Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [9]
Rounding out the cast of characters is a host of lesser figures who play their parts in the drama. They are background figures, providing a kind of color, tint, scenery, and atmosphere. I use visual images advisedly, for James’s text is like a canvas on which he has painted an intricate scene. The eye is drawn to the characters in the foreground, but the others are necessary for the complete portrait. James’s metaphors and allusions are predominantly visual. His bent, his artistic taste is to painting, in contrast to that of Proust or Mann, whose novels are filled with musical references and allusions. That the visual arts seize the imaginations of James’s characters further reinforces the whole effect of portraiture.
Kate’s aunt, Maud Lowder, is the rich, iron-willed, and domineering matriarch with whom Kate lives. Aunt Maud is determined to use her niece to advance her own ends. Maud Lowder acquired her money through marriage, and she lacks the aristocratic pedigree that is necessary to function at the top of London’s disintegrating, but still snobbish, social order. As a social climber and would-be aristocrat, Maud seeks to use her beautiful niece to advance her own social standing by marrying Kate off to a member of the nobility. The immediate candidate for this end is Lord Mark, who has a beautiful estate but is otherwise essentially broke. He needs money to keep up his lifestyle and is unabashedly in the hunt for a bride so that he can barter his social position for a fortune. He is none too finicky, requiring only that the woman’s fortune be large enough. Lord Mark, a somewhat shadowy figure, turns out to be the closest thing to a purely evil force in the novel. His visit to Milly in Venice, in which he reveals to her the true state of the relationship between Kate and Densher, is as an act of malevolence and vengeance.
Aunt Maud’s social control extends also to Kate’s unfortunate and widowed sister Marian, who lives in lower-class penury with three children to care for. Marian has fallen out of favor with Aunt Maud because she married a man of whom Aunt Maud disapproved, and is now, after her husband’s early death, reduced to living in conditions close to squalor. Her only hope in the short run is for occasional acts of minor benevolence from her aunt. Both Marian and Lionel Croy, Kate and Marian’s disgraced father, harbor the idea that Kate one day will be able to care for them handsomely if she only submits entirely to Aunt Maud’s wishes. Lionel Croy has besmirched the family through unspecified criminal acts; he has been ostracized by Aunt Maud but from time to time extracts small sums of money from her.
Though Milly is the center of the novel’s action, she is not present in the first two books, and after one brief episode in book eighth, she disappears in the last two books of the novel. The novel’s first two books are given over entirely to Kate, to her relationship with Densher and to her family background. The initial chapters set the stage for Milly’s arrival in London and her debut in the London social scene. James had his doubts about this device of leaving Milly to a later appearance, fearing that he may be too long-winded in setting the stage. The novel then could end up having “too big a head for its body.”3 He feared that, by having to cram too much into the middle sections, he might cause sudden shifts of focus and make the narrative hard for the reader to follow. While Wings does lack the structural symmetry of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, the technique of deferring Milly’s appearance heightens the drama and brilliantly succeeds in the final analysis.
Milly arrives on the scene in book third, and we learn all that we need to know of her