Defamiliarization, Setting and Foreshadowing of Death in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

Henry James is best known for his international theme of “American girl.” Most of James’s well-known fictions center a heroine with certain characteristics. The fact that women are playing a major role in James’s fictions channels a major body of criticism on James’s works toward women and psychoanalytical studies. James was to some extent was a Formalist him-self, so I have done Formalistic readings of James’s novel, The Wings of the Dove. I have sought the matter that would it be possible for the reader to foreshadow the death of the heroine of the novel? Moreover, I posed the question that how would it be possible for James to exhaust his theme of “American Girl” without making his stories boring and tiresome. I derived the term defamiliarization from Russian Formalism, and discussed that James had used techniques like focalizing characters, blanks, and stylistic oddity in order to achieve defamiliarization. Furthermore, I have discussed the exploitation of setting, Venice, in the light of defamiliarization.