On The Portrait of a Lady

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Jame pressented the heroine, lsabel, to The Portrait to make the readers understand through what she impressed, thought, and felt by means of the single point of view putting the psychology into her mind. As a matter of fact, we feel as if we read a long epic or a lyric when we read the Portrait. Indeed, James succeeded in writing this bulky novel naturally in many aspects; the art-form, the psychological expressions, the moral problems, etc. In the transitional point of the American and the English novels form the nineteenth century to the modern novels, it was James who played a part of a forerunner; he provided a new way to both American and English modern novels. Yet, many critics comment that Jame's novel are cramp and hardly understandable so that they are dry, lack of interest and vividness, but James believed, as I already erudited, that it is important to penetrate into the psychological problems of human beings and to hold the essence of the psychological things as far as the mankinds are moved by the spirit. At the same time, his technique and method are matured in The Portrait already. Then, they were favorably adopted by many novelists, conrad, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner in their works To the Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, A Protrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and The Sound and Fury which are most outstanding ones of the twentieth century American and English novels. More to the point, the structures of The Portrait are systematic and harmonized as James called charpente.
All the same, The Portrait was a prelude which led to his most successful last period novels, The Wings of Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowls in the points of view of the psychology, the art-form, the single point of view, the dramatic craft, etc. In the light of James's novels, he went to his long last after completing his art of novels to a certain extent through a dauntless spirit, a struggle, a fighting spirit, and a streneous devotion to his successful novels initiated by The Portrait.　．Needless to say, James played a role of stepping stones from the Victorian novels and the nineteenth century American and the English novels to the twentieth century American and the English fiction. To my mind, it is a motive and an inducement that many more people and critics now study about James's novels and his novel　theories after his posthumous than he had survived. In The Portrait, we notice that James's peculiar qualities are matured and mastered already and The Portrait is really one of the James's masterpieces.