Milly Theale Research Articles

Fierce Privacy in The Wings of the Dove

^Fierce Privacy in The Wings of the Dove Joan Lescinski Henry James, known for his subtle portrayals of psychological states, has produced in The Wings of the Dove a major problem of interpretation for his readers. The novel belongs to what F. O. Matthiessen calls "The Major Phase," that group of novels written by James at the end of his career. Like the other important novels of this period in his writing, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, this novel baffles readers with several mysteries, not the least of which is the cause of Milly Theale's illness. We are perplexed, even as the charaders in the novel are, about such questions as "What, predsely, is the matter with Milly?" "Is the disease real?" "Why does James persist in masking the illness behind layers of language and unspoken signs?" We are used to novelists helping us to understand their characters and their motivations. Why then does James refuse to do this? One possible explanation for James's reluctance to reveal the specifics of Milly's illness may lie in his determination to shroud her in levels of mystery in order to heighten the power of this lonely millionaire upon the novel and the charaders in it, espedally Kate Croy, her English friend, and Merton Densher, the young journalist who eventually falls in love with both women. Since mystery always seems more tantalizing and suggestive than "plain truth," James may be refusing to satisfy our curiosity in order to exploit the mystery surrounding Milly. His treatment of the illness is, in fad, in line with the privacy about herself that Milly proteds so fiercely. A number of critics have discussed the question of Milly's illness. Some commit themselves to a specific disease such as tuberculosis; others, like myself, hold that James deliberately refuses to reveal the cause of Milly's death.1 Elizabeth Allen asserts a more psychological basis for Milly's demise: "Milly dies . . . because the weight of manipulation and objectification she has to face as being perpetrated on her shatters her ability to control her existence in the world."2 R. P. Blackmur contends that Milly was "actually killed by the conditions of life,"3 while Ruth B. Yeazell believes that although we never know the literal disease to which Literature and Medicine 9 (1990) 125-33 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 126 FIERCE PRIVACY Milly succumbs, "we may assume that she dies of betrayal," making the careful distinction that we may as easily believe that "what kills Milly in the end is not the lovers' ambiguously kind deception, but Lord Mark's brutal truth."4 In any case, the determination by James to keep us and the charaders in the novel in the dark does make reading the novel an intellectual challenge. Critics have noted this before as, for example, Oscar Cargill: . . . The Wings of the Dove is not for every reader of Henry James. . . . Ability to recognize subtle dramatic tensions, the proliferation of poetic imagery, the iteration of symbols, the rich interweaving of themes, and the control of the multiplidty of elements comes only from a long saturation in James. The readers with such a saturation find The Wings of the Dove an immensely rewarding book and an immensely personal one.5 This carefully stated praise, however, does not simplify the complexities involved in the novel, espedally those related to the diarader of Milly Theale and the questions surrounding her illness. The fads available about the malady are few, and these are provided with the dense and convoluted language charaderistic of late Jamesian prose. Milly is not introduced immediately, but held off until the third book when we are already enmeshed in the affair between Kate Croy and Merton Densher with its attendant complications: their poverty, the determination by Mrs. Lowder, Kate's aunt, to arrange a "striking" marriage for her niece, and the lovers' attempts to conceal the true nature of their relationship, a secret engagement, from everyone.6 Milly seems almost an intrusion into the novels at this point, and Matthiessen notes that the unique feature of the method of The Wings of the Dove "is its deliberately indirect presentation of its...

Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (review)

John Auchard. Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence . University Park and London: Pennsylvania State U P, 1986. 182 pp. $20.00. Recent criticism on Henry James has associated him with Continental writers outside of nineteenth-century Realism. James has been viewed as a writer verging on Modernism, specifically connected with the literary currents of Decadence , Symbolism, Impressionism, and even Existentialism. John Auchard's book follows this critical tendency, arguing in a schematic fashion that James's use of silence in his novels represented a rebellion against nineteenth-century Positivism. Auchard views silence as a measure of response by which James's characters confront the materialistic phenomenal world. Auchard traces in representative fiction of James's three periods a progression of silent exchanges and of certain correlatives of silence such as absences, gaps, voids, and even ghosts. He argues that these manifestations of silence reflect a movement of consciousness from a rich potentiality associated with Symbolism to a certain Existentialist void related to an ultimate awareness of "non-being and non-expression" (156). In attempting to characterize the silence he perceives as Symbolist, Decadent , or Existential, Auchard makes vast generalizations that bypass the mystique and temper of those attitudes. He rightly treats silence as a psychological method in James, but he does not take into account the full range of poetic and philosophical states that are specifically connected with the literary movements he names. Instead, he categorizes the silences in terms of negative or positive effects . He identifies formative silences in early works such as Roderick Hudson and The American, ambivalences of silence in The Portrait of a Lady, and a dialectics of silence offered by later works such as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. He labels any so-called "extra-sensory" or "spiritual" perception as Symbolist. In particular, Auchard singles out Milly Theale from The Wings of the Dove and discerns in her spirituality and avoidance of outright statement a so-called Symbolist consciousness that is eventually rarefied into the extreme of Decadence or non-participation. With regard to The American, he sees in Christopher Newman's exposure to the silences of Qaire de Cintré in her secluded cloister an initiation into Symbolist mysticism. The equivalences Auchard makes fail to take into consideration the climates and écriture of the respective movements. As we know, Symbolism was a literary movement with quite specific stylistic characteristics and metaphysical attitudes: the cult of the dream, the suggestion of mood by objective landscapes, the evocative musicality of language, and the preoccupation with time's passage. In Auchard's hands, Symbolism becomes loosely associated with fictional characters ' retreats from the material world and from the concreteness of explicit language. Although James's characters do indeed make flights from reality, Auchard is making a rather large literary-historical leap in calling these escapes Symbolist. Auchard's bibliography in fact lacks the basic references to critical work on Symbolism that would enable him to recognize the distance between James and this literary movement. Seeking to establish links to Symbolism, Auchard locates certain "pregnant silences" (88), which he finds close to the expressions of silence introduced by Review of Silence in Henry James 75 Maeterlinck and Mallarmé. He is aware of the secular mysticism that the Symbolists adopted and attempts to make that the basis of the strongest connection. But in drawing parallels with James, Auchard seems to be off base in seeing specific similarities between Mallarmé 's aesthetic of suggestiveness and the mystery of the symbol (drawn from "Crise de vers") with what James more generally expressed as the novelist's sensitivity in "The Art of Fiction." After all, Mallarmé was not a novehst but a poet suggesting mood by die incantatory capacity of words; such mystique of setting and tone is not present in the terse exchanges of James's characters. Although Auchard uses a descriptive rather than judgmental definition of Decadence (an interpretation that in fact has already been made by others), his citation of the well-known statements on Decadence by Symons, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Huysmans is not appropriately applied to James. To consider, for example, Gilbert Osmond in The Portait of a Lady as comparable...

Inoperable cancer: an alternate diagnosis for Milly Theale's illness.

Inoperable cancer: an alternate diagnosis for Milly Theale's illness.

Falling in Love with Milly Theale: Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James’ the Wings of the Dove

Falling in Love with Milly Theale: Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James’ the Wings of the Dove

Parties as reflectors of the feminine sensibility: Woolf'sMrs. Dallowaycounters James'sthe wings of the dove

This article examines the ways in which parties conceived by women writers elucidate the feminine sensibility and feminine concerns with communication. Communication occurs through the preparation of a context—the making of the party from the planning stage, through the purchasing and preparation of food, to its opening in an artfully ordered drawing‐room. It occurs through attention to relationships between partygoers spatially; through attention to people over objects; through attention to the individual hostesses’ attempts to shape the meaning of events internally, intrapersonally; and through an exchange of meaning between individuals through a system of symbols constellated around death. A comparison of Clarissa Dalloway's party in Virginia Woolf's novel with Milly Theale's in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove aptly conveys the differences between male/female reflections of the party and illuminates how death figures prominently in feminine imaginings of social gatherings. Death is the metaphor to communicate psychic fears occasioned in women by parties. Finally, the article suggests how women writers have altered the tradition of the party in literature, permitting it to reflect their felt and lived experience.

Fall in Love with Milly Theale: Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James' "The Wings of the Dove"

Fall in Love with Milly Theale: Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James' "The Wings of the Dove"

Old Heroes and a New Heroine in the Waverley Novels

Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Jeanie and Effie Deans, Lucy Snowe, Catherine Earnshaw, Becky Sharp, Mary Barton, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolyn Harleth, Clara Middleton and Diana Warwick, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Brideshead, Kate Croy and, of course, those travelling Americans, Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver. For most of us these names echo powerfully, invoking the great stories told about them and, more generally, invoking one of the most impressive periods of sustained productivity in a genre, British fiction in the nineteenth century. For there are also other names, too many to mention, created by some of the writers who created these and by others less presently familiar. What must strike us about these names is that they all belong to women. I begin with these women, with the phenomenon itself, the fact of them, the sheer weight of their existence. And that weight is more than mere numbers. In their novels they play a major, and often the major, role. They are not a Daisy Buchanan or Hester Prynne, significant, yes, often even central, but only as some combination of myth and pawn. Nor are they a Sophia Western, too straightforwardly luscious to be mythic but hardly the main event. They don't exist as an other, however dynamic, outside the central consciousness of the narrative. And they cannot be summed up as one of those convenient siblings, the light and dark heroines. They are not the reward or the beings about whom or for whom others undergo struggles of conscience. They undergo those struggles, make their choices and live out, or perhaps die of, the consequences of their actions. Like else, they pays their money and takes their chance. So often in literature that everybody else,' at least in the foreground, has been male. But in Britain, in the nineteenth century, in novel after novel, there they are. Now it should be clear that the men are there as well. I need only mention Edward Waverley, Heathcliff, Henry Esmond, Adam Bede, and Michael Henshard. But this essay is not about them.

Moral Geography in What Maisie Knew

The difficulties for the reader of What Maisie Knew are inherent in the remarkably complex technical problem James set himself, that of rendering the intellectual and moral evolution of a child. Because Maisie is represented as passing from very early childhood to the verge of adolescence, she does not have the more nearly fixed perspective of an adult protagonist. Only at the end is she old enough to be confronted with a major decision without the sacrifice of verisimilitude. Confronting her with such a trial, however, was the means by which James could achieve depth as well as ironic effect. Hence he begins with a heroine whose perceptions are oriented to the material world and ends with one who is more concerned with abstractions. Because Maisie is still very young at the end, there is also a discrepancy between the conclusion of the plot and the symbolic conclusion. She can now think independently, but, on the morning that she tries it, Mrs Wix helps with the back hooks. In other words, Maisie's independence of spirit cannot be corroborated by an independent action on her part, such as Isabel's returning to Gilbert Osmond or Milly Theale's leaving her fortune to Densher. Instead, Maisie goes off to England with Mrs Wix, to the consternation of most readers. And because Maisie remains a child, limited in knowledge and in the terms with which to frame concepts, the maturing of her conviction depends to an uncommon degree on schematic symbolization. Normally James can rely more heavily on conversation to bring out point of view and on more subtle imagery than is at Maisie's command. Maisie's rapidly changing perspective, the final discrepancy between action and symbolism, and the perhaps excessive dependence on symbolism in the Boulogne scenes all make particular demands upon the reader.

The Symbolization of Milly Theale: Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

For Henry James, the death of his cousin, Minny Temple, was the end of a chapter in his life. It is the fitting end to the impressions of his own youth gathered in Notes of a Son and Brother: Much as this cherished companion's presence among us had represented for William and myself-and it is on his behalf I especially speak-her death made a mark that must stand here for a too waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth.1 In the opening pages of the third, unfinished volume of memories, The Middle Years, James expands this youth to encompass far more than simply the adolescence of young Henry and William:

The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady: A Study of Henry James's Later Phase

I whatever henry James's feelings may have been toward his favorite “Albany cousin,” Mary (“Minny”) Temple, while she lived, it is clear that at her death in 1870, she left with him an indelible image that made available to him as a writer large areas of human experience. This image figured more or less obscurely in several of his stories and minor female characters but according to his own testimony was most fully and consciously operative in his creation of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove.