Femininity and Female Interiority: The Representation of Gender in Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady"

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Hannover, 78 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The Portrait of a Ladywas first published in serialization in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s Magazine in 1880 and came out in book form one year later. Due to its parallel publication on the American and the English market, this novel of Henry James’s early period1had enormous success, although the critical reception was not the same on both sides of the Atlantic.2However,The Portrait of a Ladyis still considered to be his greatest achievement until this day. In the course of publishing his works in collected volumes, Henry James also extensively revisedThe Portrait of a Ladyfor the 1908 New York edition, supplementing a preface to it and placing greater significance on the heroine’s perceptive progress. The story that Henry James tells inThe Portrait of a Ladyis a conventional one about courtship and marriage, but only at first sight. Beyond following traditional patterns of literary conventions of his time, James also included a range of novelistic features into his work or reworked some of the traditional material to an extent that a clear break can be registered. The first part of my study will therefore be a literary classification ofThe Portrait of a Ladyby examining and analyzing which conventional features James makes use of or breaks with and which novelties he introduces. In terms of these literary novelties, special attention will be given to the treatment of narrative perspective, since Henry James transferred this mode of presentation in the course of the story from the narrator to a “center of consciousness”3within the story.The Portrait of a Ladycannot yet be considered as a masterpiece of the stream of consciousness technique; however, the novel already exhibits features which indicate that Henry James will devote himself to this narratological technique in his succeeding works. The second part of my study of Henry James’sThe Portrait of a Ladywill be a close reading of the novel in which the reader comes across “a young girl affronting her destiny.” James’s choice of a female protagonist will be a crucial aspect of examination before giving a detailed characterization of the American Girl Isabel Archer, the young woman whom James considered worth making “the subject in the novel.”