Pathological Commodification, Contagious Impressions, and Dead Metaphors: Undiagnosing Consumption in The Wings of the Dove

Wings insists on representing Milly Theale's condition as a matter of cognitive reticence, yet refracts it through a twinned rhetoric of disease and economics, illuminating a coextensivity between pathology and commodification. Effectively, Kate Croy's undiagnosis of the consumptive verdict invites a broader consideration of consumption's mutating tropes, which figure appetitive relations as well as the assimilation of contagious impressions. If Milly does not definitively have consumption, she is nevertheless subjected to it. Her pecuniary ontology predisposes her to being used (up); however, as a figure for dead metaphor, she also exceeds death, and moreover, allegorizes the death of the overdetermined consumptive heroine.