The Henry James Review

The Enigma of Serena Merle by William T. Stafford, Purdue University For the current reader, for this current reader, at any rate, the undeniably manipulative and allegedly villainous Madame Merle is the most intricately rendered character in The Portrait of a Lady. She is its energizing force, its complication, and, in at least one central sense, its resolution. She propels almost all the significant action. Ostensibly a structural parallel and contrast to Henrietta Stackpole, she is more suggestively a parallel and contrast to Isabel, who works her will. Finally exposed, unloved, seemingly defeated, and returned to America, Serena Merle is still in play on the last page of the novel. For whatever the ambiguous intricacies of Isabel's complex motives in returning to Rome at the end of the novel, unabashedly central to them is a willed dedication to the care of Pansy, Serena Merle's daughter. And if one considers anxious concern—admittedly, ambivalent anxious concern—for the well-being of that daughter also to be the spring that motivates Madame Merle's every ploy, then the question is not simply rhetorical when, in her last scene with Osmond (and in one of the great lines of the novel), she wails, "Have I been so vile all for nothing?" (PL 437). It is thus perhaps a deep irony in this deeply ironic book that its most troubled villain is simultaneously its most persistent enigma. Although Serena Merle was described by Joseph Warren Beach in 1918 as "perhaps the most perfect creation" in The Portrait of a Lady (207) and although extensive attention was given to her as recently as 1975 (Veeder 122-24) in what is described by an even more recent commentator as "the fullest and most penetrating analysis of . . . [her] that has been made" (Wagenknecht 53, η. 14), this first "great bad heroine" of the James canon speaks to the contemporary reader, I believe, in unexpected ways.1 The centrality of her role in the novel is apparent enough. Yet there are some touches, in her initial appearance when Isabel first meets her, that come to one only from hindsight, though James himself, in his preface, links the scene to the even more famous one of Isabel's solitary vigil before the fireplace of chapter 42, describing both as "two very good instances" of what he there calls "conversion," scenes that were to be "a turning point in . . . [Isabel's] life" that required for the writer the task of "producing the maximum of intensity with the minimum of strain" (AN 56-57). When one re-examines this scene, two or three suggestive aspects arise that possibly would not originally have struck one. Some readers will remember that Serena Merle was born in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, a daughter of a "high officer in the United States Navy," one who "had a post—a post of responsibility—in that establishment at the time" (PL 153). And perhaps most readers will have remembered that Isabel first thought her to be French and was later even more intrigued to discover her to be a compatriot ("rarer even than to be French seemed it to be an American on such interesting terms" [PL 152]). But some of the details of the word-play that establishes her American roots have implications that cannot fully be seen without a retrospective view of the entire novel. The pertinent passage is expressed thus: It would never have been supposed she had come into the world in Brooklyn—though one could doubtless not have carried through any argument that the air of distinction marking her in so eminent a degree was inconsistent with such a birth. It was true that the national banner had floated immediately over her cradle, and the breezy freedom of the stars and stripes might have shed an influence upon the attitude she there took towards life. And yet she had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind. (PL 154) That the narrator himself follows this characterization with the qualification that "her manner expressed the repose and confidence which comes from a large experience"—he had earlier described her as possessing a "world-wide smile...