The subversion of the marriage plot novel in george eliot's middlemarch and henry james's the portrait of a lady

Abstract EN

The present article seeks to study how the English author George Eliot and the American novelist Henry James subverted the domestic tradition in their respective novels Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady .

To do so the research relies on Mikhael Bakhtin’s dialogism , Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality and a feminsit theory.

The article reaches the conclusion that both authors thwarted the tradition of the marriage plot novel by creating unhappy endings paving the way to modernist fiction