the female protagonist, Isabel Archer.
The narrator begins the novel under the convention of omniscient narrator, whose presence implies the disembodied being who knows the whole. However, the story told by the narrator is about the failure of Isabel’s attempt to attain knowledge. Since the narrator as a realistic narrator shares with Isabel the epistemological premise that the appearance transparently displays the meaning, the act of narrating Isabel’s epistemological failure ironically dismantles the very principle of representation that the narrator depends on. The narrator thereby signifies the impossibility of the privileged position of conventional narrator with the omniscient perspective.
The acquisition of knowledge is not unrelated to the myth of phallus. As the knowledge or the truth is invested with the symbolic power in the phallocentric order, the course of attaining the truth can be construed as the development of masculine subjectivity. However, while narrativizing the marriage of Isabel, the narrator casts a doubt on the stability of the phallic privilege. The narrator also interrogates whether a woman can become a subject only through a phallic union, pointing out that the existence of Isabel cannot be limited to the position of woman within the marriage plot. The narrator’s attempt to decenter the phallus undermines his initial attempt to take the position of a male writer by distinguishing himself from the female protagonist with “ridiculously active” imagination.
The narrator explores a new narrative form to contain Isabel, and Ralph Touchett’s perspective functions as a medium for this experiment. Because he takes the ambivalently gendered position, Ralph’s perspective provides the possibility to create Isabel’s narrative digressing from the heteronormative marriage plot. Through Ralph’s metaphoric language, Isabel is described as an independent subject rather than a female subject who is restricted to the telos of the heterosexual contract. The narrator refuses to end the exploration of a new narrative form by suspending the narrative in the middle. As the act of leaving the ending unclosed is to renounce the authority of a male writer, it becomes impossible to explain the relationship between the narrator and Isabel with the formula of the relationship between the male writer and the female artistic object on which the writer’s male self is projected.
In conclusion, by analyzing the narrative act of the narrator, this thesis highlights The Portrait of a Lady’s call for a narrative form that portrays the life of a woman without relying on the conventional plot that normativizes gender dichotomy.