by Henry James
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 afterlife6—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 :
My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yea, I would wander afar, I would lodge in the wilderness, I would haste to find me a shelter from the raging wind and tempest” (verses 4-8).7
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.
Notes to the Introduction
1. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Period, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1945.
2. William James to Henry James, letter dated May 4, 1907, in The Letters of William James, edited by Henry James, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, vol. 2, p. 278.
3. James made this comment in a letter to Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, dated October 23, 1902; reprinted in The Wings of the Dove, Norton Critical Edition, second edition, edited by J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003, p. 468.
4. The idea of the ficelle is discussed most extensively by James in the preface to The Ambassadors (see Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by Richard P. Blackmur, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937, pp. 307-327). The discussion in James’s preface to Wings is also of interest in this connexion (see The Art of the Novel, pp. 46-47).
5. John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986; especially chapter 5 on The Wings of the Dove.
6. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death,” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, New York and London, Harper and Brothers, 1910, pp. 201-233.
7. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 696-697.
Preface
The 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.
Yes then, the case prescribed for its central figure a sick young woman, at the whole course of whose disintegration and the whole ordeal of whose consciousness one would have quite honestly to assist. The expression of her state and that of one’s intimate relation to it might therefore well need to be discreet and ingenious; a reflexion that fortunately grew and grew, however, in proportion as I focussed my image—roundabout which, as it persisted, I repeat, the interesting possibilities and the attaching wonderments, not to say the insoluble mysteries, thickened apace. Why had one to look so straight in the face and so closely to cross-question that idea of making one’s protagonist “sick”?—as if to be menaced with death or danger hadn’t been from time immemorial, for heroine or hero, the very shortest of all cuts to the interesting state. Why should a figure be disqualified for a central position by the particular circumstance that might most quicken, that might crown with a fine intensity, its liability to many accidents, its consciousness of all relations? This circumstance, true enough, might disqualify it for many activities—even though we should have imputed to it the unsurpassable activity of passionate, of inspired resistance. This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the moment one recognised that the poet essenti
ally can’t be concerned with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle.2 The process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground as in no other connexion. One had had moreover, as a various chronicler, one’s secondary physical weaklings and failures, one’s accessory invalids—introduced with a complacency that made light of criticism. To Ralph Touchett in “The Portrait of a Lady,” for instance, his deplorable state of health was not only no drawback; I had clearly been right in counting it, for any happy effect he should produce, a positive good mark, a direct aid to pleasantness and vividness. The reason of this moreover could never in the world have been his fact of sex; since men, among the mortally afflicted, suffer on the whole more overtly and more grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior strategy. I had thus to take that anomaly for what it was worth, and I give it here but as one of the ambiguities amid which my subject ended by making itself at home and seating itself quite in confidence.
With the clearness I have just noted, accordingly, the last thing in the world it proposed to itself was to be the record predominantly of a collapse. I don’t mean to say that my offered victim was not present to my imagination, constantly, as dragged by a greater force than any she herself could exert; she had been given me from far back as contesting every inch of the road, as catching at every object the grasp of which might make for delay, as clutching these things to the last moment of her strength. Such an attitude and such movements, the passion they expressed and the success they in fact represented, what were they in truth but the soul of drama?—which is the portrayal, as we know, of a catastrophe determined in spite of oppositions. My young woman would herself be the opposition—to the catastrophe announced by the associated Fates, powers conspiring to a sinister end and, with their command of means, finally achieving it, yet in such straits really to stifle the sacred spark that, obviously, a creature so animated, an adversary so subtle, couldn’t but be felt worthy, under whatever weaknesses, of the foreground and the limelight. She would meanwhile wish, moreover, all along, to live for particular things, she would found her struggle on particular human interests, which would inevitably determine, in respect to her, the attitude of other persons, persons affected in such a manner as to make them part of the action. If her impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible, if this longing can take effect only by the aid of others, their participation (appealed to, entangled and coerced as they find themselves) becomes their drama too—that of their promoting her illusion, under her importunity, for reasons, for interests and advantages, from motives and points of view, of their own. Some of these promptings, evidently, would be of the highest order—others doubtless mightn’t; but they would make up together, for her, contributively, her sum of experience, represent to her somehow, in good faith or in bad, what she should have known. Somehow, too, at such a rate, one would see the persons subject to them drawn in as by some pool of a Loreleia—see them terrified and tempted and charmed; bribed away, it may even be, from more prescribed and natural orbits, inheriting from their connexion with her strange difficulties and still stranger opportunities, confronted with rare questions and called upon for new discriminations. Thus the scheme of her situation would, in a comprehensive way, see itself constituted; the rest of the interest would be in the number and nature of the particulars. Strong among these, naturally, the need that life should, apart from her infirmity, present itself to our young woman as quite dazzlingly liveable, and that if the great pang for her is in what she must give up we shall appreciate it the more from the sight of all she has.
One would see her then as possessed of all things, all but the single most precious assurance; freedom and money and a mobile mind and personal charm, the power to interest and attach; attributes, each one, enhancing the value of a future. From the moment his imagination began to deal with her at close quarters, in fact, nothing could more engage her designer than to work out the detail of her perfect rightness for her part; nothing above all more solicit him than to recognise fifty reasons for her national and social status. She should be the last fine flower—blooming alone, for the fullest attestation of her freedom—of an “old” New York stem; the happy congruities thus preserved for her being matters, however, that I may not now go into, and this even though the fine association that shall yet elsewhere await me is of a sort, at the best, rather to defy than to encourage exact expression. There goes with it, for the heroine of “The Wings of the Dove,” a strong and special implication of liberty, liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation, of contact—proceeding from sources that provide better for large independence, I think, than any other conditions in the world—and this would be in particular what we should feel ourselves deeply concerned with. I had from far back mentally projected a certain sort of young American as more the “heir of all the ages” than any other young person whatever (and precisely on those grounds I have just glanced at but to pass them by for the moment); so that here was a chance to confer on some such figure a supremely touching value. To be the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to arrive at the type, in the light on the whole the most becoming. Otherwise, truly, what a perilous part to play out— what a suspicion of “swagger” in positively attempting it! So at least I could reason-so I even think I had to—to keep my subject to a decent compactness. For already, from an early stage, it had begun richly to people itself: the difficulty was to see whom the situation I had primarily projected might, by this, that or the other turn, not draw in. My business was to watch its turns as the fond parent watches a child perched, for its first riding-lesson, in the saddle; yet its interest, I had all the while to recall, was just in its making, on such a scale, for developments.
What one had discerned, at all events, from an early stage, was that a young person so devoted and exposed, a creature with her security hanging so by a hair, couldn’t but fall somehow into some abysmal trap—this being, dramatically speaking, what such a situation most naturally implied and imposed. Didn’t the truth and a great part of the interest also reside in the appearance that she would constitute for others (given her passionate yearning to live while she might) a complication as great as any they might constitute for herself?—which is what I mean when I speak of such matters as “natural.” They would be as natural, these tragic, pathetic, ironic, these indeed for the most part sinister, liabilities, to her living associates, as they could be to herself as prime subject. If her story was to consist, as it could so little help doing, of her being let in, as we say, for this, that and the other irreducible anxiety, how could she not have put a premium on the acquisition, by any close sharer of her life, of a consciousness similarly embarrassed? I have named the Rhine-maiden, but our young friend’s existence would create rather, all round her, very much that whirlpool movement of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great business; when we figure to ourselves the strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of suction, the general engulfment that, for any neighbouring object, makes immersion inevitable. I need scarce say, however, that in spite of these communities of doom I saw the main dramatic complication much more prepared for my vessel of sensibility than by her—the work of other hands (though with her own imbrued too, after all, in the measure of their never not being, in some direction, generous and extravagant, and thereby provoking).
The great point was, at all events, that if in a predicament she was to be, accordingly, it would be of the essence to create the predicament promptly and build it up solidly, so that it should have for us as much as possible its ominous air of awaiting her. That reflexion I found, betimes, not less inspiring than urgent; one begins so, in such a business, by looking about for one’s compositional key, unable
as one can only be to move till one has found it. To start without it is to pretend to enter the train and, still more, to remain in one’s seat, without a ticket. Well—in the steady light and for the continued charm of these verifications—I had secured my ticket over the tolerably long line laid down for “The Wings of the Dove” from the moment I had noted that there could be no full presentation of Milly Theale as engaged with elements amid which she was to draw her breath in such pain, should not the elements have been, with all solicitude, duly prefigured. If one had seen that her stricken state was but half her case, the correlative half being the state of others as affected by her (they too should have a “case,” bless them, quite as much as she!) then I was free to choose, as it were, the half with which I should begin. If, as I had fondly noted, the little world determined for her was to “bristle”—I delighted in the term!—with meanings, so, by the same token, could I but make my medal hang free, its obverse and its reverse, its face and its back, would beautifully become optional for the spectator. I somehow wanted them correspondingly embossed, wanted them inscribed and figured with an equal salience; yet it was none the less visibly my “key,” as I have said, that though my regenerate young New Yorker, and what might depend on her, should form my centre, my circumference was every whit as treatable. Therefore I must trust myself to know when to proceed from the one and when from the other. Preparatively and, as it were, yearningly—given the whole ground—one began, in the event, with the outer ring, approaching the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations. There, full-blown, accordingly, from one hour to the other, rose one’s process—for which there remained all the while so many amusing formulae.