“No natural place anywhere”: Women’s Precarious Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in James’s Novels

This article examines women’s mobility in Henry James, scrutinizing their precarious affiliation with place, on national, international, and domestic levels, and the fine line between cosmopolitanism and vagrancy. Interrogating the notion of women’s sophistication, travel, and cultural expansion, arguing that while travel and national detachment become the cause of social and psychological alienation in women, mental wandering, often situated in a liminal, “unhomely,” narrative space and explored through stylistic experimentation, comes to represent a distinct yet potent cosmopolitanism that differs from his men’s geopolitical or ethical cosmopolitanism.