Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [14]
Is it a final irony of The Wings of the Dove that Milly escapes from—not to say, triumphs over—her tormentors? In giving away her fortune to Densher despite his deception, she has shown both the softness and the strength of her wings. She has demonstrated her generosity and forgiving spirit, and at the same time has exacted a certain vengeance. Kate and Densher apparently have become permanently estranged as a result of the bequest. Kate has learned that she cannot have everything. For Densher’s part, his grand gesture of renunciation would leave him with nothing. Like all of Henry James’s endings, the end of Wings is more of a beginning than a resolution: Will Densher be redeemed and will he find a new life without Kate? Will Kate free herself from her aunt and from the London “scene,” or will she, after all, fall into a marriage with Lord Mark? Like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, who realizes that money has poisoned his relationship with his patroness Mrs. Newsome, and like Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, who must at last confront her husband without the presence and emotional support of her father, Kate and Densher must build their lives anew with only a heightened moral awareness to guide them. For Henry James, there is a darkness and a sense of doom hovering over the scene. His characters, and the civilization they represent, may be incapable of redemption, and may instead spiral toward moral decay and social disintegration.
Bruce L. R. Smith is a fellow at the Heyman Center of the Humanities of Columbia University. He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1979-1980), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad.
Notes to the Introduction
1. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Period, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1945.
2. William James to Henry James, letter dated May 4, 1907, in The Letters of William James, edited by Henry James, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, vol. 2, p. 278.
3. James made this comment in a letter to Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, dated October 23, 1902; reprinted in The Wings of the Dove, Norton Critical Edition, second edition, edited by J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003, p. 468.
4. The idea of the ficelle is discussed most extensively by James in the preface to The Ambassadors (see Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by Richard P. Blackmur, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937, pp. 307-327). The discussion in James’s preface to Wings is also of interest in this connexion (see The Art of the Novel, pp. 46-47).
5. John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986; especially chapter 5 on The Wings of the Dove.
6. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death,” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, New York and London, Harper and Brothers, 1910, pp. 201-233.
7. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 696-697.
Preface
The Wings of the Dove,” published in 1902, represents to my memory a very old—if I shouldn’t perhaps rather say a very young—motive; I can scarce remember the time when the situation on which this long-drawn fiction mainly rests was not vividly present to me. The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite,