Travelling Women: The Reconstruction of Self and Gender Roles in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

The Portrait of a Lady, the novel dealing with the passage from innocence to maturity of Isabel Archer, the American young woman dispatched to Europe by her cosmopolitan aunt, presents a good number of feminine characters that display various modes of female social existence and various degrees of adherence to the norms imposed by Victorian England. In the Victorian Age, gender roles were largely influenced by the Doctrine of the Two Spheres, according to which the public or social sphere implying work outside the house, social life, travel, power and independence belonged to the masculine gender, while women were generally restricted to the private sphere, in which they performed the roles of wives and mothers. The Portrait of a Lady displays a number of such ‘immobile’ women, limited to the confines of the narrow private/domestic sphere that assume a static role that was attributed to most middle and upper class women in Victorian society: Edith Keyes, the Misses Molyneux. The paper will focus on three female characters that accompany Isabel Archer in her travels - Henrietta Stackpole, Mrs. Touchett and Mme Merle - with a view to discuss the way in which they challenge and/or adhere to the patriarchal gender roles imposed by Victorian society in the process of being immersed into other spaces and cultures.