From the Lists: #26 The Wings of the Dove

My love / hate relationship with Henry James culminates in The Wings of the Dove (1902). A story about Kate, a beautiful, but down-and-out social climber, who pimps her fiance, Merton, to Milly, a rich, terminally ill, American orphan, in the hope that he will inherit her fortune upon her death.  (How's that for Jamesian sentence structure?)

Like James' other novels, there are really no good girls or boys in this story of having and wanting. Even the idealistic love between Kate and Merton, a journalist, is eventually corrupted by the societal machinations of Kate's Aunt Maud and Milly's traveling companion Mrs. Stringham - who, coincidentally, were school mates back in the day.

While Kate is willing to throw off Aunt Maud's "sponsorship" to be with Merton, she is also keenly aware of her struggling father and sister who look to her marriage prospects as benefit to themselves:  "...[T]he more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting."(p. 23) Of course it's easy for Kate to disdain the grasping of others when later justifying her own grasping, manipulating, lying, and betrayal as serving your "higher" purposes.

It appears that a fabulously wealthy, orphaned, American heiress with only a few months to live, really brings out the local London aristocracy. Upon her arrival, balls, dances, dinners are suddenly arranged. The Spring season is extended and the Summer exodus from London is postponed, all for a chance to meet and woo this heiress. What's most interesting for the reader, is that James gives you no clues as to who is in on the plot, who are pawns, and who are the victims.

In many ways, while reading this novel, I was reminded of Downton Abbey - particularly Cora's marriage to Lord Grantham, which included a dowry large enough to save the estate. In Milly's case, the lucky man would only need be married a few months at most, and a fortune would be at his command. Not a bad deal for a slightly tarnished estate or unlanded title holder. Yet, with all these suitors, Milly only has eyes for a poor, secretly engaged, journalist, who coincidentally is our male romantic lead, Merton.

In the end, this is a morality tale about love and greed, innocence and guilt, faith and compromise, which makes it all the more sad. The novel's first act is filled with love, innocence and faith as evidenced by the vows Kate and Merton exchange to conclude the first act, "I pledge myself to you forever." Merton exultant replies, "And I pledge you - I call God to witness! - every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life." Sadly, because this is literature, the lesson is not going to be eternal joy and bliss. Instead, the tale will end with a harvest of fruits planted, tilled, and fertilized with greed, compromise, and guilt.

Thinking about Henry James

In reading The Golden Bowl (#32), The Ambassadors (#27), and now The Wings of the Dove, I found myself settling into the parlors and receiving rooms of upper middle class London at the turn of the century. There is a bit of a scandalous undercurrent to all of these stories, there are unreliable narrators, internal dialogs, as well as character types and places his readers would have known or heard about. I think that being a part of and/or understanding this segment of society provided James with some shortcuts that the present day reader is lacking. Once I fell into the habit of reading between the lines and not fully trusting James' narrators, I think I took on more of the persona of his original audience. After all, why write something down when your reader's imagination will add the perfect amount of scandal and spice for the book to provide a rush of titillation in addition to the pleasure of moral superiority?

Next up: #24 Winesburg Ohio