Daisy, like Newman, arrives in Europe visibly an American, and is related immediately and continually back to her Americanness. To Winterbourne, she is always a representative of ‘them’: ‘Here comes my sister…..She’s an American girl’ (P.144). Winterbourne is quickly puzzled by Daisy’s behaviour, the apparent contradiction of her open, free behaviour in talking to a man she has not been introduced to, and the frankness and the charm of her manner. He looks for an explanation of her behaviour relating her back to her national femininity:
Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State – were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society?…..He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt, a pretty American flirt……Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. (P.151)
The assumption here is that there is a formula, or should be, if only Winterbourne could find it. He is going to find it by relating Daisy to her femininity, to her existence as a potential sign.
James deliberately isolates daisy as a person, which serves both to intensify her social freedom as an American, and her vulnerability as a sign. Daisy is unconstrained by her mother, her absent father, or her own sense of what is or is not socially acceptable
Imran Hussain Henry James
or apposite. She does what she likes, responds to what she likes. To the world around her she is a young girl, an American girl, she represents a society and gender. She is expected to be what she appears – whether that is an innocent girl or a fallen woman. The mechanisms of society simply expel Daisy when her behaviour no longer conforms. Winterbourne still attempts to correlate Daisy’s behaviour with what she is, to read her as a sign and make sense of her. If he could succeed, Daisy could be saved, but his attempt, finally aided by another man, comes too late.
As we are led to look at Daisy as self-reliant and individual, her death poses questions as to the possibility of the girl who signifies independence and freedom actually being free herself. Once discarded by her male interpreter, she sinks fast. Newman merely runs against a wall of defiance and denial, he can’t get what he wants from society, as an individual he has to recognise limitations. Daisy meets a negation of what she is – she is what Winterbourne might want to get, and such she is rejected. If the social structures of power turn individuals into predators and prey, possessors and possessions, subjects and objects, then the possessor denied the possession has only to look elsewhere. The possession, on the other hand, if rejected as such, loses all value altogether. That the American girl can apparently never realise her freedom and independence for herself but must submit it to another, is intrinsic to the position of existence as a sign, or other, functioning for an observant consciousness.
The problem of Daisy’s death is still a problem for Winterbourne, or by implication for the reader. Her limitation as a sign is not represented as a source of conflict for Daisy herself. Any real exploration of the conflict of the girl being defined through her sign status, and her own consciousness of her individual freedom, needs the presentation of the heroine as an ‘object of study’ to be balanced by the presentation of her attempts to be the subjet of her own experience. In The Portrait of a Lady, the false nature of the freedom of the individual girl is confronted, not simply by the observers for whom, as feminine, she is automatically confined, but by the girl
herself. In Daisy Miller, the fictional presentation of Daisy is as ‘one of them’. Daisy’s existence within the text is limited to her feminine status as an American girl. With Isabel Archer, James attempted to go beyond this and present an American girl who is a person.
James purpose in The Portrait of a Lady is to paint Isabel’s portrait by placing ‘the
Imran Hussain Henry James
centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness’ (P.13). The ‘subject’ of the novel is Isabel’s progress from innocence to experience as she tries to live freely, fails, and achieves a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom. James enables us to share Isabel’s point of view by revealing her thoughts to us, often commenting upon them to guide our judgement. As a result we know more about her
than she knows about herself. We also know more about the characters who affect her. This is James’s method of maintaining a sense of Isabel’s innocence, of preserving our sympathy for her as the victim of a conspiracy, and of keeping up the suspense.
Isabel is recognised by all who meet her as possessing potential – potential for action, for meaning, for giving a value to experience. In a predatory world, she is not faced with interpretation, like Daisy, so much as appropriation. Isabel is appropriated as a sign, to be given fixed meaning by the man who succeeds in possessing her. The important point that James makes in his preface, is that of the woman as a sign, manipulated for the purposes of others, ‘mattering’ to herself and therefore, by implication, to us. It was a theme he had explored in Washington Square. Catherine Sloper is ruthlessly manipulated by those around her. She does not actively fight back, and merely continues to exist. Nothing very dramatic happens, there are no moral triumphs or reprisals. The point, almost the whole point, seems to be the fact that, although no character within the novel realises or much cares, all this matters intensely to Catherine herself, her understanding of her manipulation and her dull,
strong resistance to it. So in reading and analysing The Portrait of a Lady, the implied criticism and failure of Isabel is always tampered by James’s initial impulse – that things matter for her, they are important in their significance for her, and it is from this angle that they are important to the reader.
