A Quickened, Multiplied Consciousness: The Light of Aestheticism in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: This paper reads The Portrait of a Lady intertextually in relationship to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance , a work that James knew well and to which he alludes throughout the novel. Contrary to a critical tradition that has approached the novel as a polemic against aestheticism generally and Pater specifically, it interprets James’s depiction of Isabel’s ethical Bildung in distinctly aesthetic and Paterian terms. In the novel, James portrays aesthetic experience as a kindling of an existentially and ethically heightened consciousness, revealing an alignment on his part with Pater’s ideas that critics have generally overlooked or misunderstood.