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This essay explores how Henry James’s Daisy Miller dramatizes the tension between Winterbourne (studying Daisy to place her in the proper social category) and Daisy (evading Winterbourne’s spying eye to celebrate her sexuality). The narrative starts with Winterbourne’s determination to learn more about “foreign” Daisy to put her into the oppositional category of a good and bad “girl.” However, in the story, Daisy hybridizes her identity by standing in between the oppositional category. The ambiguity of Daisy’s behaviors produces “classificatory confusion” and, for that matter, Winterbourne continue to fail in finding the right formula that can successfully apply to Daisy. Importantly, in the moment Winterbourne thought that he found the right formula that applies to Daisy, Daisy once more escapes from Winterbourne’s definition by disappearing into death. The story ends with Winterbourne’s self-reflective statement that he has been too dependent on conventional values to explain the new womanhood that Daisy expresses. Consequently, it is not Daisy but Winterbourne who is troubled by the “audacious” and resistant gestures Daisy made and learns a lesson in the end of the story. Thus, Daisy Miller starts with a story of Daisy who goes beyond convention and conformity but ends up to be a story of Winterbourne who fails to place Daisy in the social category because he too heavily depended on convention and conformity.

This paper purports to discuss Henry James’s criticism of the Victorian society in the 1890s in The Awkward Age which is represented through the world of Buckingham Crescent, the world of a high-class society whose true wits are Mrs. Brookenham, Vanderbank, Mitchett, and the Duchess. Almost all the characters entering this world show openly or covertly their inclinations to get money. Mrs. Brookenham and the Duchess represent the cash-nexus or cash-and-carry relations dominating all the nooks and corners of the society in this work. They use all the intrigues and tactics in order to get their niece and daughter, Aggie and Nanda, married to the rich man, Mitchett. Therefore, these young girls are prepared for “consumption” in the marriage market. The major members of the “temple of analysis,” another name of the world of Buckingham Crescent, enjoy “freedom of talk”, “freedom of mind”, and “high intellectual detachment” through their indirect and imaginative talks and by avoiding vulgarities and emotional expressions. But their “high intellectual detachment” represents a trend of the English Decadence in the 1890s, whose creed is supported most noticeably by Vanderbank. Finally, their ‘high intellectual play’ brings about the coldness of their hearts, as is shown in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand”.

This paper aims at examining Doctor Sloper’s contradictory duality in Henry James’ Washington Square. James effectively portrays his inner figure through the use of irony and conveys the spirit of American society. This novel deals with the relationships and conflicts of Doctor Sloper, Catherine and Morris Townsend. Doctor Sloper is the important character who has a scholarly doctor with his learning and skill and is proud of his perfect life. He notices that Morris tries to entice his daughter for the purpose of having her money. And he opposes her marriage with Morris because of his incapacity for money and his snobbery. His opposition shows that he performs parental duty to protect his daughter. But there is another psychological factor to work. It is his hidden inward disposition, that is, the secular and material propensity. After Doctor Sloper finds this from Morris, he tries to deny his own material disposition through his loathing about Morris. It means that he projects Morris the shadow of his own ego and hates him. But Morris’ appearance brings about the contradiction between Doctor Sloper’s perfect image and his reality and there occurs his irony. Therefore, the essence of irony from the Doctor himself and from the extreme relationship between him and Morris can be fully understood through in-depth and internal analysis of characters.

A Re-reading of Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master” Hung Kuhn Cho (Sunchon National University) This paper examines Henry James's criticism of aestheticism in “The Lesson of the Master”(1888). For a long time most of critics have considered St. George's advice to be that of Henry James on the basis of James's biography, considering it as Modernist aesthetics of alienation or as a expression of ideology of patriarchal system. But we cannot evaluate the ultimate value of this work within this frame. We can grasp James's criticism of St. George's stance as an aesthete only when we discuss the work within the context of salvation of society through art in the late 19th century. Then, we can see through St. George's statements about the renunciations of artists for the perfection of art and recognize him as a spokesman of aestheticism. Even Paul has some preconceptions of aestheticism and, thus, falls a victim to St. George's advice.

“The Beast in the Jungle” can be considered as a companion piece of “The Altar of the Dead” in that both tales are concerned partly with the English Decadence of the 1890s and partly with the classical modernism in the early twentieth century. The heroes in both tales make an escape from ‘everyday routines’ into their own particular inner world of imagination or fantasy in which they build a strong fortress of egotism or narcissism. John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” makes a journey of “a great negative adventure” in his own world of fantasy, waiting for his own “exceptional” fate with May Bartram. But his journey ends with the nightmarish attack by “the beast in the jungle” representing his own final fate. The beast represents John Marcher himself who rejects May's true love and his own life. Thus, it can be said that this tale treats the existential themes of alienation and absurdity in the modern world.

