The Expressiveness of One’s Shell: The Language of Dress in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of dress as a tool for characterization in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Previous studies conducted by Hollander (1993) and Hughes (2001) have observed that James cared very little for a detailed, “photographic” description of dress in his fiction. Nevertheless, the limited references to dress in the novel prove that the latter is often aligned with the ‘social imagination’ of the observer. In the first part, the thesis provides an overview of fashion studies – the psychological, structuralist and sociological perspectives are tackled. The second chapter introduces the subject of the “literary dress” and discusses Henry James’s representation of it in his fiction. The final chapter is devoted to reading The Portrait of a Lady through these lenses, allowing an understanding of dress as an expression of one’s identity and of how the latter is perceived, ultimately stressing the gap between the protagonist Isabel Archer’s ideas about dress as a personal ‘shell’ and her dressing practice.