According to Elizabeth Allen (1984, P.85) Isabel’s fate is precipitated not only by the vision imposed on her by others but also by the culturally conditioned vision, which she brings to her own experience. As a woman in a male society, Isabel adopts the masculine mode of viewing the world as signifying meaning and value for her as subject, yet fails to see that she is appropriated as a sign in a far more fundamental way. For when Isabel takes people as examples of various theories, she is taken as a potential signifier of any number of signifiers, depending on the male subject communicating through her. Her husband would determine her function; his value is
Imran Hussain Henry James
intrinsic, hers linked to his. Isabel thus looks at what the men and women around her appear to signify, in simplistic terms, searching for people who will fit her ideals nearly enough for her to link herself to them. She fails to see that the real threat to her freedom comes from the way she is seen and fitted into social structures of signification – she assumes herself as subject to be external to them, and thus unthreatened and unplaced. The length of time it takes her to understand the
interaction between herself and the world appears to be linked to her rather abstract and theoretical vision, which can shield her from unpleasant realties.
Isabel faces a choice of sign function rather than of exploration and action. Unlike Newman, she is not looking for someone to express her, but for an ideal to which she can submit her independence in a form of moral action. The reality of such submission takes the form of a husband. Once again marriage is the paradigm for the young girl’s absorption in to social, representative existence. No wonder then that faced with the pressure to make a concrete choice, Isabel recoils as she thinks they (Winterbourne and Ralph) are closing in on her freedom.
On the other hand we watch Isabel being manipulated by Madame Merle, by the apotheosis of the social word which labels, not naively but deliberately, according to usefulness and practical value. The worldliness of Madam Merle is continually stressed, even Isabel is aware that her new friend is hardly natural:
She was in a word too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are
supposed to have been intended to be……Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals (p.278)
Isabel becomes aware of the pressure of the potential that her inheritance carries with it. She feels ‘that to be rich was a virtue because it was to be able to do’ (P.309). The need to go beyond the acceptance of the passive female identity is accentuated by the new horizons opening up. Money is a source of power and action; it makes tangible the spiritual potential that Isabel has signified. Given the economic base to her ideals, Isabel is brought face to face with the irresistible need to do something, and the nature of the available choices, and the extent to which her imagination is limited and defined by them, is fully exposed. Isabel cannot imagine a course of action, which has no existence, in, or relation to, a society where women live through and for their husbands, fathers and sons.
Imran Hussain Henry James
It is made quite plain how Osmond objectifies Isabel, now that she has received a huge inheritance; he is prepared to subordinate her to his requirements. Thus he judges her as to whether she will enhance his status and position. He likes her having rejected Lord Warburton and he now prepares to refine her very imagination as a process of amusing himself; her intelligence ‘was to be a silver plate…..that he might heap up with ripe fruits to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might
become for him a sort of served desert’ (P.79). He talks to Isabel about the attempt to make life into a work of art. She takes this as a process which they will undertake together. He takes her as a part of his pattern, she is to be certain things and not others, and he is quite prepared to sacrifice those of her ideas that he doesn’t like. It is Osmond’s apparent disregard for society that encourages Isabel to feel she will be free from externally imposed values – she thinks that her active step has been the perception of Osmond’s fineness, despite all social disapproval.
After the marriage, there is a time lapse and we return to the marriage several years later, where Isabel and Osmond confront each other about Pansy’ marriage. The world of abstract theories and choices has hardened into a specific relationship of owner and owned, subject and object. It is marriage, she realises that deprives her of any freedom of expression, which she learns when Osmond is determined to force Isabel to act against her will, with regard to Pansy’s marriage. She refuses to surrender her integrity, to comply in the conscious and heartless disposal of the
submissive and self-denying girl. It is as though Isabel is being asked to admit the lack of self-existence of the young girl she herself once was, to compound her own guilt in having wanted anything for herself by denying Pansy’s right to any honest emotions of her own.
Thus it is her imagination which differentiates Isabel from Daisy. Daisy is watched and observed as a function of Winterbourne’s experience. Before the potential meaning of the feminine as a sign can be used and directed by the female herself, as a function of her experience, she must comprehend the process of watching and manipulation that is imposed on her. Two kinds of development are offered in The Portrait of a Lady. One is the exposure of the specific, appropriative and selfish use made by the world of the moral and aesthetic values signified by the feminine. The American girl symbolises a freedom and spontaneity that can never be realised in the structures of power and manipulation that make up the social world. As her
Imran Hussain Henry James
values are possessed and her significations limited, so is the girl who functions as a sign. The other development is the attempt of the American girl to live and function for herself, and to realise her own freedom. Her failure exposes the extent of her manipulation, both internal and external.
