'Type' in The Wings of the Dove and the Invention of Kate Croy

Abstract

James strove to employ the convention of character 'type', a traditional resource of realism, and yet gave evidence of his scepticism. The author's difficult submission to indeterminacy is visible in the ordeal of Merton Densher, for whom Milly Theale is at the outset only an 'American girl', a representative of a cliche the novelist himself had made notable. Densher, himself, is both conformable to typological description and eludes it, as do others in the novel (Lionel Croy is a satiric joke on the very idea of his recognisable type). But Kate Croy evades cliche by her modernist consequentialism that preserves moral feeling along with a conscious collaboration with necessity. For the writer, she is, as Densher says, 'a whole library of the unknown, the uncut'.