The Concept of Fear in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

Henry James (1843-1916) born in New York city in April 15, 1843.He is one of the greatest American novelists. He was influenced by European authors like the English writers George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as the French writers like Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev.James wrote twenty one novels, one hundred twelve tales, several plays, autobiographical writings, literary studies, and travel impressions. James published" The Art of Fiction" in 1884,he believed that a novel should be considered an art presenting" a representation of life" exhibiting" an air of reality"; He considered" a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness"(Forster,163).Therefore he was the first concise novelist who began to turn his novel to a kind of art, and people for the first time began to think of the novel as an art. The title of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the same as the title of T.S.Eliot's poem" Portrait of a Lady" in which" the struggle is to create a world" (Gray,13).James" did not provide us with 'ideas' but with another world of thought and feeling" (Salami,52).He was awarded the Order of Merit on January the first 1916,one month before his death. This study aims at showing the meaning of fear and its impact up on the characters involved in The Portrait of a Lady.