While the reader cruises along smoothly in the realistic works, easily engrossed in the narrative as the action unfolds in a leisurely fashion, to be caught up in the “action” of the late novels is a different experience. Much more effort and close attention is demanded of the reader. The main action, indeed, is often in the minds of the characters, in their nuances of consciousness, and in the interplay of their moral sentiments. The individuals furthermore act within a framework of complex social forces and circumstances. The moral sensibilities of the characters precipitate agonizing choices for them, and yet the social context constrains the choices. The modern reader, on tackling Wings or one of the other major novels, may be inclined to echo the exasperated sentiments that William James once addressed to his brother apropos the late prose style:

Some friends have expressed to me the fear that the language of the late James works is so far removed from modern usage that the novels may come to be regarded as in a category with, say, a Shake-spearean comedy whose allusions are hopelessly beyond the ken of today’s readers. I believe that this view is mistaken. In rereading Wings in preparing this essay I was struck once again by the novel’s richness and vitality, the humanness of the characters, and the moral relevance of their struggles. The rewards are great for the reader who perseveres. Once you are caught up in the story, you will be swept along and you will very likely join the ranks of the James enthusiasts.

William James, in the same letter in which he complained to his brother about the dense prose in the late novels, referred to Henry’s 1907 travel book, The American Scene, as “in its peculiar way ... supremely great.” To struggle with the moral dilemmas of the characters in the late James novels is to be transformed along with them, to experience the ambiguities and complexities that are very much a part of our modern lives. William James was right—there is something supremely great in his brother’s work. Whether one reads Henry James’s late novels primarily for aesthetic reasons, for social awareness, or to explore the clash of European and American sensibilities, the effort will be repaid manyfold. The richness, subtlety, and depth of characterization, the relevance of the moral issues, and the unforgettable portrayal of human dilemmas secure a place for James’s late novels among the treasures of world literature.

Fans of Henry James have long debated the respective virtues of the three major novels. The Wings of the Dove has risen in critical esteem in recent years, though it still has detractors among the critics. A familiar complaint is that Wings lacks the symmetry that James achieved in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Some have found the ending unconvincing. James himself feared that the early sections in Wings might be too drawn out and that other sections may have thus become too crowded. At the time he completed The Ambassadors, James was convinced that it was his greatest achievement. James ultimately considered The Golden Bowl his best work but ranked Wings as one of his “advanced” works. The arguments over which of the late novels is the most accessible, or has the most followers among the cognoscenti or the general public, or best represents the true genius of Henry James are lively and diverting. But much of this disputation, I think, misses the mark. The three major novels can be better understood and more deeply appreciated in reference to each other. Each deserves a wider readership; each has been to some degree a neglected classic. There are, however, favorable signs. There has been a steady growth in the number of James devotees in recent years, if one can judge by the number of Web sites and “hits” on them, the college courses featuring James, the number of journal articles, and the like. In publishing The Wings of the Dove in this Barnes & Noble Classics edition, our intent is not only to bring this classic to a broad audience but to increase the readership for and interest in all of the James works.

A few words are in order about the circumstances of the publication of The Wings of the Dove. James was in the habit of working on more than one project at a time, and he had originally contracted to finish Wings by September 1, 1901. The Ambassadors was to be prepared for serialization in the North American Review but was not finished until the summer of 1901, and only then could James concentrate his energies fully on Wings. He had determined that Wings should not be bound by the formalities and rules of serial publication in a magazine, which usually dictated twelve installments of roughly equal length. He was committed therefore to submit a complete manuscript of Wings to Constable in England and Scribner’s in America. Seeing that the initial deadline for Wings would be impossible to meet, he asked for an extension to August 1902, with publication to be deferred to the fall of 1902. The proposal was unacceptable to his publishers, who argued that their fall schedule was already too crowded and that James’s usual readers would want to read the book on their summer holidays. A compromise was worked out: The manuscript would be submitted in April 1902 with publication a few months later in June. James worked furiously in late 1901 and submitted a large installment of the manuscript of Wings to the publishers in December. But in January 1902 he became ill and his production slowed. (As with The Ambassadors and subsequently with The Golden Bowl, he dictated Wings to his typist Mary Weld.) Despite his best efforts, he could not meet the April deadline. He did dispatch some 400 pages of typescript, however, and promised his publishers the finished manuscript by May 15. He estimated that it would take an additional 100 pages to finish the novel. Winding up the story actually required more than twice that number of pages. He sent in the final 220 pages on May 20, 1902.

Delays in typesetting, the pressures of correcting proofs, the vagaries of transatlantic mail, and the task of trying to coordinate the dates of publication in New York and London, as well as continuing problems with The Ambassadors, brought further delays. The Wings of the Dove finally appeared on August 20, 1902 (ahead, as it turned out, of The Ambassadors, which was serialized in the North American Review from January to December 1903). The print run for Wings was 3,000 copies in America and 4,000 in England. Initial sales of Wings were disappointing. In addition, there were numerous typos, misspellings, misprints, and other errors in both editions. Worse yet, differences appeared between the British and American editions, evidence that James corrected the respective proofs at different times and did not correlate the versions sent to the different publishers.

The errors were largely corrected in the New York Edition, the series in which James painstakingly revised and reissued an authoritative text for a large part of his entire literary output. James finished his revisions of Wings in 1909; it was the eleventh novel issued in the New York Edition. It is a tribute to his artistic conscience that he persevered, for by the time he set to work on Wings it was clear that sales of the whole New York series were well below what he had hoped for. He could expect no profits on Wings, and the publisher reduced the print run to only 1,000 copies. Unknown to James, his friend Edith Wharton colluded with his publisher to subsidize in part the New York Edition and make it possible for the series to appear.

James made no substantive textual changes in the New York Edition of Wings comparable, for example, to what he did with The Portrait of a Lady, in which he made significant alterations, including most notably changes in the novel’s ending, or with some of the other works that he drastically revised. In Wings, in addition to correcting mistakes, he sharpened the language of the text, by substituting more active and concrete images, and made his symbols more truly poetic.

This Barnes & Noble Classics edition is based on the 1909 New York Edition and incorporates a small number of additional editorial changes made by subsequent scholars. The aim is to present a text that is authoritative without burdening the general reader with an elaborate scholarly apparatus. Brief explanatory notes appear at the bottom of the page where necessary for clarity, and endnotes and a list of suggested references for further study are also included. But, as with all great works of literature, the reader will gain his or her greatest satisfaction by engaging the text directly, without being constrained by a critic’s interpretative framework.

As with much else in the Jamesian oeuvre, however, we can gain important clues to The Wings of the Dove by noting James’s own views on what he was trying to accomplish. James was an astute critic of his own work, and in his preface to the New York Edition (included in this edition), he gives us an illuminating statement of his aims. “The idea [of Wings],” he says, “reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamored of the world ... and passionately desiring to ‘put in’ before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived” (p. 3). The story, however, was not to be “the record predominantly of a collapse” (p. 5). Quite the contrary, James intended that his victim be seen as “contesting every inch of the road, as catching at every object the grasp of which might make for delay” (p. 5). She expresses in her fight the nobility of the human spirit. The novel therefore consists in working out an elaboration of the nuances and the twists and turns along the path, and the memorable human encounters that occur in a noble, but untimely, doomed struggle against her fate. The struggles of James’s heroine are nothing but the “soul of drama—which is the portrayal, as we know, of a catastrophe determined in spite of oppositions” (p. 5).

James’s heroine is Milly Theale, a twenty-four-year-old New Yorker who embodies all the finest virtues of the American woman: freshness, spontaneity, innocence, a thirst for life. Milly is fabulously wealthy and is the sole survivor of a large upper-class New York family. The rest of family died off in the period since her tenth birthday. We learn that they died from “different causes,” lest we infer that Milly is the victim of some strange hereditary illness. Milly’s illness is never specified, except that we learn in book sixth that it is “not lungs,” when Kate Croy and Merton Densher, the other two protagonists of the novel, are discussing Milly’s health (p. 260).

James’s beloved cousin, Mary (“Minny”) Temple, who did die of tuberculosis some twenty years before, was the model for Milly, as she was for Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady and Maggie Verver of The Golden Bowl. Milly Theale is a more fully realized creation than Isabel Archer and probably outshines Maggie Verver as well. Milly dominates the events of Wings even when she is not physically present. Milly is “there” when she is not there, whereas Maggie Verver, a more passive figure, does not always seem to be there when she is there. Milly’s disease in Wings, though certainly real since it will ultimately claim her life, has almost a spiritual quality. Milly’s will to live can keep the disease at bay, for a time at least, and the loss of her will to live can cause its progress to accelerate.

