This book has attempted to trace James's development by exploring the opposition in his work between feminism and patriarchy. My strategy has been to situate James against certain women writers – against because they form the backdrop, the ground, of his resistance. I have in effect followed the interpretive program outlined by Marilyn Butler in her useful essay, “Against Tradition: The Case for a Particularized Historical Method,” though I have gone beyond Butler's program insofar as I have reached for the desires and purposes behind genres and sign systems and have caused my inquiry to terminate in acts of historical evaluation. In particular, I have argued that because James's fiction embodies a covert act of force directed against women, we should not accept his mastery on the terms his texts tend to impose. We cannot read him well unless we resist his authority.

It is still not well understood how revolutionary our current questioning of the “canon” is going to prove. To challenge James's authority as a writer about women is to do more than amplify voices that have been hidden or stifled. It is to turn the amplification of suppressed voices (the chief task of civil liberty) into one of the leading principles of aesthetic judgment. It is to raise and press the question of free speech, evaluating novels not solely as artful constructions but according to whether they enlarge or restrict the principle of expression. The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians seem to me to be opposed on several levels to free speech.