Ethereal Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove : The Transparent Heart of James's Opaque Style

The mastery or "working" of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove manifests the novel's pessimism about art and human nature. Milly is done to death in a social world whose fine manners cannot hide an irredeemably mercenary core. Everyone uses and is used by everyone else, and even Merton Densher's final perception that he has been saved and blessed by Milly illuminates primarily his own power to cast her in a savior role. Similarly, James's working of the story is implicated throughout in the "beautiful fictions" the characters compose to deceive Milly and in the "mere aesthetic instinct" that refuses to acknowledge the smudge of mortality across her picture (347-48). Thus the authorial desire to control its female subject is never far removed in Wings from a consciousness of violating her humanity. This is most clear in Densher's etherealization of Milly, which gives him a symbol for his own salvation, but only at the cost of denying her consciousness and diurnal life. By etherealization I mean the tendency to see Milly as dove, angel, savior, or priceless pearl, as the absence or mystery that brings the other characters into relationship with one another. Nonetheless, the pessimism of this novel in which even well-intentioned characters thwart others and in which everyone uses Milly as a symbol to further their own designs is at least partially lightened by the suggestion that to be conscious that we manipulate others moves us in the direction of becoming more responsibly human.

My reading of James's uses of absence and the feminine in Wings is obviously indebted to Lacan, as well as Kristeva. I am also influenced by the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Similar to James, Swedenborg depicts the feminine as a powerful absence. He places women at the center of life but makes them paradoxically powerless by insisting on their dependence on masculine forms and articulation. Swedenborg does this not only with women but also with a feminine or affectional component of language, which he describes as being conveyed by the tone of voice but lost in a written text. ¹ In several ways James's work seems tinged by Swedenborgian ideas, particularly in the way femininity runs amok when too closely aligned with public and especially writerly activities. ² This essay focuses on the implications of the fact that the more Milly Theale fades physically from the scene the more Densher profits morally from her absence. Granted, Milly may be seen as an effectively manipulative powerhouse getting exactly what she wants. But it remains crucial that she dies for such influence, and that Kate Croy, as impressively sexual, active, and intelligent as she may be for late twentieth-century readers, has no influence over Densher in the end. The rich ambivalence surrounding Densher as he vacillates between these two women, committing finally to neither one, reveals James's own authorial ambivalence about profiting from feminine subjects.

Perhaps the most definitive vision in Wings of a Jamesian ambivalence about authority and control stems from the style of the writing itself. Not only do the characters manipulate scenes to create a sense of absent agency, of things happening without any particular action on anyone's part, but the language itself evades responsibility. Through its reliance on indirection, circumlocution, definition by exclusion, double negation, and silence, the language constructs an etherealized Milly as absent female center. Passive, tentative, and self-postponing, the writing conveys at times a "passion for delay," as Ruth Yeazell describes it (22, 39). But this obfuscating style, which some have argued enacts James's shy retreat from unappreciative markets and inattentive readers, also creates a kind of literary exhibitionism. The novel's foregrounding of the sensual level of language--the way it sits on the page and rolls off the tongue...