Milly’s initial consultation with the famous London physician Sir Luke Strett in book fifth is surely the most unphysical of all medical examinations in literature. It consists mainly of the two of them conversing amiably for a time. Gently interjecting a question now and then, the benignant Sir Luke encourages Milly to talk about herself, her family, and her hopes. Presumably from this he gleans a kind of medical history, but James gives no clear indication of the fact and does not dwell on this kind of realistic detail. Sir Luke is in every respect unlike another famous physician of nineteenth-century English literature, the young Dr. Lydgate of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872). While Lydgate is ardent, impetuous, and scientifically inclined, the avuncular Sir Luke is worldly, urbane, and, in modern jargon, laid back. He is so confident of his skills that he scarcely bothers with pills, powders, and the usual armamentaria of medical practice. Sir Luke, through a process of divination or intuition, does, however, diagnose Milly’s condition precisely. He understands what is required. He is enamored (in a fatherly way) with Milly; her kindness, courage, and nobility of spirit make her irresistible to him. He promises to help her, and he gives the message that she wants to hear: She must live to the fullest, and not be bound or limited in any way by her condition.

It is part of the novel’s design that we know more of Milly’s state of mind than of her physical appearance. But we do have clues to her appearance. Milly apparently is not beautiful. Her nose and mouth are too big, and her pale skin makes her appear almost white, which in turn accentuates the redness of her hair. She generally wears black clothes that give her a slightly eccentric appearance. When we last see her at the rented palazzo in Venice, she is wearing a dazzling white gown and white pearls. This contrasts strikingly with her past costume and makes her inner beauty come radiantly to life. What counts is her inner beauty, her qualities of goodness and kindness that endear her to others. Of course her enormous wealth is part of her aura. Milly herself is completely unselfconscious about her wealth. She no more thinks of money than of the air she breathes. She will simply spend what she has to even if she is occasionally taken to the cleaners by those who serve her.

Henry James clearly worshiped Milly as much as he did his dead cousin Minny Temple. The memory of his cousin never left James. To Susan Shepherd Stringham, the Boston writer and Milly’s traveling companion in the novel, Milly seems almost “a princess” or “an heir of all the ages.” This latter characterization is how James wishes us to see Milly (see the preface, p. 6), and the phrase is a useful shorthand for everything she represents.

To some observers, Milly is so unreal in her goodness as to belong in a fairy tale. There are certainly fairy-tale qualities to The Wings of the Dove: The good princess encounters evil forces and a kind of magical tale unfolds. Indeed, Milly herself feels as if she were “on a carpet” as she whirls through the hubbub and bustle of London life. James’s less-noble female characters may appear more “real” to some readers. Certainly, Kate Croy is a memorable literary creation of this type. Other critics, some of a feminist bent, counter that Milly is a much more forceful figure than merely the long-suffering victim. In their view Milly is by no means a mere patsy; rather, she is someone who flexes her muscles in a quiet way and who makes full use of all the power that her great wealth confers.

The other major characters, whose relations with Milly form the heart of the novel, are two very different people. Kate Croy and Merton Densher have little in common beyond their mutual sexual attraction and their poverty. Kate is pure action, a handsome, strong, willful, dark-haired young woman who knows her mind exactly. Kate has a talent for living and habitually devises practical plans of action to cope with any problems she encounters. James had sketched Kate in his notebook as a willful, unsympathetic figure. But she turns out to be more fully rounded, a complex and compelling figure with a mixture of attractive and unattractive qualities. Whatever James’s original intentions, Kate Croy becomes through his artistry a sympathetic character even though she is the instigator of an unsavory, not to say immoral scheme to exploit her sick friend. She is also the one figure in the book who is brutally honest. She is in a tough game, and it is hardly surprising that she plays to win. Self-deception is not something she can afford.

