The Abyss of Language in The Wings of the Dove

The Abyss of Language in The Wings of the Dove by Sheila Teahan, Michigan State University The Wings of the Dove is consummately Jamesian in its thematics of renunciation and sacrifice. Its extensive system of Christological imagery and allusions, as well as the recurrence of such words as "sacrifice," "renouncement ," and "crucifixion," invites us to read the novel thematically as a story of self-sacrifice and redemption. Milly Theale, the "angel with a thumping bank account" (WD 228), bequeaths her fortune in an act of sacrifice that ultimately redeems Densher from his complicity in Kate's plot; or so the novel is usually read. But there emerges a contradiction or disjunction between the thematic organization of The Wings of the Dove, which reads Milly's final action as a redemption of Densher's betrayal, and its causal structure. Though Milly's bequest appears an act of renunciation, it intervenes to produce the fatal "break" between Kate and Densher, a break that mirrors a similar break or fissure between theme and causation in the novel. This contradiction is closely related to the compositional strategy of the center of consciousness described in James's preface, by which the narrative circles yet ultimately evades the representation of Milly's case. Her ' 'stricken state' ' (AN 294), as James terms her nebulous illness, is not only unrepresented, but apparently unrepresentable as such, approachable only in a series of infinitely decreasing increments. He describes the narrative as moving gradually from circumference to center: "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" (AN 294). This formulation describes an asymptotic curve of successively smaller increments that can approach, but never coincide with, its end. Milly appears by nature to resist representation. She is aligned with the unspeakable itself; as the narrator says, "she wondered if the matter had not mainly been that she herself was so 'other,' so taken up with the unspoken" (WD 126). The strategy of indirection by which Milly is seen only through the perspective of the other characters becomes an analogue for her own "working" of The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 204-214 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Abyss of Language in The Wings of the Dove 205 Kate and Densher, whose relations are fatally altered by her absent mediation. In a series of parallel ironies, Kate's substitution of Milly for herself as the object of Densher's courtship sets in motion a chain of substitutions that finally eludes Kate's narrative control. The defeat of Kate's plot is made possible ironically by her ' 'bargain' ' with Densher by which, in return for his participation in her scheme of courting the dying Milly, Densher exacts the payment of Kate's assent to visit him in his rooms. In keeping with an obsessional thematics of naming and silence, in a novel whose unspeakable central events, sex and death, elude representation, Densher is definitively silenced by the very act of naming his price. The consummation of his affair with Kate itself marks the beginning of his "turn"—a key word in the novel—from Kate to Milly. This turn, the troping or reversal on which the entire novel turns, both exposes the instability or reversibility of its chief conceptual opposition, the distinction between truth and lie, and points to a larger non sequitur in the work as a whole—to a radical fissure or disjunction between knowledge and act, means and ends, cause and effect. This causal confusion is best exemplified by James's treatment of Milly's illness. The Wings of the Dove reactivates the Gilbert Osmond plot ofThe Portrait of a Lady, with Milly as a conflation of Ralph and Isabel, both dying heiress and marriageable heroine. Ralph's signature mannerism of keeping his hands in his pockets is reassigned to Densher, here the mark of his egregious ' 'want of means' ' (WD 44). But although, like Ralph's, Milly's illness has a spiritual and figurative dimension, it is significant primarily for its unspeakability, for "the veto laid ... on any mention, any cognition" of it (WD 361).1 Its causal power is...