ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

crib which holds her son and her father, who sits behind him (521). The Principino,
then, serves primarily as a symbol around which the four principles rotate. Even more
so, though, Maggie’s mind as represented in the novel seems to consist of few
thoughts beyond the arrangement of the novel’s principles—that is, the understanding
and manipulation of the story.
The story Maggie chooses to for herself, then, is the realization of a delayed
marriage plot: securing for herself a husband. To do so, she determines that she must
leave her father—her life can contain only one man. Furthermore, this arrangement
involves the sacrifice of Maggie’s most significant friendship with another woman
(Charlotte) and leaves her friendship with Fanny (more of a surrogate mother to her
than a peer) strained, impersonal, and dishonest. Freedman reads the Amerigo at the
end of the novel as Maggie’s automaton, but, with Adam out of the picture, Maggie
no longer has her father’s financial power with which to control her husband
(Freedman, Jonathan 113). She has bought herself a traditional marriage, sacrificed
the power of an unusual arrangement to nab a husband. When Isabel Archer discovers
her husband’s illicit plotting with another woman, she turns away from him, reasserts
her interests outside of the marriage even if she is unwilling to leave the marriage.
Maggie discovers an illicit affair and decides she wants her husband. And nothing
else. From a feminist perspective, this makes the novel deeply depressing, even if we
do not consider Maggie’s actions. She simply cannot imagine anything other than her
husband that she could want. Maggie has learned how to manipulate the people
closest to her, but she has not learned how to see beyond them. One leaves The
Portrait of a Lady wondering what will become of Isabel Archer, what she will
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