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For a few decades, the discussion of gender roles has been involved in literary studies. Henry James, as an important and complicated writer, presents gender issues in their persity and complexity in his works. Therefore, his works offer an extraordinarily rich and immense textual field for the investigation of gender, particularly the roles of women. James's sense of women as an important material for fiction emerges not only from the novelistic tradition that has long dealt with heroines, but from the American culture which is recognized from within and without to accord women a particularly prominent position. One of the emerging signs is that of the American girl. The youthful femininity signifies the inpidualistic spontaneity, freedom and innocence of the New World.
Jian Jie’s (2008) report refers that readers could partly attribute James's choice to his complex opinion about women －－two contradictory feelings towards women in his real life experience: sympathy and fear which are also reflected in The Portrait of a Lady as the tendency to confuse or mix two terms of opposition: freedom and constraint, activity and passivity which people witness in Isabel. This contradiction could be captured and traced in his real life narrated in his biographies. There are several females in his life that bears profound influence on his opinions about women: his mother Mary James and his cousin Minny Temple. Another scholar, Zhang Shao’en’s (2007) analysis concluded that culture determines the way of inpidual's thinking and acting. Any inpidual is in fact a natural being to a social being during which he internalizes the prevailing ideology in the society. Thus every inpidual is endowed with rich cultural messages and people can learn the culture of a certain society through observing an inpidual's activities. In The Portrait of a Lady, readers can find the cultural conflicts embodied in the heroine young Isabel's American style character. Isabel's identity lay in her national roots, which distinguish this American girl in the nineteenth century from her European counterpart.
From previous books and periodicals, many studies are made to the analysis of single character 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.