"A Circle of Petticoats": The Feminization of Merton Densher

"A Circle of Petticoats": The Feminization of Merton Densher By Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Le Moyne College Several recent studies have considered the role of gender, and particularly the role of women, in the novels of Henry James. Indeed, many have written of the high value James placed on what he considered the feminine—the principle associated in James's work with understanding, intuition, and high culture.1 Few of these studies, however, have considered the role of masculinity in James's work or examined the figure of the feminized male. Although his late novel The Wings of the Dove (1902) echoes many of the author's positive sentiments about women and their capacities, it suggests as well that James also sees the female role as constricting and potentially duplicitous. When James plunges Merton Densher into a typically female role, it is not an advantage to Densher, but rather a condition against which he will eventually rebel. The Wings of the Dove chronicles not just the social restraints placed upon women, but the danger of men putting themselves too much in the typically female role. Further, through its quiet but persistent discourse on gender roles, the novel brings into question the entire concept of normative gender roles. I At the time James was writing, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Thorstein Veblen had analyzed the middle- and upper-class marriage as an economic institution, thus extending work already begun by Frederick Engels. Veblen wrote incisively of the function of marriage in assuring the businessman's upward climb; The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 38-54. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press The Feminization of Merton Densher 39 the wife of a rich man was not, he argued, a privileged woman, but rather the chief servant in his household, the one most intricately involved in furthering her husband's career through her conspicuous attestation to his financial success. Gilman, examining marriage from a feminist perspective, saw the ways in which middle- and upper-class girls were taught that "Wealth, power, social distinction, fame—not only these, but home and happiness, reputation, ease and pleasure, her bread and butter,—all, must come to her in a small gold ring" (71). Further, she points out that although a marriageable girl must pursue marriage in order to make a living in the world, "she must not look as if she wanted it!" (87). Thus the economic basis of marriage is hidden beneath a veneer of romantic love. James's women are clearly shaped by these social forces; Kate Croy is a perfect example. The Jamesian and complicating turn on this issue, however, is his illustration that men as well as women can be "feminized" by the marriage market—put in the disempowered position prescribed for the female, as Densher is ultimately feminized by Kate. James portrays Kate Croy as a woman who is both restless within her prescribed sphere and doing her best to exploit the possibilities that exist within it. When Milly Theale asks whether "bargaining" for status, for friendship, for love—especially when such bargaining involves marriage, the closest possible bond between two souls—can lead to a happy conclusion, Kate answers that it can: "Kate did explain, for her listening friend; every one who had anything to give—it was true they were the fewest—made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing furthermore was that this might be in cases a happy understanding" (WD 157-58).2 Kate, moreover, is willing to bargain with her very self—which is, after all, the only commodity she has. Some time after Kate reassures Milly that the bargaining amongst friends "might be in cases a happy understanding," Kate jocularly expresses to Milly the theory that Gilman and Veblen propounded, her sense of herself as an item of trade being bargained over by Lord Mark and Aunt Maud: "I am—you're so far right as that—on the counter, when I'm not in the shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as properly, of my aunt's protection" (WD...