The Cultural Conflicts And Tragic Color Of The Characters

This thesis attempts to compare and analyze the writing styles, the cultural conflicts confronting the characters and their tragic fates caused by those conflicts in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. Based on the comparison and the analysis, this thesis further probes the perplexity that different characters experience in the surroundings of cultural conflicts between European and American continents, when they try to find out their own social positions and reshape their identity.This thesis is composed of three parts, plus the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction, first of all, expounds the reasons why these two novels are chosen and analyzed. Next come the literature reviews of these two works and two authors' cultural values. Finally the topic explored in this thesis is put forward: what choice these characters should make in the surroundings of cultural conflicts between European and American continents, especially in the struggle between the inner world of the characters and the society.Chapter One explores the background of these two works, including the two authors' experience of life, the different literary schools they belong to, and the different approaches these two writers use to reveal cultural conflicts. Hawthorne employs the archetype of American Myth—a belief that the Americans have the inborn superiority—to reflect what the Americans think about the Europeans. Whereas James, from the practice of techniques of Romanism and Realism, characterizes the contradiction between human being and society, between people themselves, and reflect their fates in the conflicts.Chapter Two elaborates how the European and American conflicts of culture influence the characters' attitudes toward life, their psychological development and the changes of their feelings. The author firstly expresses the idea that culture is not synonymous with civilization: culture can affect and change a person's nature, and plays a decisive role in the development of a person's character; while civilization can merely make a person's value of morality exert its role better. It can not eliminate the bad aspects of human nature. It can only direct and limit people's behaviors and thoughts. Secondly, this chapter expounds, in the surroundings of cultural conflicts between Europe and America, the perplexity of the characters towards their own identity and the two results of identity reshaping: either return or assimilation. Return means self-preservation, leading to giving up the pursuit of superior civilization; assimilation means the loss of self and complete cultural integration of discord and concord reflected in a very delicate way.Chapter Three discusses in detail the characters' tragic fates in the cultural conflicts. The Marble Faun concerns three young American artists, Miriam, Hilda and Kenyon, and their Italian faun-like friend, Donatello, whose characters are transformed during their stay in Rome, the Eternal City. The fragility and durability of human life and art dominate this story of the American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past and Donatello's crime turn the reality into tragedy. In this novel, Hawthorne dramatizes the confrontation between the Old World and the New World and the uncertain relationship between the "authentic" and the "fake" in both life and art. The Portrait of a Lady reflects the contradiction of James's thoughts when he makes an attempt to find out what it means by being an American. When he wrote his novel, James said that he felt "a kind of national consciousness, a kind of proportion and a kind of interrelationship"; he also felt that "the world was more complicated than people thought up to now, the future was more treacherous, the success more difficult to achieve". He said that "nothing is impossible to happen in this world." Isabel, the heroine in this novel, just like the American culture in its infancy of development, forms her own initial characteristics, and is not mature enough. She comes to Europe to experience the examination of the norms in this old world and suffers the ups and downs in her life, which plainly has some symbolic meaning. James' work reflects the conflicts between American and European cultures which cause the psychological contradiction in Americans by employing the particular environments and characters. Those Americans, as described by James, are na(?)ve and pure and have no cultural foundation in their life. Without resorting to too many events, he depicts the characters and reveals the tragic fate of the characters indirectly by emphasizing the psychological 'vortex' behind a few events.The conclusion of this thesis shows that identity reshaping is a painful choice. Choosing an identity means discarding a culture. Returning and assimilation are the two opposite results throughout the process in which the characters try to find their own identity in society. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne contrasts Europe with America, focuses on the moral decay of Europeans and reveals the moral superiority of Americans. Therefore, the heroine Hilda finally chooses to return during the pursuit of her identity. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel, who is very independent and self-confident, with the original superiority of social advancement comes to Europe. But after experiencing a series of frustration and setbacks, she gets lost and feels inferior. She loses her real identity, as a result of being assimilated into European culture.