Travelling Women and Self-Reconstruction in Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is a novel written by the American expatriate novelist Henry James, who travelled back and forth between Europe and America, and portrayed Americans living abroad. Indeed, most of James’ novels are related to American young ladies focusing on contact between America and Europe in order to give an extensive portrait about their positions in both societies during nineteenth century. The fact that they were largely influenced by the ideology of separate sphere, where women were not considered as equal to men, drove many masculine writers to represent the status of those women in their works. In James‟ works, travelling women emerged as challenging power; they chose travel to achieve knowledge and freedom regardless the patriarchal norms of their society, it was an act of revolution. Travel literature is a literary genre which presents a place, people, or culture through the eyes of the writers, while travel novel in particular, is relied on fictional narratives and includes the element of travel. Being a writer who covers all the above aspects in the Portrait of a Lady, Henry James is proven to be a transnational novelist. The fact that his travel novel uses travel as a form of liberation to female characters makes James a Feminist male writer. In this respect, he succeeded to defend women by depicting travelling women who challenged the patriarchal society and the fixed gender roles imposed by the Victorian era, as opposed to other women depicted as weak and treated as objects. Finally, he referred to travel as a means that helps them to shape their identities and self-reconstruction.