© 2002 by Oxford University Press
Original Article |
The Price of ‘Mere Spectatorship’: Henry James's The Wings of the Dove
Following up on recent critical debates on Henry James, this article examines his response to publicity and consumerism as manifested in The Wings of the Dove. While critics often focus on novels such as The Tragic Muse and The Bostonians, which deal directly with issues of publicity, to unravel James's relation to the marketplace, little attention has been given to this late novel, which has incorporated the language of the market in its prose. Kate Croy, Lionel Croy, and Maud Lowder are compared to Milly Theale and Merton Densher from the point of view of performativeness, the main feature of publicity. It is argued that what Milly and ultimately Densher resent is the fact that they are constantly forced to act on the social stage, forfeiting their privacy for the sake of public exposure, the norm of late nineteenth-century London drawing-rooms. The characters are juxtaposed according to the way in which they appropriate indoor and outdoor settings. The ability to transform space subjectively, which Milly and Densher do with their impressionism, thus creating an introspective world of personal appreciation, becomes the definitive feature of privacy, a privacy which is continuously and aggressively assaulted by Kate's and Maud Lowder's prying.