To ‘Glory in a Gap’: The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

The ‘largeness of style’ (WDI, p. 208) that is everywhere the mark of the late Jamesian mode, becomes in The Wings of the Dove the ‘rich and obscure and portentous’ (Prefaces, p. 301) setting for a story built on deceit and carried on in the most polite of conversations. ‘Forms and ambiguities’, made ‘charming’ (Prefaces, p. 306) in the hands of such accomplished practitioners as Kate Croy and Aunt Maud, are given licence in the multiplicity of aspects James’s sentences here create, their processive structure, abstract subjects, embedded clauses and uncertainty of reference adding to the general sense of hovering, hidden meaning. Here a soap-opera melodrama, hinging on the exploitation of yet another American heiress, takes on dimension in the surround of James’s style it could never otherwise have had. And, writing at a rare time without impending serialisation to dictate his design, James, delighting in his ‘free hand’, produced a novel remarkably all of a piece, in its allusions and overlapping reference his most resonant.

The curious thing about art speech is that it prevaricates so terribly.

(D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Spirit of Place’, 1924)

when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater’s pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it.

(Preface to The Wings of the Dove)