The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as the masterpiece of Henry James’s entire literary work dealing with the international theme. Under the theme, James, as a lifetime transatlantic traveler, uses manners as an interesting subject of study in contrasting American and European civilizations. He examines these two distinct cultures by presenting the manners of each world and showing how these manners clash and are mixed in the international scene. In this novel, the manners of the innocent anarchic and independent Isabel, who lacks social experience, reveal the cultural level of a young and uncivilized America. While the outspoken and excessive manners of Henrietta Stackpole embody a militant and provincial Americanism, Madam Merle, who absorbs European social norms without criticism, exemplifies another extreme case of provincialism. The ideal cosmopolitan manners are displayed by Mr. Touchett and his son Ralph, who apply a liberal, balanced, and flexible approach in the face of the international conflict of manners by adopting European culture in a practical way while preserving their American spirit.

In The Princess Casamassima, London is portrayed as a contradiction; on the bright side, it is a prosperous and splendid city, but on the dark side it is a hotbed of poverty and crime. The two sides of London are projected onto Hyacinth Robinson, who was born from a morganatic marriage between an aristocrat father and a lower-class criminal mother. Hyacinth, who has a dual identity as an aristocratic descendant and a member of the urban working class, experiences two worlds without fully belonging to either of them. Through the eyes of Hyacinth, who inherited an aesthetic sensibility from his father, the crowding and deindividuation of the urban mob are captured as a sign of vulgarity, lacking taste or culture. He fails to understand the vulgarity of the two worlds, and the nature of beauty and ugliness by associating vulgarity only with lower-class and idealizing the aristocracy as an absolute beauty, which indicates his dichotomous preconceptions about the two classes. However, later he realizes and accepts that vulgarity or ugliness coexists with culture or beauty in human life, and the coexistence rather enhances the values of beauty.

Genteel Tradition is an old European culture deeply rooted in the consciousness of Americans, centering around a small and isolated group of Puritan settlers in New England. Originating from a small community in the early days of America’s national founding, genteel tradition is based on Calvinism, which emphasizes rigid moralism. This tradition refers to an outmoded and static old tradition of America that loses its foundation in a rapidly changing modern American society. In this novel, the tradition is symbolized by Mrs. Newsome, who dominates Strether’s moral consciousness. She sends her fiance, Strether, as her ambassador to Europe in order to bring home her only son, Chad Newsome, who is believed to have been seduced by an evil European woman. Strether’s journey to Europe from Woollett, Massachusetts is described as a growth in his perception as he breaks away from the prejudices of genteel tradition. In this novel, Strether’s morality, which acts on altruism, conscience, and free will, transcends the rigid and strict moralism of Puritan culture and is depicted as the ideal model of Jamesian aesthetics.

This study analyzes the way in which Isabel Archer, initially a romantic idealist, faces and then willfully decides to embrace the painful experience of actual reality. While she is eager to “see” life for herself, she wants to escape from the obligation and burden of ideals. Inevitably, she lacks a sense of reality until her zeal for ideals is tested by the crucible of her matrimony. Isabel goes through two different phases of experience before and after her marriage to Osmand. While staying in Europe, she first imagines, then observes, and finally lives the life of a young lady with an inherited fortune. This experience transforms Isabel’s vision of life from a romantic idealist’s to that of a moral fundamentalist. At the beginning she yearned for freedom and independence, but in the end she accepts her moral obligation, responsibility, and life of oppression. In a sense, such a change in her vision and attitude can be interpreted as a case of so-called “felix culpa,” meaning “fortunate fall.” Isabel's marriage to Osmond might be seen as a channel to her maturity. In sum, the whole process of Isabel's experience represented by her will to see the world, her marriage to Osmond, and then her reflection on her married life in the scene of “night vigil” enables her to have a perceptive growth.

“The Figure in the Carpet” has been considered as one of the most ambiguous tales of Henry James, and as a tale on the absence of absolute truth or absolute meaning. But, seen from the perspective of James’s consistent interests in the relation of life and art in his artist tales, it can be read as another variation of that relation, one that depicts an inversion of life and art. According to James himself, this tale was meant to criticize the lack of “analytic appreciation” and the “numbness of general sensibility” “in the English- speaking air.” Thus, in the story, three critics are lured and tested for their critical qualifications. They are meant to discover the “secret”—“the figure in the carpet”—of Hugh Vereker, a famous but unpopular writer. But they can’t achieve the goal because of their “limp curiosity,” and because, as critics who have abandoned their real lives and true human sympathy, they have a strong avidity for fame and success. The inversion of life and art is the natural result following from their quest for the “secret.” The anonymous first-person narrator is an especially cold, obsessed observer who inflicts violent injury on other people’s hearts and commits an ‘Unpardonable Sin’ like the scientist characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales.

