Charting an Ethics of Desire in The Wings of the Dove

Have you acted in conformity with your desire?

Jacques Lacan

We might say that the process of truth induces a subject.

Alain Badiou

I

Why do philosophers and literary theorists consistently return to the question of ethical behavior in Henry James, a writer who, as Lee Clark Mitchell recently observed, "resists any simple notion of human psychology or ethical engagement"?¹ As we struggle to understand Isabel Archer's return to her disastrous marriage, Lambert Strether's commitment to the fantasy of Madame de Vionnet, Maggie Verver's agonized contemplation of a successfully imprisoned Amerigo, and Milly Theale's construction of a space in which she can hold on to her desire, we are riveted by the complexity of these characters' emotional and ethical responses. We return to James not only because his characters' dilemmas refuse simple resolutions (perhaps any resolution) but also because we experience the suffering and paradoxical triumph of those who pursue their desire to its most far-reaching conclusion. James's characters are nothing if not willful—and ultimately alone—in their quests. Like figures from ancient Greek drama, they demand everything and give up nothing, enacting Jacques Lacan's ethical claim that "the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire."² In doing so, these characters seem to call into question, or at least complicate, the Kantian categorical imperative and the ideal of disinterested action, offering a radical ethical alternative. James's characters enact, I will argue, an ethic of desire.

My intention here is not to reduce James's late novel to an ethical treatise but, rather, to retrieve it from a kind of situational relativism that has long been considered, from a humanist perspective, to be antithetical to ethics. A number of critics have suggested that James's protagonists engage, implicitly or explicitly, in unethical behavior, in what Sharon Cameron calls, for example, a "phenomenology of domination" as they construct fantasies of others that match their private desires.³ In keeping with Lacan's purposeful antihumanism, I will argue in contrast that James's characters pursue their desires in a way that leads to the discovery and enactment of a personal ethic, an ethic that challenges the illusory notion of the coherent subject.⁴

Refusing to cede one's desire leads to an awareness of the void around which reality is structured, what Lacan frames as "the Real."⁵ For Alain Badiou, as for Lacan, our normal lives are structured around the repression of the Real, and access to our subjectivity can occur only through an essential encounter, an event that "punches a hole" in the "instituted knowledges of the situation."⁶ Badiou argues, following Lacan, that the individual emerges as an ethical subject by holding fast to the particular truth that arises from such an Event.⁷ This encounter offers a foundational moment for ethical action, because the individual who is wholly committed to her desire comes into being as a subject—not the illusory coherent subject of humanism, but the shattered subject who has encountered her finitude. Lacan's and Badiou's grounding of ethical behavior in the emergence of subjectivity is especially relevant to James, for, consistently, as the characters of the late novels and tales pursue the beast in their respective jungles, they come to see that the promise of desire—personal fulfillment, coherence of the self—is an empty space.⁸ Why is confronting finitude the basis for an ethical position? Because it allows the individual to begin (to act) from a wholly subjective orientation, in opposition to "the reality that commands and regulates."⁹

In The Wings of the Dove, "the great smudge of mortality across the picture" that Milly apprehends almost from her first appearance on the scene may be understood as an intrusion of the traumatic Real,¹⁰ because it serves as a kind of rupturing event, "something which turns [her] symbolic universe upside down and leads [her] to reconfigure it."¹¹ Milly's response to her death sentence constitutes what James refers to in his preface...