by Henry James
Rounding out the cast of characters is a host of lesser figures who play their parts in the drama. They are background figures, providing a kind of color, tint, scenery, and atmosphere. I use visual images advisedly, for James’s text is like a canvas on which he has painted an intricate scene. The eye is drawn to the characters in the foreground, but the others are necessary for the complete portrait. James’s metaphors and allusions are predominantly visual. His bent, his artistic taste is to painting, in contrast to that of Proust or Mann, whose novels are filled with musical references and allusions. That the visual arts seize the imaginations of James’s characters further reinforces the whole effect of portraiture.
Kate’s aunt, Maud Lowder, is the rich, iron-willed, and domineering matriarch with whom Kate lives. Aunt Maud is determined to use her niece to advance her own ends. Maud Lowder acquired her money through marriage, and she lacks the aristocratic pedigree that is necessary to function at the top of London’s disintegrating, but still snobbish, social order. As a social climber and would-be aristocrat, Maud seeks to use her beautiful niece to advance her own social standing by marrying Kate off to a member of the nobility. The immediate candidate for this end is Lord Mark, who has a beautiful estate but is otherwise essentially broke. He needs money to keep up his lifestyle and is unabashedly in the hunt for a bride so that he can barter his social position for a fortune. He is none too finicky, requiring only that the woman’s fortune be large enough. Lord Mark, a somewhat shadowy figure, turns out to be the closest thing to a purely evil force in the novel. His visit to Milly in Venice, in which he reveals to her the true state of the relationship between Kate and Densher, is as an act of malevolence and vengeance.
Aunt Maud’s social control extends also to Kate’s unfortunate and widowed sister Marian, who lives in lower-class penury with three children to care for. Marian has fallen out of favor with Aunt Maud because she married a man of whom Aunt Maud disapproved, and is now, after her husband’s early death, reduced to living in conditions close to squalor. Her only hope in the short run is for occasional acts of minor benevolence from her aunt. Both Marian and Lionel Croy, Kate and Marian’s disgraced father, harbor the idea that Kate one day will be able to care for them handsomely if she only submits entirely to Aunt Maud’s wishes. Lionel Croy has besmirched the family through unspecified criminal acts; he has been ostracized by Aunt Maud but from time to time extracts small sums of money from her.
Though Milly is the center of the novel’s action, she is not present in the first two books, and after one brief episode in book eighth, she disappears in the last two books of the novel. The novel’s first two books are given over entirely to Kate, to her relationship with Densher and to her family background. The initial chapters set the stage for Milly’s arrival in London and her debut in the London social scene. James had his doubts about this device of leaving Milly to a later appearance, fearing that he may be too long-winded in setting the stage. The novel then could end up having “too big a head for its body.”3 He feared that, by having to cram too much into the middle sections, he might cause sudden shifts of focus and make the narrative hard for the reader to follow. While Wings does lack the structural symmetry of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, the technique of deferring Milly’s appearance heightens the drama and brilliantly succeeds in the final analysis.
Milly arrives on the scene in book third, and we learn all that we need to know of her New York background and her family circumstances. In demonstrating the force of her character by showing how she affects the others, James dramatizes her the more, just as he does with the figure of Mrs. Newsome in The Ambassadors (who never actually appears in the novel). Milly’s presence is powerfully felt even in her absence. She animates the other characters; they are at first preoccupied with trying to figure her out and then they scheme to use her for their own purposes. Her seeming victimhood is demonstrated by the way the others constantly plot behind her back. The tawdriness of their intrigues contrasts with Milly’s own lonely struggle to live.
