Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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