The Contrapuntal Narration In The Portrait Of A Lady

Henry James,one of the most prominent playwrights in American literature,is also a great prose writer as well as a literary critic.His early representative work The Portrait of a Lady is generally regarded as a great novel concerning international subjects reflecting the interpersonal interactions between Americans and Europeans as well as Europeanized Americans under the influence of the cultural conflicts between Europe and America.The novel mainly focuses on a young and wise protagonist Isabel’s emotive experiences and her belief,which exposes the theme of the contradictions between American capitalists and European aristocracy together with their admirations for the other side.Employing the multiple-perspective narration and the approach of central consciousness,James has fully represented characters’ diverse ideas and consciousnesses in The Portrait of a Lady.Furthermore,James also applies the contrastive method borrowed from counterpoint in polyphonic music to his arrangement of the structure of the whole novel.Accordingly,various artistic elements and notions in this novel are harmoniously united as an entity jointly representing the confrontations and affinities among different cultures and classes.According to the theory about the polyphonic novel,the present writer attempts to make an analysis of the novel’s unique narrative feature of polyphonic counterpoint and further explores the artistry of narrative styles in this novel.This thesis is composed of five parts.Part One briefly introduces James and The Portrait of a Lady.Part Two gives a review and summary of previous studies of James and The Portrait of a Lay as well as makes a brief introduction of Bakhtin’s study of polyphonic novel and contrapuntal principles in the artistic structures of polyphonic novels.Accordingly,the present writer raises the thesis statement and illuminates the purpose of the present study.Part Three explores the contrapuntal narrations in terms of three external factors in this novel,namely status,settings and cultures,from the perspective of counterpoint.Firstly,different narrators who are endowed with equal position express their own opinions on status.Closely connected to each other,those independent ideas and thoughts represented in the whole novel contrastively represent class contradictions in 19th century European society and expose the antagonism between American expatriates who advocate free and democratic spirit and European upper class as well as Europeanized Americans.Secondly,the contrapuntal arrangements of several pairs of essential settings in this novel not only reveal positive and negative characters,distinctive personalities but also present the heroine’s psychological development by virtue of the author’ s employment of contrastive method.Lastly,the antithetical relationships between European and American culture are also represented through the contrapuntal principle.To be concrete,James displays the cultural collision between Europe and America in the aspects of manners and conventions,features of national cultures and objective cultures.In addition,the representations of a sharp contrast between the two cultures further manifest James’s desire for the cultural fusion.Part Four analyzes the counterpoint in characters’ consciousness in the novel separately from the aspects of the heroine’s internal conflicts as well as psychological dialogues and contradictions among different characters.In The Portrait of a Lady,James has employed the structure of psychological counterpoint to portray the heroine’s internal conflicts in the face of her great sense of freedom,European elegance,traditional morality and marital responsibility,which profoundly uncover the theme with regard to a young lady’s choices of her fate in the unknown future.Besides,the psychological contradictions among different characters can be perceived from their dialogues.In brief,the psychological dialogues and contradictions among different characters reflect the oppositions between young American women’s consciousness of liberty and orthodox authority as well as traditional conception in Europe,and expose their impossibility of achieving free explorations of life and self-realization under the oppression of conservative ideas and decayed norms in the patriarchal society.Part Five concludes that the contrapuntal arrangement and organization in the structure of the novel not only expose the oppositions between Europe and America in the aspects of ideology as well as social custom but also present unsophisticated,independent and enlightened American woman’s interior contradictions,psychological progress and explorations in the process of the social contacts with Europeans and Europeanized Americans.Moreover,the objective contrast between two types of culture in the new and old continents made by James on the basis of contrapuntal principle delicately reflects his profound reflection of the cultural conflicts between Europe and America and great expectations for a consummate fusion between European temperament and American spirit.