SPEECH, MANNERS, AND SOCIETY IN HENRY JAMES (WOMEN)

James's late essays, "The Speech of American Women" and "The Manners of American Women," originally published in Harper's Bazaar in 1906-1907, have received little critical attention. This dissertation begins from the premise that the essays' theme--the role of good speech and manners in the creation and maintenance of social order--can shed important light on James's fiction. Certain stories and novels reflect, sometimes with startling directness, sometimes less obviously, the ideas James made explicit in the essays.;In this first chapter, the dissertation compares three works--"Pandora," Daisy Miller, and The Bostonians, which are explicitly concerned with the powers and limitations of the "American girl" as a social phenomenon. In making an issue of the speech and manners of his American heroines, James exposes the sexual and social confusion of contemporary Americans.;The following three chapters deal with novels which explore, in various ways, the connections between articulateness and the social instinct. In Washington Square, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age, corrupt speech and manners are both evidence of social disintegration or individual egotism and a force in the perpetuation of corruption. The heroines of these three works, though powerless in many ways, posses the sense of responsibility to others that James saw as characteristic of the "lady" he describes in the essays. While Catherine Sloper's mild irony remains essentially defensive, and Maisie's carefully planned speeches seldom have the peacemaking effect which she intends them to have, Nanda Brookenham puts her developed manner to "truly social" use.;These essays define "good" speech, illuminate James's concept of society, express James's criticism of American society vis-a-vis European tradition, and explore the complementary social roles and responsibilities of men and women in regard to speech and manners. James insists that democracy, by encouraging the hypertropy of individual egos, poses a grave threat to social unity.