Now I will discuss Dickens’s Great Expectations. Much can be said about Dickens' view of women according to the way he constructs his female characters in Great
Expectations. There are many of them in the novel. However, none of them are deeply focused on throughout the novel. Estella, who is one of Pip's ‘great expectations,’ does not even have a major role. Nevertheless, his attitude concerning women is still reflected through his female characters as well as his word usage towards them.
Many of Dickens’s beliefs and attitudes were typical of the age in which he lived. He believed as many did during the Victorian period: the woman’s place was in the home. Women were the caregivers of the world. Their lives were supposed to be centred around their family: ‘It was for Dickens a fundamental belief . . . that man’s nature, his psychological and emotional make-up, differed, fundamentally and inherently, from woman’s writes Slater (1983, P. 301-2). He states that Dickens naturally sees women as born nurses. According to Dickens, the role of a woman is a natural one. Her natural state was in the home, meaning that the household came first. Although he did not see anything wrong with a woman who worked outside of the home, it could be done only for the well-being of her family. The woman’s domestic responsibilities were most important to Dickens. If a woman had to work outside of her home to support her family, ‘[he] was more than happy to support moves to obtain better conditions of work and helpful training’ (Slater, 1984 P.334). These guidelines, basically that a woman’s main concern is for her family, are what Dickens bases his female characters on and what their outcome will be. The outcome depends on the type of female in question.
Women and property is one of the central themes in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Dickens wrote this novel during the mid-nineteenth century, a period when women’s property rights were being intensely debated in England. His depiction of propertied women in the novel reflects Victorian England’s beliefs about women’s inability to responsibly own and manage their own property. Miss
Imran Hussain Henry James
Havisham is presented as the embodiment of women’s failure to properly manage wealth and property. Mr. Havisham’s settlement of the bulk of his estate on his daughter, despite the existence of a male heir, is unconventional, as the property system operated on a patrilineal basis. Estella’s economic tragedy illustrates consequences of disposing property onto women who will inevitably marry. She suffers the loss of her property at the hands of an unscrupulous husband who misuses her fortune. The most recent analysis of the chronology of Great Expectations shows that the main action spans between 1812 and 1829 according to Carlisle (1996, P. 5).
Dickens clearly gives attention to wealthy women who own property and are susceptible to abuse. The social and historical context of the penning of the novel, and the period during which it is set, suggests a criticism of women’s property rights.
As an unmarried woman in Victorian England, Miss Havisham, now a wealthy young heiress, becomes the target of an opportunistic swindler. She falls in love with Compeyson and accepts his marriage proposal. Miss Havisham’s love for Compeyson makes her vulnerable to the ‘systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her’ (Dickens: P. 177).
The combination of woman, love, and property in Great Expectations proves economically lethal. Miss Havisham’s fiancé never shows up for the wedding. Instead he sends her a letter, which upon reading, makes Miss Havisham realize she has been deceived and embezzled. Dickens’s depiction of Miss Havisham’s abuse of her estate parallels the belief that women were considered incompetent to exercise control over property or the power that it brings. Walsh (1993, P.74) says that:
Miss Havisham had been bilked, jilted and humiliated by a false fiancé; in response, she had immolated her women’s body and the brewery’s manufacturing economy in one furious sweep. In so doing, she effectually repudiated the role of women’s economic...capital within the family enterprise system, a business model still central to Victorian culture in general.
The economic consequences of Miss Havisham’s investment decisions provide an argument against women acquiring substantial property. Miss Havisham illustrates the perilous capacity of independent, propertied women to waste family fortunes upon sharp practitioners dressed in gentlemen’s clothing. It is important to take into consideration that this novel was being read against the social backdrop of demand for reform of married women’s property rights. Walsh (P.74-5) explains that:
Imran Hussain Henry James
Reformers began to advocate that the married woman be granted the power to own and dispose of property as a ‘feme sole.’ Miss Havisham, as a moderately wealthy ‘feme sole’ already enjoys these prerogatives. From a conservative point of view, her errors as a single woman would seem to reflect badly upon measures aimed at giving all women greater freedom to modify or reject their customary economic roles.
According to conventions of Victorian economic practices, Miss Havisham illustrates a significant female failure. Furthermore, Miss Havisham’s decision to adopt a daughter provides a matrilineal property link and suggests an additional argument against women’s property rights.
