Article: Purely Platonic relations with Isabel: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

"[T]he art required for making this delusion natural!" exclaims Henry James about the challenge of crafting Isabel Archer (Notebooks 13-14). As the chronicle of a deluded character, perhaps The Portrait of a Lady bears some inevitable resemblance to Plato's allegory of the cave, a nearly unavoidable touchstone in western thinking about misperception. Although no one has undertaken a thorough Platonic spelunking of this text, James scholarship is peppered with intimations of the philosopher's presence. (1) In the case of Portrait, its thematic similarity to the allegory makes the cave paradigm a framework for understanding Isabel's plight. Key passages from the novel as ...

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