Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels

'In Wibke Schniedermann's book relational sociology meets narrative criticism to help probe gender-based inequality in some of Henry James's major novels. In her outline of the theoretical underpinnings and in her meticulous analyses ranging from James's first popular success in Daisy Miller to his last finished novel in The Golden Bowl, Schniedermann offers an exciting new way of reading symbolic economy in James's fiction at the interface of the social, the psychological and the literary.'

- Mirosława Buchholtz, Professor of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland 

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James’s novels. Reading James’s narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. The close readings focus on three novels, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, providing a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to masculine power and oppression. James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. The chapters trace a development throughout James’s career that reflects a growing sensitivity for the concealment and attendant misrecognition of gendered domination.