The Modern American Novel

The Modern period covers a large amount of time, spanning from the late eighteen hundreds to the early nineteen hundreds. From the beginning of the modern era till the end, there have been many changes in society. When one looks at the roaring twenties, it is hard to imagine what America was like twenty or thirty years earlier. These drastic differences can be seen when one looks at one of the first Modern American Novels, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and compares it to a later Modern American Novel, The Sun Also Rises. Not only are the societies depicted in the two novels utterly dissimilar, the way in which the works are written shows major changes in the field of literature. What is it that connects the beginning of the Modern era to the end?

In their novels, James and Hemingway say similar things about the Modern American male and female. In both novels, the masculine and feminine stereotypes are reversed within the main characters. Both authors question the roles of men and, especially, women in society. The difference between the novels is how those roles are reversed and to what lengths the author goes to convey it.

In The Portrait of a Lady, written in 1881, Henry James clearly expresses all the things that women in the end of the 1800s were entitled to have: " kindness, admiration, flattery, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, the latest publications, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, and a glimpse of contemporary aesthetics (James 30)." A different stand on women's rights is shown through two of the female characters in this novel: Isabel Archer and Mrs. Touchett. Both women react differently to the confinin...

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...rett defeats man sexually, both are essentially doing the same thing. Isabel and Brett are overriding the roles that men gave them. Because The Portrait of a Lady was written in 1881 and The Sun Also Rises was written in 1926, Isabel and Brett live in different societies and they have different wars to wage and different weapons of attack. Yet both are doing the same action, in different worlds and different ways. Both women have a man that understands and appreciates what they do. The two men are only different because of the different societies they live in, and the different societies the two writers live in. Both novels follow the form of the Modern American Novel. Hemingway wrote the same message to the people of the 1920's that James made to the people of the 1890's.

Works Cited

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1996.