The settling of Miss Havisham’s estate on her adopted daughter Estella reinforces the argument that women’s control and ownership of property invariably leads to economic devastation. Estella is nurtured by her mother’s corrupted and ill feelings towards men. Estella learns the nature of the economic game when Miss Havisham orders Estella to ‘Beggar Him’ as Estella and Pip sit down to a childhood card game of ‘beggar my neighbor’ (P.73). Estella represents the fusion of wealth and social ambition, as she marries Bentley Drummle for his social position as a baronet. Estella repeats Miss Havisham’s mistake by not insisting on a marital settlement, which would have designated her inherited property as separate from the marital estate. Estella recapitulates Miss Havisham's earlier error of refusing to attend carefully enough to the economic grammar beneath the language of love. Upon marrying, Estella’s legal status is converted from feme sole to feme coverte. As a feme coverte, Estella’s estate is legally absorbed by her husband into the marital property. Although her husband was independently wealthy, that did not prevent him squandering and dissolving Estella’s inheritance. Bentley Drummle proves to be an abusive husband who ‘had used her with great cruelty’ and ‘brutality’ (P. 437). When Estella eventually separates from her husband, she is unable to reclaim any rights to her inheritance. After the death of her husband, she is able to recapture what is left of her property. As she comes to bid farewell to Satis House, two years after she is widowed, Estella explains to Pip, ‘the grounds belong to me. It is the only possession I have not relinquished. Everything has gone from me. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I have made in all these wretched years’ (P. 438-39). Estella admits the error of her judgment in marrying Bentley Drummle. Although she is working and making a ‘sufficient’ living, Estella believes that through her experiences
Imran Hussain Henry James
she has ‘been bent and broken . . . into a better shape’ (P. 439). Estella’s property ownership is minimized and her economic role is redefined as her property and economic status are reshaped to a socially acceptable state.
Thus Great Expectations settles the debate of women and property rights by restoring propertied female characters to their proper roles. Miss Havisham clearly illustrates the failure of women’s ability to manage property. Miss Havisham’s investment decisions and settlement of her estate on Estella proved economically disastrous, because she wrecks the brewery and refuses to sponsor her male relatives, she blocks her financial capital from circulating within the proper channels of investment and trade, thus rendering it economically barren. The novel’s ending may reflect Dickens’s attitude about women and property rights.
For the novel to arrive at some sort of happy conclusion, Miss Havisham must fulfil her proper economic role. Hence Miss Havisham aids her family in economic recovery and restores the family’s patrilineal system. She financially helps Herbert secure his investment in a profitable business. She also wills Mathew Pocket ‘a cool four thousand’ (P. 423). By investing in her male relatives, Miss Havisham plays a vital role in preserving the patrilineal system. The novel’s ending eliminates women as an economic force and repositions them in their proper place in Victorian society.
In conclusion James and Dickens represent women as signifiers and symbols of disappointment, disillusionment and failure. Failure in acquiring true freedom and failure in successfully managing property and wealth whether in Daisy Miller or The Portrait of a Lady or Great Expectations, compared to men who are not only confident of their freedom and independence but cunningly manipulate, embezzle and defraud women of their wealth and honour without them realising. Women, despite their inherited wealth have no real power and have to struggle to find some sort of fixed place for themselves in the novels. In Dickens’ and James’ novels one can see how the women who fit their ideas were rewarded with happy lives, usually in the form of emancipation from male subordination. On the other hand, the women who did not conform to these ideas were punished in one way or another. Although not all of their attitudes reflected what was typical of the period in which they wrote, many did.
Imran Hussain Henry James
Bibliography
Allen, Elizabeth. (1984). A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James. McMillan. London. U.K.
Carlisle, Janice. (1996) Introduction: Biographical and Historical Context to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Boston. USA.
Dickens, Charles. (1990). Great Expectations. Penguin. London. U.K.
Habegger, Alfred. (1989). Henry James and the “Woman Business”. Cambridge University Press.
Howells, W, D. (1958). Henry James and His novels. Gibson. New York
James, Henry. (1985). Daisy Miller and Other Short Stories. OUP. U.K.
James, Henry. (1994). The American. Everyman. U.K.
James, Henry. (1989). The Portrait of a Lady. OUP. U.K.
Jefferson, D,W. (1960). Henry James: Writers and Critics. Oliver and Boyd. Edinburgh and London.
Slater, Michael. (1983). Dickens and Women. Stanford. USA
Walsh, Susan. (1993). Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and the Climacteric Economy. Victorian Studies. Longman. U.K.