A Future for Isabel Archer: Jamesian Feminism, Leo Bersani, and Aesthetic Subjectivity
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2011
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Abstract
This essay brings Leo Bersani’s theorization of aesthetic subjectivity to bear on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1908) and its portrayal of Isabel Archer’s concept and embodiment of “independence.” Drawing upon a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality as that which shatters and undoes the rigid contours of the self, Bersani argues for and attends to aesthetic experiences that model the values and pleasures of relinquishing power. I deploy these formulations from Bersani’s thought to read the transformation of Isabel’s perceptions, which becomes most evident in her aesthetic encounters with Rome’s historical landscape, and argue that Isabel’s betrayal at the hands Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond opens her to a form of feminist engagement unhinged from a rigorous and definitive American identity.
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Lamm, KK (2011). A Future for Isabel Archer: Jamesian Feminism, Leo Bersani, and Aesthetic Subjectivity. The Henry James Review, 32(3). pp. 249–258. 10.1353/hjr.2011.0023 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32473.
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Scholars@Duke
Kimberly Kay Lamm
My scholarship brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory. I have a particular interest in the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, the various ways language figures into feminism, and aesthetic practices such as fashion that challenge the devaluation of femininity. I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses that work with literature, art, and film to illuminate the feminist imagination.
My first book, Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press, 2018) demonstrates the significance of visual and textual manifestations of language to feminist art practices of the late 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the work of three artists –Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly—and shows that their work expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture are perceived. I argue that the language (as system, text, and speech) was crucial to bringing viewers into that collective project. At the heart of this book is the ‘other woman,’ a figure who encapsulates the utopian wish to reach other women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To reveal this address, I pair the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. By tracing the correspondences between these artists and writers, I argue we can better appreciate how together they created the imaginary conditions in which feminism could take hold as a collective practice and a shared idiom.
I recently published Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book devoted to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde feminist film. I read Riddles (1977) as an essay film and explore how it utilizes voice, sound, and writing to challenge Hollywood's dominant images of women and to portray maternal care as a legitimate form of work, rich in aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities.
In early 2026, my book Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image will come out with Punctum Books. Along with Anna Backman Rogers, I am editing the collection, Laura Mulvey: Feminist Legacies, which will be published by BFI/Bloomsbury in 2026. I have published my research in Australian Feminist Studies, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, Feminist Theory, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Oxford Art Journal, Public Art Dialogue, and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.
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