This paper has an aim at analyzing the aspects of aestheticism and calculated intention in Henry James’s Washington Square. Sloper, Morris, and Mrs. Penniman, the three major characters around Catherine have a tendency to manipulate and control other people, especially Catherine, with calculated intentions to get them or her to their own advantage. Sloper and Morris compete with each other in order to control or take possession of Catherine just like a property, and Mrs. Penniman tries to meddle with the love affairs of Catherine and Morris with her own melodramatic imagination. All the intentional activities of the three persons are closely combined with their aesthetic tendencies. Being ‘natural’ and ‘sincere’ is suggested as Morris’s motto but proves to be just his pose as an aesthete. The genuine meanings of the words ‘natural’ and ‘sincere’ belong only to Catherine in Washington Square. Her sincere efforts to love both her father and Morris and to determine her fate with her own will are the genuine criticism of the above three persons, and here lies the real nature of Henry James’s social criticism of American society in Washington Square.

James never put his reader in a direct contact with his subjects; he believed it was impossible to do so, because his subjects were really not related to what happened but instead to what someone felt about what happened, and this could be directly known only through an intermediate intelligence. So I studied the structure of the dynamic interrelationships among the intermediate reflectors, including the narrator as an another character. In Wings, the reader sees the events through the eyes of the three principle centers; Kate, Milly and Densher. The voices of the narrator and the characters become a representation of multiple perspectives. Through a less-than-omniscient narrator, Kate's value becomes clear to the reader, so we couldn't see her as a woman with a tinge of the cold-blooded assassin despite being a conspirator. Through the Susan's consciousness a mere romantic view of Milly's situations can be seen. Susan judges and acknowledges Milly as a positively good person naming her as the princess. The narrative voice about Milly's thoughts is either silent or meager. As Milly functions as an absent center, what is written is dependent upon what is unwritten. Due to the functions of the mystified angelic figure, the fortune hunters cannot be regarded as abominable villains. Throughout in the novel, Densher never has an original idea, but develops, for the reader, both a reflector and an unreliable narrator. As his interchanging process is the main point, his meetings and reflections are more closely allied to the tension of the novel. Though the narrator plays a part to construct thoughts and feelings of the characters, his own narration ends up revealing vulnerability. For this fact, the reader can easily recognize the narrator's limitations of omniscience. But he pursues persuasion to convince the reader that a character's effect on him can be the same for the reader. In conclusion, the Jamesian text does not readily tell the facts. What is recorded are the effects the characters have on one another and on the narrator as well. It is the very narrative technique adopted in James' deployment of the epistemology of impressions, which creates the reader's response.

This paper examines the pragmatic experiences and conversion of perception in The Ambassadors. The hero, Lambert Strether, who is engaged to Mrs. Newsome, comes to Paris as an ambassador to take her son Chad Newsome home. The dilemma comes from the fact that Strether, as a man of sensibility, is burdened with Puritan dogmas. However, his moral sense does not remain inflexible and unchanged. It undergoes considerable change as he meets with new experiences in Paris. His inner experience demonstrates a great swing from a public to a private conscience, from a fixed code of conduct to a flexible code of conduct. Strether never stops re-describing experiences by judging each event through his own ‘metaphors.' In particular, the process by which he continuously reconstructs the meanings of the experiences through his moral imagination represents the epitome of the pragmatic attitude. Strether finds himself on the point of losing everything at the end of the novel, and he decides to return to Woollett “to be right.” His decision is a pragmatic conversion that overcomes society's values and finally leads him to perceptive freedom.

As a psychological realist, Henry James employs the narrative strategy of the stream of consciousness, which is inseparably associated with the philosophical trend of phenomenology. In this regards, this paper examines Isabel’s epistemological process in the light of descriptive method, which is inevitably related to the phenomenology of perception. Despite her passionate aspiration to obtain the absolute freedom, she cannot escape the trap built up by her surroundings, due to her fault. She marries Osmond because his aesthetic attitude toward life seems to be promising for her to seek for the ideal beauty. After immense suffering from her mistake to choose Osmond, Isabel undergoes a serious change in her life mentally and physically. Isabel starts to see the reality behind Osmond’s false appearance and realizes the diminished freedom. She can arrive at a transcendental apprehension with the phenomenological reduction to the thing itself after being exposed to different people. At the last part of the novel, by returning to the chill and ruins of Rome, she accepts her responsibility for her mistaken choice. The reason for her return to Rome is analyzed in connection with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body phenomenology’. The phenomenological perception on human existence provides her with a new paradigm emerging from the perception of the human body.