Authoring "the real thing": Influence, Impressibility, and The Wings of the Dove's Queer Style

Abstract

Except for The Bostonians little scholarship focuses on women's homoerotic desire in Henry James's fiction. This article responds by reappraising The Wings of the Dove's much-discussed queerness. While most interpretations emphasize Lionel Croy's unspeakability or Susan Stringham's homosexual panic, this paper locates queerness in Wings's seductive entanglement of influence and impressibility—an entanglement that indexes female-female desire. Reading Wings in this way reveals that powerful attachments between women occupy such a place of centrality in James's fiction that to overlook them is to overlook a crucial aspect of the nuanced representation of sexuality critics have traced across his oeuvre.