Henry James and the Phenomenal Reader: Consciousness and the Variation of Style in The Wings of the Dove

In the conclusion to his 1910 essay "Is There a Life After Death?," Henry James articulates his conception of human consciousness in terms that parallel themes and images central to The Wings Of The Dove:

I like to think it open to me to establish speculative and imaginative connections, to take up conceived presumptions and pledges, that have for me all the air of not being decently able to escape redeeming themselves. And when once such a mental relation to the question as that begins to hover and settle, who shall say over what fields of experience, past and current, and what immensities of perception and yearning, it shall not spread the protection of its wings? No, no, no--I reach beyond the laboratory-brain. (WD1 477)

Both James's peculiar use of the negative form to express the imagination's inescapable capacity to redeem its constructions, as well as the imagery it is framed in, are oddly reminiscent of Milly Theale's tendency to spiritually redeem the very people who manipulate her. Likewise, this passage recalls the Christ-like symbolic presence after death that Milly foresees for herself: "'Since I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me' [. . .] 'you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not'" (WD2 143). John Carlos Rowe reflects on this passage noting that "Milly's symbolic absence places her in the stream of life and consciousness itself. She becomes the symbol of the mystery at the heart of our language and our art" (196). Although Rowe (like many critics working within a more or less deconstructionist mode) ¹ tends to emphasize the aesthetic problems raised in the novel, the struggle James articulates both in the 1910 essay as well as throughout The Wings of the Dove also involves a self-consciously experiential, or what I believe we can retroactively refer to--particularly in relation to Heidegger--as an existential dimension.

James is explicit in the passage from the 1910 essay that the process of making "speculative and imaginative connections," of taking up "conceived presumptions and pledges" concludes, when at its most authentic, by transforming "the fields of experience" from which the process itself arose. Indeed, James is deeply concerned with how various modes of representation reflect differing existential comportments to the world and the possibilities of self-transformation which arise therein. This process of construing imaginative connections is central to the construction of the main characters in The Wings of the Dove--particularly Kate Croy and Milly Theale. It will be my principal challenge in this essay then to illustrate that the existentially distinguishable comportments towards the world of Kate in Book One and Milly in Books Four and Five emerge through significant differences in the styles of each section. These shifts in form reveal that Kate's perception is impoverished, in a Heideggarian sense, insofar as it is saturated by the material conditions around her. This impoverishment-of-world, this sense that she does not form a completely individuated self--but is held prisoner by her past--is conveyed stylistically through a highly ambiguous and often discontinuous narrative. Such ambiguity and discontinuity places Kate at a distance from both the narrator and the reader, suggesting that she is not entirely self-coherent, not, in other words, fully individuated. Milly, on the other hand, is far less rooted in the past as she moves towards deeper and deeper self-awareness until her consciousness is fully disclosed to herself and to the reader in Book Five. This process of coming into greater self-consciousness results in increasingly more intense levels of intimacy between her and the reader...