Milly's Bargain: The Homosocial Economy in The Wings of the Dove

DORAN LARSON Milly's Bargain: The Homosocial Economy in The Wings of the Dove Economy: The organization, internal constitution, apportionment of function, of any complex unity. The administration of the concerns and resources of any community . . . with a view to orderly conduct and productiveness.DPD Exchange, gift, and theft (the only known forms of economy) each in its way implies heterogeneous objects and a dislocated time: my desire against something else—and this always requires the time for drawing up the agreement. Simultaneous proffering establishes a movement whose model is socially unknown, unthinkable: neither exchange, nor gift, nor theft, our proffering, welling up in crossed fires, designates an expenditure which relapses nowhere and whose very community abolishes any thought of reservation: we enter each by means of the other into absolute materialism.~ , . , , „.. . Barthes, A Lovers Discourse (151 ) ,ver the past two decades, feminist revisions of The Wings of the Dove have discovered in Milly Theale an active participant father than a passive victim in het own history' Such revisions, however , do not go far enough. For to grant Milly a self-conscious role in the unfolding of het own story, to say that, like Kate, ". . . Milly acts upon others as an interpreter and critic," and is "a far better reader than the critics who read her as victim" (Mizruchi 203), is to restructure our reading of the novel as a narrative whole, subverting assumptions about its very "plotting" as a social and financial conspiracy. By writing Millyas -reader over Milly-as-victim at the center of the novel, we are forced Arizona Quarterly Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 82Doran Larson to revise our conceptions of what the novel as narrative unfolds. Moreover , this revision of what 1 will call the text's narrative economy2 is necessary to the further critical unfolding of what I want to argue Milly's active participation places under observation: an instance of what Luce Irigaray tetms a "feminist economy." This is not to say, of course, that we are dealing with a self-consciously feminist novel. Rather, I will read the novel as one which explicates relations between women, enacted among hetetosexual relations, as a critique of malehomosocial exchange; a critique carried out in dynamic tension with female-homosocial exchange.' My attempt, then, is to understand in economic terms relations between female- and male-homosociality. In such a dialogical relationship , however, the very notion of exchange (both financial and anthropological ) undergoes redefinition. A traditional male-homosocial economy —as Luce Irigaray's work demonstrates (177)—separates use and exchange value. It is thus ttansformed by any engaged relationship to women, whose homosocial relations are premised—for Irigaray—upon an exchange/use continuum. Thus my focus in part will be the transformation , necessitated by reading their very interaction, in the terms of these relationships. More concretely, short of claiming Wings as an intentionally feminist text—though arguing that it is "woman-centered" (Coward 230)— my aim is, by working from existing feminist cartographies, to rechart the movement ofJames' novel as a story not of lovers and victims, but of mothers, friends, sisters, and daughters. My aim is to discover in female friendship, as does Janet Todd, an "ideology," here set among its relations to heterosexual romance (6, see also Newton).4 The economy of exchange—of desire—is man's business. For two reasons: the exchange takes place between masculine subjects , and it requires a plus-value added to the body of the commodity , a supplement which gives it a valuable form. The supplement will be found, Marx writes, in another commodity, whose use value becomes, from that point on, a standard of value. (Irigaray 177) So long as commodities (women) are commodities by virtue of their "share in the cult of the father, and never stop striving to resemble, to copy, the one who is his representative" (Irigaray 178), women's influ- Homosocial Economy83 ence upon value, along with their manipulation of language, remains no more than custodial.5 In this reading of Wings, however, we will witness a social discourse wherein even traditional (Marxian) exchange value and linguistic significatory value are not only indistinguishable...