This study analyzes the way in which Isabel Archer, initially a romantic idealist, faces and then willfully decides to embrace the painful experience of actual reality. While she is eager to “see” life for herself, she wants to escape from the obligation and burden of ideals. Inevitably, she lacks a sense of reality until her zeal for ideals is tested by the crucible of her matrimony. Isabel goes through two different phases of experience before and after her marriage to Osmand. While staying in Europe, she first imagines, then observes, and finally lives the life of a young lady with an inherited fortune. This experience transforms Isabel’s vision of life from a romantic idealist’s to that of a moral fundamentalist. At the beginning she yearned for freedom and independence, but in the end she accepts her moral obligation, responsibility, and life of oppression. In a sense, such a change in her vision and attitude can be interpreted as a case of so-called “felix culpa,” meaning “fortunate fall.” Isabel's marriage to Osmond might be seen as a channel to her maturity. In sum, the whole process of Isabel's experience represented by her will to see the world, her marriage to Osmond, and then her reflection on her married life in the scene of “night vigil” enables her to have a perceptive growth.