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That's what love is. It's one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level.
I cannot escape my fate … I can't escape unhappiness…
In an early chapter of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James's narrator, in an effort to illuminate the reader about Isabel Archer's character, offers a gentle but somewhat ominous warning: “Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded” (James, 1995, p. 54).1 By the end of the novel it seems that James's heroine has been granted her wish: Isabel finds herself imprisoned in a “house of suffocation” where there is “neither light nor air” (p. 360). Yet Isabel's motive for returning to Gilbert Osmond, despite her knowledge of his betrayal, begs for an explanation that neither Isabel nor James offers us. Jonathan Freedman has called the ending of The Portrait “an interpretive mystery … one of the most famous cruxes in American literature” (1994, p. 78), and, more recently, J. Hillis Miller has argued that “the basis of decision is hidden,” that we cannot determine Isabel's motive (2005, p. 16).2 James himself made the following observation about the ending of The Portrait: