Melodrama Redeemed; or, The Death of Innocence: Milly and Mortality in The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

MELODRAMA REDEEMED; OR, THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE: MILLY AND MORTALITY IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE Emily Schiller University of California-Los Angeles At the end ofhis 1 879 study ofNathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James writes that the author "combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems."1 This, of course, could be a description of James himself. Critics have compared their works for some time, sifting through plots, tiiemes, characters, settings , and ethical concerns in order to establish clear lines ofinfluence.2 F. O. Matthiessen was the first to suggest some similarities between The Marble Faun (1860) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), but Marius Bewley wrote the first full essay on the topic.3 As others have afterhim, Bewley focuses on the connection between Hilda and Milly Theale, using Hawthorne's pale moralist to explain James's mysterious heiress.4 The connection between Hawthorne and James is a deeply important one. But it lies more in the realm of "spontaneity of the imagination" and "care for moral problems" than in a list of simple resemblances between characters. Milly's similarity to Hawthorne's copyist begins and ends with surface detail. Both heroines are young American girls; both travel to Italy; both see their resemblances to old Italian paintings; and both are characterized by their friends as "doves." The novels do indeed share a central preoccupation with the implications of innocence and its loss, butMilly's innocence is at once more specifically complex and more humanlyuniversal than that ofHawthorne's cold heroine. Hilda is an artificial—though sometimes appealing—construct of nineteenthcentury society. Her innocence is largely a kind of perverse ignorance, fueled and protected by an inflexible moral code based on narrow middleclass conventions and a debased interpretation of Christian orthodoxy. She has no love or even compassion for other human beings whose lives stray beyond the petrified limits ofher experience. No pinched New Englander, Milly is an heiress of "vast" and "startling " New York, a descendent of those wild and wicked, "free-living" ancestors. Her innocence, sexual as well as emotional and experiential, is exactly what she wants most to lose. And for her, it is not "loss" that is involved but all of life itself to gain. Unlike Hilda, whose tower is a retreat from the troubling ambiguities and vulgar aggressiveness oflife, 194Emily Schiller Milly's precipice is a starting point, a temporary place for contemplation , where possibilities are considered and one course of action is decided on. And in the end, her Palazzo does not exclude but gathers all the world for her last days. IfMilly is not attempting to avoid life, is human duplicity her only or even her most important antagonist? If so, as a dying woman, she would be the most pathetic of victims. But is the state of Milly's health only so much window-dressing, a ploy to wring the last ounce of sympathy and horror from the reader? In the Preface to The Wings of the Dove, James turns over the problem of having a sick and dying young woman as the central figure of a novel. He resolves that the "act of dying" cannot be the concern of the "poet": Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle. The process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground as in no other connexion. . . . My young woman would herselfbe the opposition—to the catastrophe announced by the associated Fates.5 Milly's struggle is not so much with the darker side of life but with the illumination of death. It is not her moral innocence that is at stake, but her mortal. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne contrasts the painful but necessary loss ofprimeval innocence in Donatello with the smothering dissemination ofartificial innocence in Hilda, thus creating a romance ofthe Fall that also succeeds in ironizing the popular heroines of "domestic fiction ." James, too, draws from the best-selling sentimental novels ofhis day, but the...