An Analysis on A Woman's Position in Society Through Henry James’ The Portrait of A Lady

Abstract

The nineteenth century was a time ehere a very high number of great novels were written and the English novel came of age. It was also a time when more and more people were asking basic questions about women. Feminism was not invented in the twentieth century; it entered English literature with the work of Mary wolstonecraft in the 1790's, dissappeared for fifty years and then became an important strand of opinion in the second half of the nineteenth' century. During the same peroid enormous changes were taking place in women's daily lives and they are constantly gaining more power and freedom. After that tjme the women have almost had their rights as men but then it was the beginning of loosing their traditional virtue, their true womanhood. In this case, a novelist like Henry James as well as other people were forced to define or redefine their attitudes. One of the protests came from Charlotte Younge in 1870s, who criticized that girls by that time had a much freer, bolder life, travelling alone was hardly doubted about. There were many aspects of this new freedom which she really disliked,the custom of girls enjoying cigarettes, for instance , or reading novels which tampered with dilemmas about the married vow and the act of disobeying their parents. The fact that " the woman question " was being debated everywhere, more and more writers attacked the double standard and occasionally marriage itself. As the century closed an increasing number of people are asking the question, , what should a woman do with her life?, ' How should they really act’ and there was no longer a single obvious answer.