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When one refers to the major themes of a particular writer, he refers to those subjects and preoccupations that persist and appear in many of his woks. The international theme operates broadly in James’ works, and it appears in the typical encounters of American and European cultures. His novels created many American feminine images that made pilgrimage to Europe. These females' yearn for Europe reflects not a desire for materials but a purely spiritual expectation with a strong sense of American cultural consciousness and self-moral consciousness.
1.2 The Significance
From previous books and periodicals, many studies are made to analyze the characters from Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. However, there does not appear to be much literature concerning the culture conflicts from the female’s perspective based on the contrast between Daisy and Isabel. For these two excellent novels both deal with an American girl going into European continent. They are both American girls arousing much academic controversies. They are both like the fresh air blowing into the ancient continent and society, displaying the Americans before Europeans. This absence arouses my interest in scratching this unexplored area. Hopefully, my exploration will make the research on the culture conflicts from the female perspectives, taking heroines of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady as examples.
2 Literature Review
With the publication of Daisy Miller, Henry James's reputation was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic and Daisy Miller has ever since become the American Girl in Europe, a celebrated cultural type who embodies the spirit of the New World Daisy Miller is the most immediately popular fiction among all of Henry James's works. When it was published in 1878, it attracted the attention of a wide public.
Wang Fu (2004) has a thorough analysis of the cultural conflicts in Daisy Miller, who considers the heroine is the victim of culture conflicts. In this novel, there are mainly two groups of people standing for different cultures. They are Daisy, the heroine and her family, and the Europeanized Americans represented by Mrs. CosteIlo and Mrs. Walker. As to Winterbourne, an American young man who has been in Europe for years, he serves as a linkage between Daisy and the Europeanized Americans, or in other words, between the innocent America and the sophisticated European countries. Superficially speaking, Daisy is the victim of her own innocence and naturalness. She dies young in the old world because her manners are intolerable in European society, Putting Daisy against social and historical background, we can say that she is the victim of the conflicts between two cultures. It is the intolerant attitudes towards different culture that lead to her pathetic ending.
The Portrait of a Lady, one of James’s greatest masterpieces, has been listed among the most studied female fictions in the world literature. It made him famous all across the American continent. It was James's most widely reviewed work and created a peak in his reputation. This novel focuses on the question of a woman's destiny and the conditions and consequences of modern marriage. Isabel, a young American woman, goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle, and their son, Ralph. She inherited a large sum of money. Then she turns down the proposals of marriage from Casper GoodWood and Lord Warburton, and marries Gilbert, a snobbish middle aged widower with a young daughter, Pansy. Henry James described the subject of the novel in the preface as "The conception of a certain young lady affronting her destiny". A young American heiress caught in the meshes of a loveless marriage.
Here is Li Langyan’s (2011) study result about the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady. There is no doubt over James's affection for her, because she is a more highly developed character and it is generally agreed that her morals reflect James's own. Literary criticism tends to focus on two important aspects in the novel. The first is why she abandoned her quest for freedom to marry Gilbert Osmond, and the second is why she returns to him after all she realizes how she has been deceived. The novel consistently focuses on Isabel Archer's view of freedom.