From Naivety To Maturity

Henry James (1843-1916) is one of the greatest novelists in American literature, an outstanding theorist and practitioner of fiction as well. During his literary life as long as fifty years, Henry James has made a lot of experiments upon the art of fiction. He invents quite a new narrative technique known as "center of consciousness," which focuses on the point of view narration from some character. Thus, the representation of the novel, with the real life experience and vision as its focus, is shifted from the external description to the inner world of the characters. These attempts later on have grown into the basic and remarkable principle of the modern composition, influencing some diverse writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and so on.The Portrait of a Lady, one of Henry James' early masterpieces, famous for its rich, highly complex psychoanalysis, is regarded as the best novel in the history of English and American literature and has attracted the attention of many famous critics. What the author portrays to us is the unsteadily changeable process of the heroine from naivety to maturity. Ralph has told Isabel, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt, that she should live to suffer enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was duly provided. At the end of the novel, Isabel seems to have seen the ghost of Ralph since she has suffered a lot in her tragic marriage. Like his brother, William James, Henry James emphasizes the importance of experience on people's whole life: Isabel does not become truly mature until she has experienced the colorful and painful life.This thesis concentrates on the importance of experience on life through the analysis of the heroine's life experience. Firstly, a brief introduction to the theory of pragmatism is given. The founder of American pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce had specified the nature of pragmatism. William James had further developed it and...