Contingency, Opacity, Belief: Ethics in The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

The Wings of the Dove brings out a fierce desire to know—a desire the text often refuses to satisfy. I argue that this denial of knowledge acts ethically: drawing on unexpected common ground between Davidson and Levinas, I see knowledge-formation as fitting new information into existing schema. Wings marks the inadequacy of those schema, instead proposing a particularized, contingent encounter with characters who escape our grasp. Crucially, this is not an ethics grounded only in denial: even as James forecloses access to characters' consciousness, his stylistic choices attest to their inner lives as unavailable yet not empty.