Densher, in contrast, is pure thought, a man who delights in his own cerebrations. He is happiest when he is thinking and pondering about events, examining other people’s motives (or his own), or when he is studying historical events or uncovering a scandal to put in his newspaper. He is passive where Kate is active. He is a loner, while she recognizes (if she does not always like) the necessity and inevitability of seeking one’s goals by manipulating others in a web of social interactions. Their opposite personalities and qualities of mind attract and apparently are complementary, even though we may well wonder how long such an attachment will last. If they were forced to survive on Densher’s meager pay as a journalist, their relationship would probably soon fizzle out. Densher has a conviction deep down that “he will never be rich.” Unless pushed by Kate, he would be content to drift through life reading, writing the occasional piece for his newspaper, and contemplating the state of affairs from the margins of society. He is not wholly without ambition. He does want to get ahead in his chosen profession of journalism, as is evidenced by his willingness to visit America (where he first makes the acquaintance of Milly). But he doesn’t have the relentless drive to advance his career with real vigor, just as he doesn’t have the will to resist Kate when she propels him into the scheme to entrap Milly. Kate is willing to roll the dice, whereas Densher on his own could hardly imagine doing so. He admires her precisely for her uncanny knack of knowing what she wants and for her boldness in trying to achieve her goals. How, why, and to what degree he modifies his feelings toward Kate are critical turning points in the novel.

Rounding out the cast of characters is a host of lesser figures who play their parts in the drama. They are background figures, providing a kind of color, tint, scenery, and atmosphere. I use visual images advisedly, for James’s text is like a canvas on which he has painted an intricate scene. The eye is drawn to the characters in the foreground, but the others are necessary for the complete portrait. James’s metaphors and allusions are predominantly visual. His bent, his artistic taste is to painting, in contrast to that of Proust or Mann, whose novels are filled with musical references and allusions. That the visual arts seize the imaginations of James’s characters further reinforces the whole effect of portraiture.

Kate’s aunt, Maud Lowder, is the rich, iron-willed, and domineering matriarch with whom Kate lives. Aunt Maud is determined to use her niece to advance her own ends. Maud Lowder acquired her money through marriage, and she lacks the aristocratic pedigree that is necessary to function at the top of London’s disintegrating, but still snobbish, social order. As a social climber and would-be aristocrat, Maud seeks to use her beautiful niece to advance her own social standing by marrying Kate off to a member of the nobility. The immediate candidate for this end is Lord Mark, who has a beautiful estate but is otherwise essentially broke. He needs money to keep up his lifestyle and is unabashedly in the hunt for a bride so that he can barter his social position for a fortune. He is none too finicky, requiring only that the woman’s fortune be large enough. Lord Mark, a somewhat shadowy figure, turns out to be the closest thing to a purely evil force in the novel. His visit to Milly in Venice, in which he reveals to her the true state of the relationship between Kate and Densher, is as an act of malevolence and vengeance.

Aunt Maud’s social control extends also to Kate’s unfortunate and widowed sister Marian, who lives in lower-class penury with three children to care for. Marian has fallen out of favor with Aunt Maud because she married a man of whom Aunt Maud disapproved, and is now, after her husband’s early death, reduced to living in conditions close to squalor. Her only hope in the short run is for occasional acts of minor benevolence from her aunt. Both Marian and Lionel Croy, Kate and Marian’s disgraced father, harbor the idea that Kate one day will be able to care for them handsomely if she only submits entirely to Aunt Maud’s wishes. Lionel Croy has besmirched the family through unspecified criminal acts; he has been ostracized by Aunt Maud but from time to time extracts small sums of money from her.

Though Milly is the center of the novel’s action, she is not present in the first two books, and after one brief episode in book eighth, she disappears in the last two books of the novel. The novel’s first two books are given over entirely to Kate, to her relationship with Densher and to her family background. The initial chapters set the stage for Milly’s arrival in London and her debut in the London social scene. James had his doubts about this device of leaving Milly to a later appearance, fearing that he may be too long-winded in setting the stage. The novel then could end up having “too big a head for its body.”³ He feared that, by having to cram too much into the middle sections, he might cause sudden shifts of focus and make the narrative hard for the reader to follow. While Wings does lack the structural symmetry of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, the technique of deferring Milly’s appearance heightens the drama and brilliantly succeeds in the final analysis.

Milly arrives on the scene in book third, and we learn all that we need to know of her New York background and her family circumstances. In demonstrating the force of her character by showing how she affects the others, James dramatizes her the more, just as he does with the figure of Mrs. Newsome in The Ambassadors (who never actually appears in the novel). Milly’s presence is powerfully felt even in her absence. She animates the other characters; they are at first preoccupied with trying to figure her out and then they scheme to use her for their own purposes. Her seeming victimhood is demonstrated by the way the others constantly plot behind her back. The tawdriness of their intrigues contrasts with Milly’s own lonely struggle to live.

Milly’s character is initially presented through the eyes of Susan Stringham, who is accompanying her to Europe. Susan’s role in Wings is similar to that of Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors or to Colonel Bob Assingham’s role in the narrative structure of The Golden Bowl. James refers to this literary device as the ficelle (literally, a little piece of string), by which he means the use of a lesser character to facilitate the flow of events and to link the major scenes.⁴ One day in Switzerland, while looking for Milly, Susan Stringham sees the book Milly was reading left by the side of the trail and follows the path that leads to the edge of a precipice. She sees Milly sitting in a precarious position on a rock slab, gazing down at the valley stretched out below her. For a moment Susan is frightened, thinking that her friend might be contemplating suicide. She is afraid to call out for fear that a sudden disturbance might startle Milly and send her over the edge. Then, as Susan contemplates her friend, she slowly realizes that as Milly “was looking down at the kingdoms of the earth ... it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all?” (p. 106). She understands that her friend is not running from life but hungers for life. Shortly, Milly announces to her friend that she wants to go directly to London. She has evidently had enough of Switzerland’s bucolic charms, and wants to be at the center of activity in the world’s most bustling metropolis.

Susan Stringham happens to have an old friend in London from the days before the marriage to her late husband. This friend of her youth, now also widowed, is Maud Manningham Lowder, who is Kate Croy’s aunt. Susan writes to her friend Maud, and upon their arrival in London renews the friendship. Milly, with her “heir of all the ages” qualities, quickly captivates Maud, and is introduced into Maud’s London circle. Milly’s wealth, though she carries it gracefully, inevitably attracts attention. In the London scene of the day, wealth makes one “a great personage.” Maud and her friends treat Milly as such, although they also regard her as eccentric. Milly is sensitive enough to see that she is being patronized, and wishes she could escape from the stereotype. She especially wants to be respected by her new friend Kate and by Merton Densher (whom she had met in New York when he visited the city as a journalist). Milly sees that the Londoners she meets seem preoccupied with money, but she does not yet understand the deeper currents and plots being hatched around her. For the moment she is happy to be caught up in the excitement of London, in broadening her knowledge of the world (and her knowledge of herself). She is living more fully through her new friends.

Milly is a symbol of the innocent but thoughtful American guided by an innate idealism and an intuitive sense of what is right. Milly, like her country, is without a significant past to shape her identity, and is also without culture but is hungry to learn. In Kate, equally a creature of her circumstances, opposing qualities are represented: She is shrewd, knowing, a survivor by temperament and by necessity. She is driven by values forged within a framework of practical reality. Her values are purely exigent, and she is on the make because she has no other choice. In the general condition of fin-de-siècle England, Kate suffers both from too much history and from a radical uncertainty about the future. Kate’s family fortunes are on the wane (as England’s commercial fortunes, too, are under siege). Kate, living by her wits like other Londoners, faces a crumbling social order, still beset with vestiges of privilege, and a crass, cash-driven morality where money and competition reign. Although Wings is framed almost in mythic terms—the fair princess versus the Dark Lady, innocence against guile, America’s innate goodness against England’s expediential morality—James’s genius lies in his making the characters alive and concrete, palpably real as they interact and make their ways within the London scene, and never mere caricatures.

Milly is caught up almost immediately in a plan of Aunt Maud’s to detach Kate once and for all from the impoverished Densher. Maud finds out that Milly has met Densher in New York and quickly decides to try to link Milly with Densher—to her it is self-evident that any sensible man would be attracted to a woman of Milly’s wealth, along with the added bonus of Milly’s apparent pliability. Once attached to Milly, Densher would be moved to the periphery and Maud would be free to advance her plan to marry Kate to Lord Mark. As subterfuge, Maud advances the notion that Merton Densher is a “family friend.” Kate, who is in love with Densher, at first resents this move by her aunt, but soon enough realizes its potential uses for her own purposes. Gradually, with the twists and turns of real life, Kate’s own plot takes shape as a way to thwart her aunt. She will outsmart her aunt by adopting her aunt’s very plan.

