Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

The burden of actually implementing the scheme, however, falls on Merton Densher. Once having set things in motion, Kate steps into the background, and it will be Densher’s job to deceive Milly, to become her lover and/or husband, and thus to inherit her money. His emotions, and his awakening moral sensibilities as he proceeds, and the impact of all this on his relations with Kate provide the main dramatic tension for the novel. Densher, who becomes something of an exemplar for the anti-hero figure so prominent in twentieth-century fiction, is passive, a spectator type of person, someone to whom things happen. His moral struggles grow out of his reaction to the circumstances he finds himself in—his dilemma has come about, seemingly, only because he wanted to be kind. He is meant, as Henry James originally envisaged the character’s development, to undergo a spiritual transformation as he comes to see the horror of his role in exploiting the dying girl’s quest to hang on to life. Whether the reader will be convinced that Densher’s conversion is genuine remains an open question. James, in the actual writing of the novel as opposed to his notebook projections, made Densher’s spiritual development a more nuanced affair, and left us to judge Densher’s motives. Is Densher’s ostensible renunciation of Milly’s fortune merely a self-righteous gesture, an effort to conceal the extent of his own moral responsibility? Some readers may find Densher’s late actions priggish and bizarre—far removed, indeed, from any true signs of respect for Milly’s memory.

Kate stays in character to the end. She is not squeamish; she is resolute and matter-of-fact. She holds to her rationale that the deception brought Milly a degree of solace in her fight for life. After all, Kate remarks on an earlier occasion, “Who does Milly have but us?” Kate wonders, in the final scene with Densher after Milly has died and after Densher has received notice from Milly’s New York attorneys of the bequest of her fortune, why he hadn’t simply denied to Milly the truth of Lord Mark’s vengeful revelation. Susan Stringham at the time had also urged Densher to deny Lord Mark’s accusation, which had devastated Milly and caused her to “turn her face to the wall.” Densher is shocked by the suggestion. This is the one thing he could not do. He could only seek Milly’s forgiveness in his final interview with her. Kate presses him to tell her what actually happened—did Milly, in fact, forgive him? Densher is vague—all he can recall is that the encounter lasted about twenty minutes and ended when she grew tired and asked him to leave her. Densher assumes that he was forgiven, but he assumed all along that his moral responsibility was mitigated by the fact that his role was passive and because he was motivated by kindliness. He has, in fact, deceived himself repeatedly. The meeting with Sir Luke Strett in Venice, for example, shows Densher at his self-righteous worst. Sir Luke tells him that Milly would like to see him, and Densher grandly imagines that Sir Luke thinks highly of him and sees him as someone seeking only to comfort Milly. This manifest self-deception makes us wonder about Densher’s state of mind.

Densher presents Kate with a choice between having Milly’s money without him or him without the money. But she cannot have both. Kate has failed the tests that Densher has devised for her, and apparently she now finds herself back where she started: having to choose between love and money. But will Densher be able to carry out his grand gesture? Will he be able to resist Kate’s stronger will and her greater capacity for life? Densher is the quintessential loser thrust into circumstances he does not fully understand. James still has sympathy for Densher even if this troubled soul’s spiritual transformation falls short. Densher, in his moral confusions and hesitations, is truer to life and more credible without the full moral awakening. Though polarities of good and evil are often implied in the novel, James endows his characters with a mixture of motives and with nuanced qualities that prevent us from making easy moral judgments. James’s characters are vividly alive, struggling in their imperfect ways to realize their destinies in a world that lacks moral clarity. For James, there is a sense of foreboding in the air. The cash nexus is the spirit of the new post-Victorian age. Everywhere in
The Wings of the Dove,
from the thrusting commercialism of London to the dilapidation and fading glory of Venice, there is the sense that the old order is passing and the higher values of Western civilization are under assault.

Kate, with her quick perception, recognizes in the novel’s final scene that something fundamental has happened. Densher has changed; he is no longer a reliable ally. She believes that Densher has fallen in love with a ghost; he has become enamored of Milly’s memory. Just when Kate’s scheme has apparently brilliantly succeeded, the whole effort has in fact fallen apart. Densher’s equivocal attempt to absolve himself from blame and his quixotic attitude toward Milly’s money have doomed Kate’s best-laid plans. Densher assures her that he is still ready to marry her “in an hour.” Kate asks, “As we were?” The “as we were” means what exactly—as they were in the old days before Milly came on the scene? As they were before Densher’s renounces Milly’s money? “As we were,” he replies. Kate, ever clear-headed and decisive, gives a firm shake of the head and turns to the door, declaring, “We shall never be again as we were!” (p. 492).

There are in Wings few of the “big scenes” that one finds in many nineteenth-century novels. James’s method of indirection means that we as readers, as well as the characters, learn of critical developments as they are refracted through another character’s consciousness, or in what somebody says offhandedly, or by means of a poetic image or symbol that brings a sudden burst of understanding. In James’s late fiction, meanings are conveyed, as John Auchard has shown, through the “silences.”
⁵
Effects are communicated via a glance; a mood is captured in a momentary intrusion of a shaft of light. The emotional aftereffects of a chance encounter linger and the characters ponder the meaning of gestures fraught with wider significance. As in life, great moral issues seem to dissolve into myriad small choices, and the continuous flow of little encounters sweeps the characters along toward ends that they cannot foresee.

