Tracing Transnational Modernity through Women’s Eyes: Cross-Cultural Negotiations in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters

Abstract

Despite being written in two different continental contexts, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters (1934) (originally published in Bengali as Char Adhyay) are similar in that they foreground the evolving roles of women in a rapidly modernizing world. These are the final novels written by James and Tagore, representing the culmination of each author’s mature reflections on modernity, morality, and gender, and are therefore particularly suited for a transnational comparative study. Though cross-cultural negotiations and transnational modernity reached their acme with the advent of postcolonial studies, James and Tagore had reflected the same idea in their writings much earlier. The article unravels how both authors navigate the intricacies of modernity within transnational frameworks, with James portraying Anglo-American interactions and Tagore representing India under colonial rule. It closely examines the socio-cultural structures and gender norms within the novels to highlight how the characters, particularly women, challenge conventional constraints to establish a liberal society.