Kate’s plan begins to take shape when she discovers that Milly may be seriously ill. The idea is that Kate will encourage Densher to be nice to Milly—she senses at once that Milly is attracted to him—and she will thus persuade Milly that there is nothing between Densher and herself. Milly will in due course fall in love with Densher, Kate believes, and want to marry him, which will result in Densher inheriting her fortune. By exploiting the dying girl’s desperate wish to find love, Kate will escape her aunt’s and Lord Mark’s clutches. She will have it all: the man she loves as her husband, Milly’s money, and her own freedom of action. Kate’s approach to life is epitomized by her comment to Densher in book second that “I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That ... is how I see myself” (p. 70).

The burden of actually implementing the scheme, however, falls on Merton Densher. Once having set things in motion, Kate steps into the background, and it will be Densher’s job to deceive Milly, to become her lover and/or husband, and thus to inherit her money. His emotions, and his awakening moral sensibilities as he proceeds, and the impact of all this on his relations with Kate provide the main dramatic tension for the novel. Densher, who becomes something of an exemplar for the anti-hero figure so prominent in twentieth-century fiction, is passive, a spectator type of person, someone to whom things happen. His moral struggles grow out of his reaction to the circumstances he finds himself in—his dilemma has come about, seemingly, only because he wanted to be kind. He is meant, as Henry James originally envisaged the character’s development, to undergo a spiritual transformation as he comes to see the horror of his role in exploiting the dying girl’s quest to hang on to life. Whether the reader will be convinced that Densher’s conversion is genuine remains an open question. James, in the actual writing of the novel as opposed to his notebook projections, made Densher’s spiritual development a more nuanced affair, and left us to judge Densher’s motives. Is Densher’s ostensible renunciation of Milly’s fortune merely a self-righteous gesture, an effort to conceal the extent of his own moral responsibility? Some readers may find Densher’s late actions priggish and bizarre—far removed, indeed, from any true signs of respect for Milly’s memory.

Kate stays in character to the end. She is not squeamish; she is resolute and matter-of-fact. She holds to her rationale that the deception brought Milly a degree of solace in her fight for life. After all, Kate remarks on an earlier occasion, “Who does Milly have but us?” Kate wonders, in the final scene with Densher after Milly has died and after Densher has received notice from Milly’s New York attorneys of the bequest of her fortune, why he hadn’t simply denied to Milly the truth of Lord Mark’s vengeful revelation. Susan Stringham at the time had also urged Densher to deny Lord Mark’s accusation, which had devastated Milly and caused her to “turn her face to the wall.” Densher is shocked by the suggestion. This is the one thing he could not do. He could only seek Milly’s forgiveness in his final interview with her. Kate presses him to tell her what actually happened—did Milly, in fact, forgive him? Densher is vague—all he can recall is that the encounter lasted about twenty minutes and ended when she grew tired and asked him to leave her. Densher assumes that he was forgiven, but he assumed all along that his moral responsibility was mitigated by the fact that his role was passive and because he was motivated by kindliness. He has, in fact, deceived himself repeatedly. The meeting with Sir Luke Strett in Venice, for example, shows Densher at his self-righteous worst. Sir Luke tells him that Milly would like to see him, and Densher grandly imagines that Sir Luke thinks highly of him and sees him as someone seeking only to comfort Milly. This manifest self-deception makes us wonder about Densher’s state of mind.

Densher presents Kate with a choice between having Milly’s money without him or him without the money. But she cannot have both. Kate has failed the tests that Densher has devised for her, and apparently she now finds herself back where she started: having to choose between love and money. But will Densher be able to carry out his grand gesture? Will he be able to resist Kate’s stronger will and her greater capacity for life? Densher is the quintessential loser thrust into circumstances he does not fully understand. James still has sympathy for Densher even if this troubled soul’s spiritual transformation falls short. Densher, in his moral confusions and hesitations, is truer to life and more credible without the full moral awakening. Though polarities of good and evil are often implied in the novel, James endows his characters with a mixture of motives and with nuanced qualities that prevent us from making easy moral judgments. James’s characters are vividly alive, struggling in their imperfect ways to realize their destinies in a world that lacks moral clarity. For James, there is a sense of foreboding in the air. The cash nexus is the spirit of the new post-Victorian age. Everywhere in The Wings of the Dove, from the thrusting commercialism of London to the dilapidation and fading glory of Venice, there is the sense that the old order is passing and the higher values of Western civilization are under assault.

