Dark Lady and the Fair Maiden: the Transformation of the Romance Heroine in the American Novel

Abstract

Despite the dominance of a boyish and adolescent theme that Leslie Fiedler finds in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Torn Robbins create distinct portraits of women in their fiction. These writers base their characterizations on the Dark Lady/Fair Maiden stereotypes of the romance tradition. My intention in this study is to trace the transformation of the romance heroine in the American novel and, in so doing, to illustrate each author's use of these stereotypes, the similarity of the characters' development, and their relationship to the romance tradition.