The Portrait of a Lady. Discuss James representations of 'places' for women in this novel.

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Q2.        ‘A woman it seems to me has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself, she has to remain on the surface and more or less to control’

        Discuss James’ representations of ‘places’ for women in his novels.

There is an impressive range of female characters in Henry James’ fiction.  Drawn to the world of wealth and leisure as a subject, a world which was at the same time, ironically the context for his own hermetic labours as a writer, James perhaps inevitably came to concentrate on the feminine.  Correspondingly, most of his male characters seem to be concentrating on women too.

It seems a woman’s place and her relationship with others in James’s novels is to act as a sign.  Through the exploration of women as signs in James’ novels, I will focus on a specific pattern and try to trace a development in his use of women as sign and women as consciousness, and the implications each has for the other.  I will thus concentrate on Daisy Miller, The American and The Portrait of a Lady which seem to me to exemplify various stages of treatment in this pattern.  Also these texts form a chronological progression, so that in the early stories the figure of the ‘American girl’ functions simply as a sign for an observant consciousness.  Daisy Miller is the paradigm of the woman as a sign in James’ early work, whose destruction raises questions as to the real nature of her individuality and freedom.  These questions are explored in the use of the same figure attempting to be the free subject of her own experience, yet being appropriated as a sign by the surrounding world, in The Portrait of a Lady.  In addition, I will make references to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and compare his representation of places for women and whether or not they are meant to symbolise any limitations of women.

The theme so early recognised as particularly James’ own was the international one, and the expression of this theme pivoted around the figure of the American girl.  The critic W.D. Howells (1958 P.63) credited James with being the inventor of the    ‘International American girl’.  The American girl, as she appears in James’ early stories and novels is independent, moral, free, innocent, and her attractiveness is either ‘delicate’ or of a pale and rather asexual kind.  In her less refined or serious form, she may be ignorant, brash or simply naïve.  She is, of course, as always unmarried.  In using the American girl as central to his exploration of the interaction of American and European society, it was not at first in the girl herself that James placed the distinguished American moral consciousness, and when she was endowed

 Imran Hussain  Henry James

with moral seriousness the conscious response to its clash with social convention was again, in the early work, usually located in a male onlooker.  Her self-consciousness according to Habegger (1960, P.67) developed out of a line of American girls who were absorbed by Europe, withdrew from it, or were destroyed by it, and this is the reason for their destruction which suggests the need for an assertive self.

It is only in certain of his central female characters that James focuses on the conflict between female consciousness of self and existence as a sign, defined socially and linguistically.  The novels establish women signs both in their reflection of social reality and in their use of women as ‘other’ suggestive of interpretation, at the same time as they probe this sign function as problematic for the aware and conscious female individual.  The heroines in whom this conflict is explored are young and usually unmarried, poised as it were, on the threshold of social existence and limitation.  The places, which older women occupy in his novels, are very much ‘fixed’ socially, and are linguistically and socially adept.  Easily recognisable, they function both as social reference points and as interpreters of the social world to the subject of the novel’s experience.  Maintaining the social structures they inhabit, they encourage marriage and objectification of the hesitant young girl.

I will now discuss two of James early novels, in both of which Americans come to Europe and fare badly – The American and Daisy Miller.  In the former the protagonist is male – Newman – while in the latter female – Daisy.  Thus I intend to argue that there is a difference in treatment, and through the comparison of the use of both Newman and Daisy as sign to show that this function is paramount and intrinsic for Daisy while it is not for Newman.  I will also suggest that Daisy is destroyed because she fails as a sign.  As a vivid signifier there is no clear indication of what is

signified.  Her salvation would be not in herself but in the male subject’s ability to trace some correspondence – an ability which emerges too late.

The starting point for Newman in The American is the same as for Daisy; the independent American individual arriving in the old world.  In the opening chapters, Newman is described as a ‘powerful specimen of an American’ (P.10).  He signifies and symbolises the material wealth of America, its raw energy and individualism.  Thus as an American individual, Newman confronts a formal aristocratic European

Imran Hussain  Henry James

society; yet there exists a second dichotomy which modifies Newman’s existence as an individual vulnerable to the response of the social world he encounters.  Within

America itself, a division was seen to exist as Jefferson (1960, P.39) points between men ‘doing’ and making money, and women ‘representing’ culture and thus the cultural products of money, functioning both as consumers and as products.  In The American, the money/culture split is defined partly as European/American, but also as male/female.  Newman observes, sees, and buys and he is doing so in order to obtain some sign of his material success, some means whereby he will be interpreted and represented to the world.  Newman is appropriate as a wealthy American than as an innocent one, but even so the signification of his wealth remains at a literal level.  The moral questions raised by the wealth – the power, freedom, responsibility and potential for transcendence of the material that it brings – are not explored in the way that they are elsewhere in the rich girls, who through their indirect relationship to the sources of wealth, both represent it and present the illusion inherent in apparently going beyond its worldly base.

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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 ...

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