Female Protagonists in Henry James's The Potrait of A Lady and The Bostonians

About the Book The post-Civil War America ushered in a period when social and historical processes redefined the woman's role and choices. This work explores the process of negotiation between individual liberty and social conventions in the patriarchal and transitional American society of the nineteenth-century. The study focuses on the female protagonists in The Portrait of A Lady and The Bostonians. which demonstrates that Henry James placed women in the centre-stage in his fiction and watched them negotiating in the conditioning circumstances.

Introduction Henry James, it is generally recognized, is a psychological novelist with a special gift for rendering shades and nuances of a character's mind and sensibility. He draws the portraits of his major characters from within by probing deep into their motives and aspirations. In reading his novels our attention remains focused not so much on the external incidents as on the impact they make on the minds of the characters ill the novel. E.K. Brown has rightly pointed out that both' James and Conrad are impressionistic writers in the broad sense that their novels focus the reader's attention not on what will happen but on what happening will mean to the principal character or characters." In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James tells us that the seminal idea in his novels is ordinarily a character.

Situations and settings are imagined by him simply to bring out the full reality of the central figure which remains his primary concern in the work. He explains that his characters 'look a move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them.

From this we can see that a major character in James has to be envisaged in relation to the circumstances in which it is located and the minor characters in the novels are invented, on the whole, as a part of the environment which is supposed to reveal the full complexity and subtlety of the major characters. In his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James tells us very clearly that his interest lies in a single character. The novel, according to the declared intention of the writer, does not give primacy to the plot, the main emphasis being on 'the consciousness of a young woman."

Henry James puts before us different facets of Isabel Archer's personality as they are revealed through her actions and supplements this with description and direct commentary. The value of James's works, as George Markow Totevy rightly observes lies 'less in the framework and in the story than in the novel's overall atmosphere and the successive states of the hero."

James's interest in the deeper psychology of his characters is the primary factor behind the impression of realism he creates in his novels. However, through his characters he also tries to portray the conditions of his time.

He attains social as ‘well as psychological realism by making a judicious selection of characters and recording those actions and traits of the personalities of these characters which reflect the most significant tendencies of the age.

James, despite being primarily a psychological novelist, had a serious and active interest in understanding the nature of cultural climate in which he lived. For accomplishing the important task of identifying the basic attributes of the existing society and showing how it required improvement in some ways he did not find it necessary to give an extensive description, of the external circumstances or deal with institutions and methods through which that society carries on its social, political and economic activities.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages