When the narrator introduces readers to Isabel, they list some of her favorite musicians and writers, making allusions to actual people:
She had had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.
Charles Gounod (1818–93) was a French composer who trained in Italy and was most famous for his opera Faust. Robert Browning (1812–89) was one of James’s favorite British poets and was famous for his support of women’s emancipation and other liberal views. George Eliot (1819–80) was one of James’s favorite British novelists, and it’s likely that Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871) deeply influenced The Portrait of a Lady in its focus on the ways that Victorian marriages are financial transactions that lead to unhappiness.
The fact that Isabel engages with this sort of artistic and literary content communicates important qualities of her character. First, she is clearly deeply influenced by European music and literature, which explains her decision to go to England with her aunt Mrs. Touchett despite being happy in the United States. Second, her interest in Eliot’s fiction underlines her skepticism of conventional marriage and gender norms, which makes her decision to marry Osmond all the more painful.
When Osmond first meets Isabel, he is genuinely taken by her—not merely interested in her for her money, as he expected—and finds himself making romantic gestures like writing poetry for her. One of the poems he writes her is titled “Rome Revisited”—an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s poem “Rome Unvisited”—as described in the following passage:
Old impressions, old enjoyments, renewed themselves; one evening, going home to his room at the inn, he wrote down a little sonnet to which he prefixed the title of “Rome Revisited.” A day or two later he showed this piece of correct and ingenious verse to Isabel, explaining to her that it was an Italian fashion to commemorate the occasions of life by a tribute to the muse.
This allusion is important in that it establishes a connection between Osmond and Wilde, and not a very flattering one. In real life, James was notoriously critical of Oscar Wilde, an Irish writer who was becoming more and more famous over the course of James’s writing career. Wilde was a key part of the Aesthetic Movement, an artistic movement James looked down on for its commitment to beauty and “art for art’s sake” rather than to communicate deeper meanings or moral messages. Like Wilde, the character of Osmond has no moral commitments—all he cares about is collecting art that is aesthetically pleasing.
As James goes on to show, Osmond slowly loses interest in Isabel after this initial infatuation. Once they are married, she becomes just another beautiful object Osmond can add to his collection—a “muse” for him but not a person of her own.
