Your usual style’? A re-evaluation of the stylistic similarities between Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

Fish (1980:95, 69) negates the status of stylistics as a proper subfield of linguistics (calling for ‘repair [of] the ruins of stylistics’), and that of literary criticism, which is ostensibly characterised by ‘subjectivity and imprecision’. Since, stylistics has aimed to address these criticisms, while literary critics have unabashedly remained unconcerned. I argue that the way forward in the field of stylistics is embracing the subjectivity of literary studies, while supporting analyses with the ever-evolving methods of stylistics. This study combines tested and tried stylistic methods, as employed by Chatman (1972) and Watt (1960), with more modern methods of corpus analysis (Cui 2014, Wichmann 2001) in an analysis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. The two novels have frequently been compared to one another, with the proposition that Wharton’s 1920 text heavily relies on James’s 1881 text (Strout 1982, Tintner 1980, Martin 2000). This talk focuses on stylistic aspects of their prose (referential ambiguity of pronouns, ellipses, syntax and metaphorical language), arguing that James’s text shows development towards his late style (e.g. The Golden Bowl), and Wharton’s retrospectively approximates it, but to different ends: James’s is the dramatisation of Isabel’s, the protagonist’s, consciousness, making his an inherently feminist novel, while Wharton’s equally creates satire, making her text almost as polemical as The House of Mirth, and highlights her appropriation of the period’s tropes and earlier texts, which challenges the reader’s expectations of gender roles, character and genre. Chatman, Seymour. (1972). The Later Style of Henry James. Oxford: Blackwell Cui, Yaxiao. (2014). ‘Parentheticals and the presentation of multipersonal consciousness: A stylistic analysis of Mrs Dalloway’. Language and Literature, 23.2. 175-187 Fish, Stanley. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. London & Cambridge: Harvard University Press Martin, Robert. (2000). ‘Ages of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’. Henry James Review 21. 56-62 Strout, Cushing. (1982). ‘Complementary Portraits: James’s Lady and Wharton’s Age’. Hudson Review 35.3. 405-415 Tintner, Adeline. (1980). ‘Jamesian Structures in The Age of Innocence and Related Stories’. Twentieth Century Literature 26.3. 332-347 Watt, Ian. (1960). ‘The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication’. Criticism, X.3. 250-274 Wichmann, Anne. (2001). ‘Spoken parentheticals’. In Karin Aijmer (Ed.) A Wealth of English: Studies in Honour of Göran Kjellmer. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis