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).