A Significant Life by Todd May

Author:Todd May [May, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780226235707
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Meaningful Lives, Good Lives, Beautiful Lives

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady is a study of womanhood in late nineteenth-century Europe. Like his brother, the famous psychologist and philosopher William James, Henry was an acute observer of human character. The lady of the title, Isabel Archer, goes from America to Europe, eventually marries, and settles in Rome. Among the people she meets is her cousin Ralph Touchett. Ralph is physically weak with a debilitating lung disease. He is in love with his cousin, but doesn’t believe he deserves her because of his feeble constitution. As he puts it to Isabel, his love for her is “without hope.” Throughout the novel, he seeks to support her, first by convincing his father to leave her a fortune upon the father’s death, then by giving her sage advice, which in the case of marriage she ignores to her own peril. Near death, he travels from his home in England to Rome, where Isabel lives, in order to be near her. The final favor he does for her is unintended. He returns to England to die, where, in defiance of her husband, she visits him. This allows her an independence she had not previously achieved from her tormented marriage.

Ralph is not altruistic, nor is he selfless. He is, however, steadfast in his love for Isabel, as he was in his care for his father. His ironic and sometimes sardonic humor allows him to keep a distance from his emotions, particularly when he is with those he cherishes. One of the few times he confronts a situation directly, advising Isabel against marrying Gilbert Osmond, he wonders afterward whether he made a mistake in being forthright. Perhaps, he thinks, if he had held his tongue she would not have shut him out after her marriage and he could have been more support to her in what was, as he predicted, a disastrous union.

Ralph Touchett is a good man in a straightforwardly moral sense. He also embodies the narrative value of steadfastness. He is not, however, a happy man. He is remote from his emotions, believing himself unworthy of their satisfaction. He chalks this up to his physical condition. It seems, though, that his condition is less the cause of his remoteness than the excuse for it. Had he not been plagued by a lung disease, he would have found some other reason to keep his emotional distance, from himself as well as others.

We can contrast Ralph Touchett with another figure, a contemporary and nonfictional character: Lance Armstrong. As I write these lines in the late winter of 2013, Armstrong is offering a partial confession of his use of banned drugs to Oprah Winfrey. Up until 2012, the name Lance Armstrong stood for courage, commitment, and intensity. After being diagnosed with a metastasizing testicular cancer in 1996, he underwent aggressive chemotherapy. Throughout his ordeal, he maintained that he would race again. He was often nearly alone in this belief. His major sponsor dropped him, and he had trouble finding a team with which to race in top-level competition.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.