Date of Graduation
1991
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
This study examines the male American protagonists from four of Henry James's major novels, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Bostonians, and The Ambassadors. Considerations of the generic Jamesian hero usually include James's heroines, and numerous works have concentrated on James's female protagonists, but few comparable attempts have been made to focus exclusively on James's male protagonists. Both the dynamic character of James's literary career and the extraordinary range of James's female characters suggest that such a study may be warranted. The scale of modes delineated by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism provides an archetypal base for this study. Because the significance of the hero depends not only on his own qualities but also on the genre or mode in which he functions and on the way the reading audience perceives him, the study also uses psychological, structuralist, and reader-response frameworks to consider how the de-forming, re-forming, and blending of narrative modes and the use of conventions clarify or obscure our perceptions of James's heroes. In Chapter 2, Roderick Hudson, who represents the old heroic tradition, must be destroyed to allay James's anxiety of influence. Chapter 3 employs the topoi of melodrama presented by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination to discuss the double nature of James's The American and the implicit threat posed by James's American hero Christopher Newman. Chapter 4 considers James's most traditional hero, Basil Ransom of The Bostonians. Examination of James's use of conventions indicates that Basil Ransom is a false hero idealized by a shallow culture. Chapter 5 offers an archetypal reading of The Ambassadors as a mock-heroic, with Lambert Strether functioning as a true hero in an unheroic world. The varied roles of these four characters, who appear in novels produced at different periods in Henry James's career, suggest that as a group, James's male protagonists offer greater variety than critics have heretofore accorded them.
Recommended Citation
Woods, Sandra Rosalynne, ""Losers at the game?" Male protagonists in four novels of Henry James." (1991). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 10043.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/10043