Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic

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“. . . a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art.” —Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo In his landmark study of The Wings of the Dove,1 Peter Brooks sets the terms for what has subsequently become one of the major thrusts in the novel’s critical reception.2 For Brooks, the novel has as its central concern the question of representation and its limit, or as he puts it, the “abyss of meaning,” a question that for him possesses a uniquely ethical urgency. Situated as it is within James’s “major phase” of the 1890s to the early 1900s, Brooks argues that this novel properly belongs to that group of James’s work involved with exploring the void, the hidden yet determining absence that retroactively confers order and structure on the lives of James’s characters. Brooks cites numerous examples from James’s tales from this period to demonstrate James’s preoccupation with this “abyss of meaning,” from the epistemological uncertainties of “The Beast in the Jungle”—where John Marcher’s futile wait for the meaning-conferring event of his life is finally revealed as the great event itself—to the ontological dilemmas raised by what the governess saw in “The Turn of the Screw.” With The Wings of the Dove, Brooks asserts, James presents a sustained investigation of the void that lies at the heart of representation which, because its final reference points for Brooks are the Manichean struggle between good and evil, ultimately reveals itself as a uniquely “moral occult” (Brooks 178). 43 2 “A Poor Girl with Her Rent to Pay” The Wings of the Dove Brooks is not alone in his assertion. Laurence Holland also finds the novel interrogating the limits of the sayable, but for this critic the emphasis is put on the way the failure of language is given thematic and formal expression. Accordingly, James’s stylistic technique is found to “perform” the “passion” of sacrifice and betrayal that constitutes the novel’s main thematic content, Milly’s betrayal and sacrifice by her false friends. Hence, in James’s signature style of withdrawal and approach, Holland finds an ambiguous “tribute” to the unrepresentable: art, like Milly’s friends, must inevitably “betray” what it seeks to represent insofar as it always, ultimately, “falls short of the full communion it nonetheless manages to imitate and celebrate.” In a famous passage Holland writes, [T]he novel tacitly acknowledges that it cannot completely or directly embrace the ultimate reality—neither the ultimate horror nor the ultimate beauty, neither the pulsing actuality of life beyond art, nor the completely imagined vision which was the novel’s origin or muse. [. . .] But the novel is not content to acknowledge this by saying it. Instead it acts as if its vision lay within the presence but beyond the reach of language : as if its horrors were unspeakable horrors and its beauties too beautiful for words, the novel intimately acknowledges the fact in the contortions of expressive movement, the rhythm of approach and withdrawal as a tribute of devotion to what it leaves behind. As [. . .] an act of devotion it reveals by betraying the life and sacred presence it adores.3 Because language cannot “completely or directly embrace the ultimate reality,” the response, Holland argues, can only be the ambiguous tribute to the unspeakable bestowed by art that ultimately “betrays” what it seeks to memorialize. The question pursued in this chapter is whether the “aesthetic ” response outlined by Holland must inevitably be understood as a tragic narrative of betrayal in the face of representation’s limits. Here I ask whether the novel in fact presents another reading of the aesthetic gesture of “betrayal,” one which, continuing the concerns of the previous chapter , can be properly described as “ethical.” Let me say at once that I share Brooks and Holland’s conviction that the novel is preoccupied with the question of the limit of representation. After all, the plot of the novel, insofar as it is Kate’s “plot” to persuade her fiancé Densher to make love to the wealthy but mortally stricken heiress, Milly, depends for its effectiveness on their joint refusal to “name names,” that is, to say aloud what for most critics is a sordid and villainous plot against the innocent “dove” Milly. Similarly, in allowing herself to be 44 Acting Beautifully taken in by Densher’s overtures, Milly demands in return a reciprocal refusal to acknowledge...