The Wings of the Dove is consummately Jamesian in its thematics of renunciation and sacrifice. Its extensive system of Christological imagery and allusions, as well as the recurrence of such words as" sacrifice,"" renouncement," and" crucifixion," invites us to read the novel thematically as a story of self-sacrifice and redemption. Milly Theale, the" angel with a thumping bank account"(WD 228), bequeaths her fortune in an act of sacrifice that ultimately redeems Densher from his complicity in Kate's plot; or so the novel is usually read. But there emerges a contradiction or disjunction between the thematic organization of The Wings of the Dove, which reads Milly's final action as a redemption of Densher's betrayal, and its causal structure. Though Milly's be-quest appears an act of renunciation, it intervenes to produce the fatal" break" between Kate and Densher, a break that mirrors a similar break or fissure between theme and causation in the novel.

This contradiction is closely related to the compositional strategy of the center of consciousness described in James's preface, by which the narrative circles yet ultimately evades the representation of Milly's case. Her''stricken state''(AN 294), as James terms her nebulous illness, is not only unrepresented, but apparently unrepresentable as such, approachable only in a series of infinitely decreasing increments. He describes the narrative as moving gradually from circum-ference to center:" Preparatively and, as it were, yearningly—given the whole ground—one began, in the event, with the outer ring, approaching the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations"(AN 294). This formulation describes an asymp-totic curve of successively smaller increments that can approach, but never coin-cide with, its end. Milly appears by nature to resist representation. She is aligned with the unspeakable itself; as the narrator says," she wondered if the matter had not mainly been that she herself was so'other,'so taken up with the unspoken"(WD 126).