The Silent Treatment of The Wings of the Dove: Ethics of Care and Late-James Style

The Wings of the Dove’s characteristic structure of silences is intimately connected to a dynamic of caregiving. Late-Victorian readers would have expected the novel to climax in a cathartic deathbed scene. Although this scene gets thwarted on the plot level, it surfaces on the stylistic level, its discourse characterized by the elements of care it has invoked: relationality, shifting, communalism. This reading aims to show the extent to which The Wings of the Dove develops a narrative theory of care.