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By Root 3505 0

from too much history and from a radical uncertainty about the future. Kate’s family fortunes are on the wane (as England’s commercial fortunes, too, are under siege). Kate, living by her wits like other Londoners, faces a crumbling social order, still beset with vestiges of privilege, and a crass, cash-driven morality where money and competition reign. Although Wings is framed almost in mythic terms—the fair princess versus the Dark Lady, innocence against guile, America’s innate goodness against England’s expediential morality—James’s genius lies in his making the characters alive and concrete, palpably real as they interact and make their ways within the London scene, and never mere caricatures.

Milly is caught up almost immediately in a plan of Aunt Maud’s to detach Kate once and for all from the impoverished Densher. Maud finds out that Milly has met Densher in New York and quickly decides to try to link Milly with Densher—to her it is self-evident that any sensible man would be attracted to a woman of Milly’s wealth, along with the added bonus of Milly’s apparent pliability. Once attached to Milly, Densher would be moved to the periphery and Maud would be free to advance her plan to marry Kate to Lord Mark. As subterfuge, Maud advances the notion that Merton Densher is a “family friend.” Kate, who is in love with Densher, at first resents this move by her aunt, but soon enough realizes its potential uses for her own purposes. Gradually, with the twists and turns of real life, Kate’s own plot takes shape as a way to thwart her aunt. She will outsmart her aunt by adopting her aunt’s very plan.

Kate’s plan begins to take shape when she discovers that Milly may be seriously ill. The idea is that Kate will encourage Densher to be nice to Milly—she senses at once that Milly is attracted to him—and she will thus persuade Milly that there is nothing between Densher and herself. Milly will in due course fall in love with Densher, Kate believes, and want to marry him, which will result in Densher inheriting her fortune. By exploiting the dying girl’s desperate wish to find love, Kate will escape her aunt’s and Lord Mark’s clutches. She will have it all: the man she loves as her husband, Milly’s money, and her own freedom of action. Kate’s approach to life is epitomized by her comment to Densher in book second that “I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That ... is how I see myself” (p. 70).

The burden of actually implementing the scheme, however, falls on Merton Densher. Once having set things in motion, Kate steps into the background, and it will be Densher’s job to deceive Milly, to become her lover and/or husband, and thus to inherit her money. His emotions, and his awakening moral sensibilities as he proceeds, and the impact of all this on his relations with Kate provide the main dramatic tension for the novel. Densher, who becomes something of an exemplar for the anti-hero figure so prominent in twentieth-century fiction, is passive, a spectator type of person, someone to whom things happen. His moral struggles grow out of his reaction to the circumstances he finds himself in—his dilemma has come about, seemingly, only because he wanted to be kind. He is meant, as Henry James originally envisaged the character’s development, to undergo a spiritual transformation as he comes to see the horror of his role in exploiting the dying girl’s quest to hang on to life. Whether the reader will be convinced that Densher’s conversion is genuine remains an open question. James, in the actual writing of the novel as opposed to his notebook projections, made Densher’s spiritual development a more nuanced affair, and left us to judge Densher’s motives. Is Densher’s ostensible renunciation of Milly’s fortune merely a self-righteous gesture, an effort to conceal the extent of his own moral responsibility? Some readers may find Densher’s late actions priggish and bizarre—far removed, indeed, from any true