20 pages • 40-minute read
Portrait of a Lady
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Themes
A Lopsided Power Dynamic
The power differential between the two people in the poem is suggested in its formal structure. The lady’s words appear in quotation marks. The reader hears her exact words, but none of her thoughts or feelings—our only access to the lady is through external markers of characterization, such as speech, appearance, and setting. The speaker, in contrast, supplies none of his actual words but does give clear hints about his feelings, of which he has limited understanding or control. Thus, one character is direct in expression, the other is withdrawn and veiled. There is also some measure of power in the lady’s ability to be socially affable despite the awkwardness and unresponsiveness of the young man. Despite his clear distaste for their meetings, the speaker returns time and again, thrown by the guilt and confusion that underlie his participation in the relationship.
The poem’s lady is likely an older, wealthy woman of leisure trying to find some meaning in her life through what she terms “friendship” (Line 26)—though her use of the word is probably euphemistic here. While she ambiguously and somewhat manipulatively points out that without nourishing friendships, life would be a “cauchemar!” (Line 28) or nightmare, her interest in the young man is most likely romantic, sexual, or possibly one of social mentorship and patronage. The young man’s sense of her chamber as “Juliet’s tomb” (Line 6) and the poem’s telling epigraph hint at the sexual undercurrent, as do the pair’s lack of common interests, the young man’s boredom with the lady’s conversation, and their large age gap. This hints that there is little aside from physical attraction that could inspire her interest in him. Her connection to Paris solidifies this theory—patronage of this sort is standard in the 19th-century realist novels of Stendhal and Balzac, which chronicle French society and its power structures.
The lady’s conversation simultaneously plays up her dependence on the young man and the seeming casualness of their relationship—sending intentionally mixed messages that fill him with guilt he cannot process. On the one hand, she calls herself “one who is about to reach her journey’s end” (Line 67)—a dying woman reaching out to a young man as a lifeline; on the other hand, she calls what they have friendship while clearly insinuating something more. Her skill at passive-aggressively developing his guilt comes most clearly in the accusatory line, “Why we have not developed into friends” (Line 98), which blames him for not accepting her advances while couching these advances in the language of camaraderie and pretending that she is baffled by his lack of response.
Part of what puts the speaker in the weaker position is his inability to understand the lady’s subtext and euphemistic speech. In some ways, he is an unreliable speaker, as readers piece together far more of the reality of the relationship he is describing than he himself can. In the end, the only thing he can do to escape is, literally, to leave the country.
Confusion, Desperation, and Guilt
When the lady confesses her feelings about her life, gives her opinion about her young visitor, and expresses her regret that their social interactions did not lead to a real friendship, the young man is thrown into confusion. He appears to lack the social skills that would enable him to grasp the role that she assumes he is willing to play—that of a young ingénue she can mold and have a sexual relationship with in the euphemistic guise of being a casual companion. Instead, he is bored by her conversation and uncomfortable because of her implicit demands and the subtext underlying her compliments; he knows that she is misreading him completely in the qualities she attributes to him, but can’t formulate the idea that she is doing this specifically to inspire guilt and a feeling of being in emotional debt. For example, after referring to her dissatisfaction with her life, she flatters him, “you knew? you are not blind! / How keen you are!” (Lines 22-23); although he has given her no reason to suspect that he is actually this perceptive, she describes him as a friend who “has, and gives / Those qualities upon which friendship lives” (Lines 25-26). At the same, she plays the part of the weaker partner, evidenced in comments such as, “You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel” (Line 61)—a false statement that the young man cannot argue against, but which does make him feel like he cannot abandon her. The lady insists on putting him into the role of someone he is not, which makes him feel extremely awkward, insecure, responsible for not being authentic or true to himself, and like he is failing her. His desperation leads to panic, with the “tom-tom” (Line 32) hammering in his brain.
While the poem never explicitly mentions sexual involvement between the lady and the young man, the burdensome atmosphere that suffocates the young man in her presence and the clear unspoken subtext that drips from everything she says imply the expectation that this is where she expects their “friendship” (Line 26) to go. Feeling bad about not wanting to give the lady what she desires, the young man feels the need to make amends for his lack of attraction. However, he has enough self-awareness to know that any gesture of apology will be “cowardly” (Line 69), because of the truth of their lopsided dynamic and the manipulation of their meetings. Perhaps the epigraph from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, about the guilt of Barabas, is a clue to the young man’s need to make amends. Like Barabas, who is a guilty but callous man who dismisses whatever wrong he did to the now-dead “wench” (Line 2), T. S. Eliot’s speaker must compartmentalize his relationship with the lady, both literally and figuratively fleeing to another country. But even though he accomplishes this physical escape, whatever guilt or confusion the speaker feels remains unresolved at the end of the poem.
The Need to Escape
Both of the poem’s characters feel the need to dramatically transform their circumstances. The lady’s protestations do not sound genuine—rather, they are complexly designed to evoke specific feelings of pity and debt in the young man. Still, in Part 1, she confesses that she is frustrated with her life, “For indeed I do not love it” (Line 22); in Part 2, she expresses doubt about whether she has anything to offer the man (Lines 64-65); in Part 3, she must acknowledge that she is about to lose him to another country for an unknown period of time.
As for the young man, he at all times wants to escape the lady’s company, which is so distressing that he feels like a supplicant going to visit her, “as if I had mounted on my hands and knees” (Line 87). He feels so deeply uncomfortable when talking to her, that his minds fills with the instinctive escape behavior of prey animals—like them, he is aware that he is being hunted. Each part of the poem ends with his imagined escape. In Part 1, he wants to go outside to smoke and drink—that is, indulge in traditional masculine activities—but feels that he cannot simply leave without asking the lady, “let us take the air” (Line 36). At the end of Part 2, he really does leave, taking his hat and thinking about how he likes to sit in the park alone, reading the newspaper. Part 3 shows that he has put an even more drastic escape plan into action by leaving the country for a while. Finally, in the last 11 lines, he dares to imagine an even more permanent escape—the death of the lady—although even that would not free him from the emotional grip of the relationship, since he is unsure of what the appropriate attitude might be to her passing: “Doubtful, for quite a while / Not knowing what to feel” (Lines 118-19).
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