Women and Men

This essay focuses on changing constructions, discourses, and institutions of femininity and masculinity during James’s lifetime, and investigates their critical rendering in the writer’s work. It addresses James’s representations of women and men, and his narrative concern with the coeval revolution taking place in the position and outlook of women; the crises in and trials of masculinity; the respective conditions of men and women in relation to marriage, sexuality, work, and the public and private spheres; contemporary feminism; and images of women and men in contemporary/popular culture.