5. Masterpieces

‘Masterpieces’ focuses on three of Henry James’s novels that are generally considered his greatest: The Ambassadors (1902), The Wings of the Dove (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The Ambassadors is a meditation on the nature of ambition, destiny, and what makes a life meaningful. The Wings of the Dove deals with illness and suffering, and the moral conundrum presented by a dying girl possessed of great wealth she cannot enjoy, and her needy friends who seek to inherit it. The Golden Bowl is about the institutions of marriage and family, and how they are disrupted by passion. The chapter also examines James’s travel narrative, The American Scene (1907).

Henry James’s Literary Remains

In his critically neglected autobiographical writings, Henry James depicts himself as a young boy given to cooing over school notebooks, gazing dreamily at peeling bills, and luxuriating in the grease of theatrical posters. Such tattered wastepaper acts as a kind of material plug with which James fills his many confessed memorial gaps: James, that is, stuffs the blank spots of his memory with paper. But the persistence of a tangible past can be a dangerous thing, as James—a prodigious destroyer of his own literary remains—was well aware. Letter-burning, a recurring motif in his fiction from “The Aspern Papers” to The Wings of the Dove, is for James a surprisingly ethical act of destruction: it not only lays troubled ghosts to rest but, at the same time, re-enchants the past by eradicating its ability to speak through matter, transforming the palpable objects of memory into impalpable objects of desire.

Making Love Public: The Paradoxes of Intimacy in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

This article focuses on the paradoxes pertaining to romantic love in Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Drawing on love sociology (Luhmann, Illouz) it explores the ways in which James places the love and courtship of his protagonists Merton Densher and Kate Croy in a complex and shifting relation to the private and the public. As sociologists and cultural historians inform us, “romantic love“—a notion that links love and marriage—emerged only in the late 18th century as an ideal advocated by sentimentalism and romanticism and then gained popularity throughout the 19th century. Its emergence was concomitant with the rise of the middle class, the rise of the novel, and the growing separation of the private and the public spheres. Indeed, as Niklas Luhmann argues in his seminal study Love as Passion, the differentiation of the private or intimate sphere—a sphere defined by personal/intimate relations as opposed to impersonal ones—begins with the cultural codification of love. It was only after love and marriage became linked that marriage gained its status as a private affair and the family came to be regarded as the sphere of privacy. This already suggests a paradox built into the idea of romantic love: while love came to be understood as the most intimate relation between two people and as central for the demarcation of the private sphere, it also needed to be made public in order to remain what it was. This paradox is reflected in one of the major ironies of James’ novel: Kate’s decision neither to publicly acknowledge their relationship nor to conduct it in secret, but rather to appear publicly and act privately as if there was nothing to disavow in the first place, leads to the disintegration of their intimate bond. Suggesting that the performative effects of Kate and Merton’s public actions eventually render their intimate bond nonexistent, James exposes the paradox at the heart of romantic love.

Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, and Seraphic Devotions

Reading Henry James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove with Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphita, this essay argues that James performs through his novel an act of secular devotion, a memorialization of lost others through which he enables himself to continue to live.

Densher’s Crucifixion—or A Beautiful, Beneficent Dishonesty?

Chapter 4 takes up the perspective of Kate Croy over against that of lover Merton Densher, to recognize how James’ The Wings of the Dove moves the reader beyond the short-sighted Anglo-Puritan ethics of Densher to contemplate the “beauty” of Marian-Catholic beneficence, mercy, and non-zero-sum romantic vision—especially when it comes to the otherwise dark entwinements of love and death. From mid-century English critics Yvor Winters and F.R. Leavis to the latest U.S. aestheticians, Wings has long been understood to be a sordid tale of greed and betrayal redeemed precisely yet only by the rise of conscience in Densher—who, not coincidently, takes over the indirect discourse of the second half of the novel, to the point of declaring his personal Christian ascension. And yet it is not a coincidence that this part of Wings is set in Adriatic-Catholic Venice: a city of waterways and alleyways in which to go straight is to get there by gorgeous indirection—which, this chapter argues, is the objective correlative of how James’ notorious late style (postponements, fractures, multivalences) and huge melodramatic, Veronese-inspired canvas serves the alternative Marian knowingness, not only of Kate Croy, the visionary mistress among the Marian figures, but also of the dying yet still sexual Milly Theale, her surreptitious acolyte; and not only that of the two women in the romantic triangle but also of the three wondrous queer characters in support—besmitten yet selfless Susan Stringham, visionary doctor Sir Luke Strett, and Eugenio the major-domo of Venetian Living.