The Mythological Archetypes Of The Female Characters In The Portrait Of A Lady

The Portrait of a Lady is the representative work of Henry James. The opus is a full-length novel about an American woman named Isabel Archer. She goes to Europe to make her life and meets different types of men and women. The whole story concentrates on the emotional changes of Isabel Archer, narrates the affective entanglements between Isabel and other male characters and depicts the changes of relationships between the protagonist and other major female roles. Henry James characteristically portrays the primary women images in his The Portrait of a Lady, and by means of his splendid diction he dug into the internal monologue of those women, endowing them with vitality and authenticity.This study holds that the three major women characters (Isabel Archer,Madame Merle and Osmond Pansy) reflect and secretly conform to certain mythological archetypes in the Bible and the Greek myth.Therefore, by virtue of myth and archetypal criticism, my study tries to explore the major three women characters in The Portrait of a Lady through the lens of mythological archetypes at length respectively. This study discusses the hidden meaning of these characters, and proves step by step that Henry James turned to certain mythological archetypes when creating the above three women characters. This study finally points out that it is very difficult to transcend the mythological archetypes because they have sunken into the collective unconsciousness of human beings.The thesis consists of four sections: introduction, three chapters and conclusion.The life and works of Henry James, the literary influence and scholarship of The Portrait of a Lady, the theory of myth and archetypal criticism, the three representative theorists(comprising James George Frazer, Carl Gustav Jung and Northrop Frye) are all included in introduction.Chapter one traces the mythological archetypes of the heroine Isabel Archer back to Eve in the Bible and the goddesses including Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Persephone, Hera and Aphrodite in the Greek myth.Chapter two explores the archetypes of Madame Merle from origins of the serpent in the Bible, combined with Apate and Hera in the Greek myth.Chapter three studies Pansy and finds her archetypes covering Achsah in the Bible, and Persephone with the addition of Aphrodite in the Greek myth.Based on the above analysis, this study concludes with two points. Firstly, Henry James either consciously or unconsciously used mythological archetypes while creating the three major women characters in The Portrait of a Lady. Although the mythological archetypes of the three women differ from each other seemingly, they actually share many similarities. One archetype can be embodied by several characters, and one character can reflect several archetypes. Secondly, mythological archetypes have sunken into the collective unconsciousness of human beings and literature is the continuation of myth. A writer will consciously or unconsciously use mythological archetypes but can not transcend them.