Milly’s character is initially presented through the eyes of Susan Stringham, who is accompanying her to Europe. Susan’s role in Wings is similar to that of Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors or to Colonel Bob Assingham’s role in the narrative structure of The Golden Bowl. James refers to this literary device as the ficelle (literally, a little piece of string), by which he means the use of a lesser character to facilitate the flow of events and to link the major scenes.4 One day in Switzerland, while looking for Milly, Susan Stringham sees the book Milly was reading left by the side of the trail and follows the path that leads to the edge of a precipice. She sees Milly sitting in a precarious position on a rock slab, gazing down at the valley stretched out below her. For a moment Susan is frightened, thinking that her friend might be contemplating suicide. She is afraid to call out for fear that a sudden disturbance might startle Milly and send her over the edge. Then, as Susan contemplates her friend, she slowly realizes that as Milly “was looking down at the kingdoms of the earth ... it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all?” (p. 106). She understands that her friend is not running from life but hungers for life. Shortly, Milly announces to her friend that she wants to go directly to London. She has evidently had enough of Switzerland’s bucolic charms, and wants to be at the center of activity in the world’s most bustling metropolis.
Susan Stringham happens to have an old friend in London from the days before the marriage to her late husband. This friend of her youth, now also widowed, is Maud Manningham Lowder, who is Kate Croy’s aunt. Susan writes to her friend Maud, and upon their arrival in London renews the friendship. Milly, with her “heir of all the ages” qualities, quickly captivates Maud, and is introduced into Maud’s London circle. Milly’s wealth, though she carries it gracefully, inevitably attracts attention. In the London scene of the day, wealth makes one “a great personage.” Maud and her friends treat Milly as such, although they also regard her as eccentric. Milly is sensitive enough to see that she is being patronized, and wishes she could escape from the stereotype. She especially wants to be respected by her new friend Kate and by Merton Densher (whom she had met in New York when he visited the city as a journalist). Milly sees that the Londoners she meets seem preoccupied with money, but she does not yet understand the deeper currents and plots being hatched around her. For the moment she is happy to be caught up in the excitement of London, in broadening her knowledge of the world (and her knowledge of herself). She is living more fully through her new friends.
Milly is a symbol of the innocent but thoughtful American guided by an innate idealism and an intuitive sense of what is right. Milly, like her country, is without a significant past to shape her identity, and is also without culture but is hungry to learn. In Kate, equally a creature of her circumstances, opposing qualities are represented: She is shrewd, knowing, a survivor by temperament and by necessity. She is driven by values forged within a framework of practical reality. Her values are purely exigent, and she is on the make because she has no other choice. In the general condition of fin-de-siècle England, Kate suffers both from too much history and from a radical uncertainty about the future. Kate’s family fortunes are on the wane (as England’s commercial fortunes, too, are under siege). Kate, living by her wits like other Londoners, faces a crumbling social order, still beset with vestiges of privilege, and a crass, cash-driven morality where money and competition reign. Although Wings is framed almost in mythic terms—the fair princess versus the Dark Lady, innocence against guile, America’s innate goodness against England’s expediential morality—James’s genius lies in his making the characters alive and concrete, palpably real as they interact and make their ways within the London scene, and never mere caricatures.
Milly is caught up almost immediately in a plan of Aunt Maud’s to detach Kate once and for all from the impoverished Densher. Maud finds out that Milly has met Densher in New York and quickly decides to tr
y to link Milly with Densher—to her it is self-evident that any sensible man would be attracted to a woman of Milly’s wealth, along with the added bonus of Milly’s apparent pliability. Once attached to Milly, Densher would be moved to the periphery and Maud would be free to advance her plan to marry Kate to Lord Mark. As subterfuge, Maud advances the notion that Merton Densher is a “family friend.” Kate, who is in love with Densher, at first resents this move by her aunt, but soon enough realizes its potential uses for her own purposes. Gradually, with the twists and turns of real life, Kate’s own plot takes shape as a way to thwart her aunt. She will outsmart her aunt by adopting her aunt’s very plan.
Kate’s plan begins to take shape when she discovers that Milly may be seriously ill. The idea is that Kate will encourage Densher to be nice to Milly—she senses at once that Milly is attracted to him—and she will thus persuade Milly that there is nothing between Densher and herself. Milly will in due course fall in love with Densher, Kate believes, and want to marry him, which will result in Densher inheriting her fortune. By exploiting the dying girl’s desperate wish to find love, Kate will escape her aunt’s and Lord Mark’s clutches. She will have it all: the man she loves as her husband, Milly’s money, and her own freedom of action. Kate’s approach to life is epitomized by her comment to Densher in book second that “I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That ... is how I see myself” (p. 70).
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.