Reciprocity and the Market Place in The Wings of the Dove and What Maisie Knew

Abstract

B EFORE WE CAN HOPE to understand moral sense of Henry James, we must shed a number of misconceptions. One of oldest and most attractive of these misconceptions is that James shared New England conscience which many of his American characters possess. According to Yvor Winters, most persuasive exponent of this view, more immediate source of James's moral sense was Puritan conscience, ultimate source being the Aristotelian ethical tradition. 1 In Puritan conscience this tradition had become intensified even while losing its rational foundations. Because of his Calvinist ancestry, a traditional moral sense survived in James, but without its original philosophical and religious sanctions. Thus, James inherited a moral sense by any clear set of ideas. The instinctual and unsupported nature of his moral sense is Maule's Well, which poisons James's fiction by causing a great deal of obscurity and ambiguity. This interpretation of Jamesian morality presents a number of difficulties. For one thing, Winters rides roughshod over facts