"There are plenty of houses": architecture and genre in the Portrait of a Lady.

"It's not damp, by the way; I've had the house thoroughly examined; it's perfectly safe and right. But if you shouldn't fancy it you needn't dream of living in it ... there are plenty of houses."

James, Portrait 163

Lord Warburton incorrectly reads Isabel Archer's obvious skepticism about his proposal of marriage as an objection to his home, Lockleigh; at the same time, he innocently clarifies her true rationale for rejecting him. Isabel, newly liberated from her grandmother's house in Albany, has no desire to dwell in a place that is "perfectly safe and right"; she seeks instead to occupy "houses in which things have happened" (163, 81). The heroine of James's 1881 novel associates types of domestic architecture with varieties of experience and knowledge, while at the same time continually comparing her life to literature and displaying a metafictional understanding of the implications of certain narrative forms. This triangulation of architecture, literature, and experience occurs throughout The Portrait of a Lady, raising the question of how we should read the "actual" houses in the text as well as their ghostly metaphorical counterparts. Much has been written about James's use of architectural metaphors and the attention drawn to them by the preface to the New York edition; however, the relationship between houses and literary genres in this novel has not yet been fully explored. (1) In the canon of Portrait criticism, common practice has been to associate each fictional house with an aspect of Isabel's personality or perspective (e.g. Schulman 163). Building upon this critical foundation, but taking into account James's play with literary as well as architectural structures, I propose that each of the houses occupied by Isabel is meant to invoke one or more novelistic genres with which both Isabel as a reader and the "outside" reader of James's text are familiar and about which they hold certain expectations. (2) These expectations, I suggest, manifest themselves in the form as well as the content of the text. If in fact each house suggests a set of possibilities for Isabel, derived from established literary conventions, James creates for her and the reader a literary phenomenology that reveals the centrality of architectural metaphors to human understanding, and the ways in which genre not merely categorizes, but helps interpret, experience.

James's manipulation of genre presumes, even requires, an experienced reader equipped with what Jonathan Culler calls "literary competence" (113). (3) Michael McKeon defines genres as "models for making formal choices within a larger realm of formal determinacy" (1). In other words, literary genres offer both readers and writers examples of choices that have previously been made within given fictional situations. McKeon's understanding of genre is essential to nay reading of James in that it presents genre's taxonomic purposes as inseparable from, instead of at odds with, its hermeneutic functions. While Isabel initially regards genre as an impediment to personal and artistic freedom, what McKeon calls "a grid imposed on writer and reader alike, from without," the novel itself ultimately promotes a more nuanced point of view (3). Genre, I argue, becomes for James--and for Isabel, albeit too late--an "enabling hermeneutic" that fosters intelligibility and helps us use what we know to make sense of our experience. Yet the text's many literal and metaphorical architectures often obscure this intelligibility by evoking and then defamiliarizing established generic conventions: for James, genre sometimes represents only the illusion of creative control. (4) As a result, Portrait consists of not one but several "realm(s) of formal determinacy," with each house an individual "realm" within the overarching "realm" of the novel. James's manipulation of genre within his "house of fiction" seems to suggest that stories--and, perhaps, lives--must be read from several angles, "not one window, but a million," in order to be understood (Portrait 45). How, then, do aesthetic categories such as genre influence our perception of the "real"?

Although the title of the book points to the portrait as a governing metaphor, the coalescence of art and the "real" in James's fictional houses best represents the aesthetic ambiguity around which his text is built. Joel Porte even calls Isabel "the architect of her own portrait," demonstrating architecture's authority over all other tropes in the novel (19). If a portrait implies a framed, immobile image, architecture suggests movement through space, habitation as opposed to enclosure. Houses, unlike portraits, can be seen from all sides, while doors and windows imply interiors that portraits can not provide. A house is also always more than a work of art. While aesthetic conventions allow us to classify different genres of architecture, they tell us nothing about the "character" of a house, its history, or who dwells there. According to Marilyn Chandler, "If a fiction is like a house, so a house is a kind of fiction: a text, a story, a system of signs, a way of organizing relations into comprehensible patterns" (91). While Chandler's analogy suggests that each house/text holds a single fixed meaning, for James, the significance of a house depends primarily on who is looking, and what side of its walls they happen to be on. I propose that by portraying the house of fiction as both an "outlook" and a "mould," James demonstrates the freedoms and constraints that characterize point of view (45). He also seems to anticipate Heidegger's assertion that "the real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell" (109). For Heidegger--and, I would argue, for James--dasein, or situatedness, makes where we are inextricable from who we are. Isabel, who tends to judge a house by its cover, believes that she can wander from place to place and remain unaffected, essentially herself. (5) James, however, plays a phenomenological chicken-and-egg game with Isabel's fate. Will who Isabel is determine where she lives, or will where she lives shape who she becomes?