European Landscape and American Experience: a Study of Henry James's Last Three Major Novels

This work attempts to analyze how the European landscape is intricately linked with Henry James's American protagonists in his last three major novels: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. This study proposes that the study of European landscape provides one different yet plausible approach to interpret James's last three major novels. Through the experiences of the innocent Americans, the significance of European landscape is highlighted and intensified. Places, such as Paris, Venice, and London, are essential because they provide contrastive settings that conserve the very tone and quality of European cultural refinement. More importantly, these places evoke, reflect, and enhance the characters' experiences there. The European landscape hence serves as a kind of extrasensory playground for the central reflectors to engage themselves in a different kind of conscious journey concurrent with the physical one. It is also elevated from a mere geographical and cultural territory to that of the literary--to a kind of fictionalized and versified territory similar to literary texts.