A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James

## Contents A Note on the Texts if Henry James's Fiction WOMEN AS SIGNS Any sign depends on someone using and understanding it. If we learn our sense of self through being the subject or 'I', who understands and uses signs, and for whom they are being used by others to communicate, then what do we make of the position of women, who learn through existing sign systems that they themselves are signs? Of course all peopleindividuals or groupscan function temporarily as signs for other people. In the advertisements which judith Williamson discusses in Decoding Advertisements, various people signify gracious living, sophistication, success, etc. What I want to suggest is that women actually learn their sense of self in a way different from men: that society demands of them always to be potential signs, carriers of meaning (whatever that meaning is) simply because they are women. That this can be only partial, since women are inescapably also conscious subjects, results in conflict which, strangely enough, is often not seen as problematic-whereas it seems in fact to be one of the fundamental conditions of oppression. For instance Levi-Strauss, in The Elementary Structures OJ Kinship, formulates the problem without appearing to see it as such: The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged ... But woman could never become a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person,and since in so far as she is defined as a sign, she must be recognised as a generator ofsigns. 3 But 'still' being a person is not as simple as Levi-Strauss implies. It tends to involve the schizophrenic recognition of yourself as object for yourself, that any female reading and identifying with such a passage as this would involve: It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman?4 There is a total assumption that the reader, the subject to whom this It was James himself who was eventually hailed as the real progenitor of the fictional American girl, developing the subject that he had seized upon so early as somehow particularly expressive and paradigmatic of the contradictions he wished to explore. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-10 Woman in the Nineteenth Century....Pages 11-35 The Scarlet Letter....Pages 36-39 The Early Work....Pages 40-57 The Portrait of a Lady....Pages 58-82 Women in the Public World: The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse....Pages 83-116 The Novels of the 1890s....Pages 117-145 The Wings of the Dove....Pages 146-175 The Golden Bowl: Signification as Power....Pages 176-208 Back Matter....Pages 209-223