Revue Algérienne des Sciences du Langage
Volume 10, Numéro 2, Pages 328-340
2025-12-27
The Inheritance Of Harm: Cycles Of Abuse In Henry James's Heroines
Authors : Souhali Hichem .
Abstract
This paper examines the cyclical nature of abuse as portrayed through the female protagonists in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove. Through close textual analysis, I argue that James's heroines—Isabel Archer, Catherine Sloper, and Milly Theale—are trapped within inherited patterns of psychological and emotional cruelty that they unconsciously perpetuate even as they suffer from them. The study explores how these women, despite their apparent agency and intelligence, become complicit in systems that ultimately destroy them or others around them. Drawing on contemporary trauma theory and feminist literary criticism, I demonstrate how James anticipated modern understandings of intergenerational trauma transmission. The analysis reveals that James's female characters exist within what I term "elegant violence"—a refined form of cruelty disguised as social propriety that gets passed down through mentorship, marriage, and social expectation. Catherine learns cruelty from her father's emotional withholding, Isabel from Madame Merle's manipulations, and Milly from the very society that claims to protect her. Each woman, in turn, inflicts variations of this learned harm on others, suggesting that James viewed the cycle of abuse as an inescapable feature of his society's power structures. The paper concludes that James's genius lies in showing how victims become perpetrators not through conscious malice but through the unconscious reproduction of the only relational patterns they have known.
Keywords
Henry James ; cycle of abuse ; intergenerational trauma ; female characters ; feminist literary criticism
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