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Near the end of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in a scene referred to as Isabel's vigil, a ghost appears. Or, perhaps more accurately, after returning from Italy to England and finally meeting with the dying Ralph Touchett, Isabel thinks that he "would not outlast the night" (570). So she waits in her room for the knock on the door that will signify his death. As the knock never clearly sounds, she lingers in a state of partial consciousness into dawn:
at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that he was standing there-a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room. She stared a moment; she saw his white face-his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. (570)
Between Isabel's certainty of Ralph's death by the end of the night and the curiously unmoored "only sure" that she experiences at dawn, the novel introduces the ghost as an encounter bracketed by, but distinct from, epistemic certainty about Ralph's life. From a narrative standpoint, however, this is actually the second time Ralph's death has been represented. In the previous chapter, the narration delicately handles Ralph's textual presence during his and Isabel's final conversation by gradually erasing his bodily presence. Identified as a "mere lattice of bones" (565), Ralph dematerializes, as his famous final words to Isabel are disjointed from his barely animated body: "'if you've been hated you've also been loved. Ah but, Isabel-adored!' he just audibly and lingeringly breathed" (569). His presence in this scene, between "mere"-ness and "just"-ness, signifies the event of his death in a way that the appearance of his corpse later cannot; Ralph's dead body is oddly less substantive than his ghostly presence.
The concern of this essay is to account for why both Isabel Archer and the reader are made to experience Ralph Touchett's death twice: first, watching him die; then, encountering his ghost. What, in other words, is at stake in representation of repeated encounters with the dead for James, encounters that are surprisingly prevalent in his work, and why is...