What Pansy Knew: Why there are few children in the world of Henry James

After a year of travel, Isabel Archer comes back to Florence and we learn that she is engaged to Gilbert Osmond, an insipid, fortune-hunting American. We don't know why or how this came about - typical of Henry James ("The Portrait of a Lady") to elide a crucial dramatic scene and tell his story by indirection. We do know how this announcement affects a number of characters. First we see the stolid, hapless Caspar Goodwood arrive in Florence to see Isabel face to face and plead his case, such as he can, once more. Goodwood could b played by John Hamm, a handsome and rather boring presence. Isabel dismisses him curtly, even cruelly. What has become of her? She had seemed so strong and independent and freshly American, and now that she has money she seems no better than the rest, and very much under the spell of Madame Merle (who could be played by a slightly younger Glenn Close). We have to figure that Isabel's commitment to Osmond has something to do with Osmond's daughter, Pansy, whom Isabel visited before leaving Florence for her year of travel. There are not many children in the world of Henry James, and the few that there are, such as Pansy and the eponymous Maisie, are really just little adults - small people who speak like a James character and have few or none of he recognizable feelings of children - probably because James himself was born at the age of 50 or so. How aware is James that Pansy has been essentially abandoned by her selfish father, Osmond? Or does James think it's normal behavior to leave your child in care of governesses (mother is dead) as you follow a rich young woman around the ruins of Rome for weeks at a time? Isabel may think she's doing a service to Pansy my marrying her father, but it rarely works out that way.