Yet in Wings circumstances do not control events to the exclusion of human will. The Jamesian world is not like the naturalist order of a Zola or Dreiser novel, where the individual is subject to the iron determinism of circumstance. Individual moral choices do matter. Important corners are turned in
Wings,
and decisions are made at every turn that carry a string of consequences. For Kate, deciding to live with her aunt brings her under the sway of her aunt’s values. In choosing money, and in postponing marriage to Densher, she turns her life onto the path of the London “scene.” This scene is marked by crassness and grasping ambition. Densher’s decision that he will be kind to Milly as the gentlemanly thing to do is a pious rationalization. Once he takes the first steps, he is implicated deeply in Kate’s venture. He places himself on a slippery moral slope. Once in the action, he cannot get out. Milly encounters critical turning points, too, and in those moments she makes decisions that will shape her life. How long she can fight off her fate is in some measure a reflection of her own will and of whether she is fully engaged in life. She chooses to ignore Kate’s warning to “drop us while you can.” The scene in which Milly stands with Lord Mark in front of the Bronzino portrait that resembles her sticks in our minds as a decisive moment. She has the first symptoms of her illness on that occasion, and perhaps she surrenders to her fate and loses some of her will to live. Milly thereupon makes a series of important decisions. She decides to consult with Sir Luke Strett. She invites Kate to accompany her on the first visit to the doctor but not on the second visit, and she does not confide in Kate what the doctor tells her. Milly’s pride thus assures that she will face her fate essentially alone.

Why does James—one of the most secular of authors, whose only religious inclination seems to have been a nodding interest in his brother William’s ideas about consciousness and the afterlife
⁶
—choose the religious symbol of the dove for his heroine? At one level the answer seems obvious enough. Kate calls Milly a “dove” early in the novel when the two of them are alone in a drawing room, and just after Milly has had the thought that Kate is “like a panther” pacing before her. Milly’s dove-like qualities and Kate’s fierceness are nicely juxtaposed here for the reader. The dove image next appears in book seventh at Milly’s grand party in Venice. Kate and Densher are watching Milly from across the room as Kate lays out her instructions to him concerning how he should maneuver to be assured of getting Milly’s money. Milly is dressed in white at the party and wears white pearls, and the image of the dove pops into Kate’s mind. But when Kate refers to Milly as a dove the word does not seem apt to Densher; he does not think of Milly as a passive, demure creature. However, a dove has large wings, and it strikes him that at the very moment they all are nestled under Milly’s wings. Indeed, they have all lived for some time under Milly’s patronage and protection. Psalm 55, it may be recalled, is actually a prayer for the release from suffering and persecution :

Is it a final irony of The Wings of the Dove that Milly escapes from—not to say, triumphs over—her tormentors? In giving away her fortune to Densher despite his deception, she has shown both the softness and the strength of her wings. She has demonstrated her generosity and forgiving spirit, and at the same time has exacted a certain vengeance. Kate and Densher apparently have become permanently estranged as a result of the bequest. Kate has learned that she cannot have everything. For Densher’s part, his grand gesture of renunciation would leave him with nothing. Like all of Henry James’s endings, the end of
Wings
is more of a beginning than a resolution: Will Densher be redeemed and will he find a new life without Kate? Will Kate free herself from her aunt and from the London “scene,” or will she, after all, fall into a marriage with Lord Mark? Like Lambert Strether in
The Ambassadors,
who realizes that money has poisoned his relationship with his patroness Mrs. Newsome, and like Maggie Verver in
The Golden Bowl,
who must at last confront her husband without the presence and emotional support of her father, Kate and Densher must build their lives anew with only a heightened moral awareness to guide them. For Henry James, there is a darkness and a sense of doom hovering over the scene. His characters, and the civilization they represent, may be incapable of redemption, and may instead spiral toward moral decay and social disintegration.

 

Bruce L. R. Smith
is a fellow at the Heyman Center of the Humanities of Columbia University. He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1979-1980), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad.

T
he Wings of the Dove,” published in 1902, represents to my memory a very old—if I shouldn’t perhaps rather say a very young—motive; I can scarce remember the time when the situation on which this long-drawn fiction mainly rests was not vividly present to me. The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately desiring to ”put in” before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived. Long had I turned it over, standing off from it, yet coming back to it; convinced of what might be done with it, yet seeing the theme as formidable.
¹
The image so figured would be, at best, but half the matter; the rest would be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience somehow compassed. These things, I had from the first felt, would require much working-out; that indeed was the case with most things worth working at all; yet there are subjects and subjects, and this one seemed particularly to bristle. It was formed, I judged, to make the wary adventurer walk round and round it—it had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike that attention; not being somehow what one thought of as a ”frank” subject, after the fashion of some, with its elements well in view and its whole character in its face. It stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would collect this debt to the last shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light a person infirm and ill—a case sure to prove difficult and to require much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters, one of those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of the very best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked and cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they make a sign.