Failed to Feel It: Stoniness in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

Failed to Feel It:Stoniness in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove Diana Leca Kate Croy is hard to like. In critical appraisals of The Wings of the Dove, she has been called "dreadful," "diabolical" (Krook-Gilead 299, 331), "vindictive[]" (James's own contribution [CN 106]), an "avaricious vampire" (Cornelius 6), and—from Michael Wood's Schadenfreude-inspiring list—"greedy, ghoulish, shabby, disgrace, and swindling" (33). As one early reader of the novel asked: "Who could feel any desire for even a fictional acquaintance with such persons?" (Cornelius 6). The dream of sympathetic attachment, after all, remains alluring. While it is unlikely that many novel theorists today would crusade for its centrality, most continue to operate quietly under its assumptions. In my reading, Kate Croy elicits such a strong response from readers not because she has too many—or the bad sort—of feelings but because she has too few. E. M. Forster famously condemned James's method of "pruning" emotion in Aspects of the Novel: "[James's] characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. … Even their sensations are limited" (143). For many of James's contemporaries, his late novels were not simply shy or reticent—affective states with a scintilla of charm—but emotionally stony. We would do well not to shelve these complaints too swiftly. How supple, in fact, are our theories of reading when faced with figures who are not only inscrutable but also indifferent or hard of heart? Can thinking more carefully about stoniness as a literary and aesthetic property intervene in current debates about styles of reading? My conviction that it ought to is reinforced by a small but emerging set of critics investigating diminished or flat affect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. In her study on insensibility, Wendy Anne Lee argues that "failures of feeling" are bound up with, rather than incidental to, the historical development of the novel as a discrete genre, persistently testing its limit points. As she puts it in relation to figures [End Page 234] like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park: "Characters who cannot or will not generate the feelings demanded of them (in stories oriented towards, but not restricted to, conjugality) upset the terms of subjectivity offered by the novel and its ontological design of investigating feelings" ("British Novel" 6).1 But does hardness offer any analytical purchase on The Wings of the Dove? On first blush, it appears to be an unpromising category for a discussion of the types of feelings and formal properties particular to James's late period. That stoniness tends to jar with contemporary interpretations of the novel, however, is part of the reason I am inclined to explore it here. This is less from an impish will to upend the received narrative and more from a sense that current figurations of The Wings of the Dove continue to miss something of its unsettling rigidity and coolness.2 James's novel is invested not so much in the sentimental nuances of specific subjects than in exploring what Rei Terada calls the "opalescent end" of feeling (14, emphasis mine). Stoniness is not a quirky or ancillary feature of James's late novel; rather, it is integral to its structural shape, affective texture, character investigations, and plot construction. In what follows, I attempt to show that rather than stymying creativity, states of unfeeling and associated lapidary elements like imperviousness and fixity are built into The Wings of the Dove at various levels of its compositional process. The Wings of the Dove opens with a bitter pas-de-deux. Kate Croy and her father, Lionel, fume, plead, stare hard at the street below, stare hard at each other. When her father displays a rare sliver of sentiment, Kate is described as being left cold: "she cared, however, not a straw for his embarrassment—feeling how little, on her own part, she was moved by charity" (7). To be unmoved has of course more than one sense: literally, it means to be inert. Catherine Malabou's definition here is instructive: "Inertia names the resistance of...