Kate, with her quick perception, recognizes in the novel’s final scene that something fundamental has happened. Densher has changed; he is no longer a reliable ally. She believes that Densher has fallen in love with a ghost; he has become enamored of Milly’s memory. Just when Kate’s scheme has apparently brilliantly succeeded, the whole effort has in fact fallen apart. Densher’s equivocal attempt to absolve himself from blame and his quixotic attitude toward Milly’s money have doomed Kate’s best-laid plans. Densher assures her that he is still ready to marry her “in an hour.” Kate asks, “As we were?” The “as we were” means what exactly—as they were in the old days before Milly came on the scene? As they were before Densher’s renounces Milly’s money? “As we were,” he replies. Kate, ever clear-headed and decisive, gives a firm shake of the head and turns to the door, declaring, “We shall never be again as we were!” (p. 492).

There are in Wings few of the “big scenes” that one finds in many nineteenth-century novels. James’s method of indirection means that we as readers, as well as the characters, learn of critical developments as they are refracted through another character’s consciousness, or in what somebody says offhandedly, or by means of a poetic image or symbol that brings a sudden burst of understanding. In James’s late fiction, meanings are conveyed, as John Auchard has shown, through the “silences.”⁵ Effects are communicated via a glance; a mood is captured in a momentary intrusion of a shaft of light. The emotional aftereffects of a chance encounter linger and the characters ponder the meaning of gestures fraught with wider significance. As in life, great moral issues seem to dissolve into myriad small choices, and the continuous flow of little encounters sweeps the characters along toward ends that they cannot foresee.

Yet in Wings circumstances do not control events to the exclusion of human will. The Jamesian world is not like the naturalist order of a Zola or Dreiser novel, where the individual is subject to the iron determinism of circumstance. Individual moral choices do matter. Important corners are turned in Wings, and decisions are made at every turn that carry a string of consequences. For Kate, deciding to live with her aunt brings her under the sway of her aunt’s values. In choosing money, and in postponing marriage to Densher, she turns her life onto the path of the London “scene.” This scene is marked by crassness and grasping ambition. Densher’s decision that he will be kind to Milly as the gentlemanly thing to do is a pious rationalization. Once he takes the first steps, he is implicated deeply in Kate’s venture. He places himself on a slippery moral slope. Once in the action, he cannot get out. Milly encounters critical turning points, too, and in those moments she makes decisions that will shape her life. How long she can fight off her fate is in some measure a reflection of her own will and of whether she is fully engaged in life. She chooses to ignore Kate’s warning to “drop us while you can.” The scene in which Milly stands with Lord Mark in front of the Bronzino portrait that resembles her sticks in our minds as a decisive moment. She has the first symptoms of her illness on that occasion, and perhaps she surrenders to her fate and loses some of her will to live. Milly thereupon makes a series of important decisions. She decides to consult with Sir Luke Strett. She invites Kate to accompany her on the first visit to the doctor but not on the second visit, and she does not confide in Kate what the doctor tells her. Milly’s pride thus assures that she will face her fate essentially alone.

Why does James—one of the most secular of authors, whose only religious inclination seems to have been a nodding interest in his brother William’s ideas about consciousness and the afterlife⁶—choose the religious symbol of the dove for his heroine? At one level the answer seems obvious enough. Kate calls Milly a “dove” early in the novel when the two of them are alone in a drawing room, and just after Milly has had the thought that Kate is “like a panther” pacing before her. Milly’s dove-like qualities and Kate’s fierceness are nicely juxtaposed here for the reader. The dove image next appears in book seventh at Milly’s grand party in Venice. Kate and Densher are watching Milly from across the room as Kate lays out her instructions to him concerning how he should maneuver to be assured of getting Milly’s money. Milly is dressed in white at the party and wears white pearls, and the image of the dove pops into Kate’s mind. But when Kate refers to Milly as a dove the word does not seem apt to Densher; he does not think of Milly as a passive, demure creature. However, a dove has large wings, and it strikes him that at the very moment they all are nestled under Milly’s wings. Indeed, they have all lived for some time under Milly’s patronage and protection. Psalm 55, it may be recalled, is actually a prayer for the release from suffering and persecution :