Jamesian Reading Lessons: The Wings of the Dove

In reading The Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James will be our guide, by way of the indications found in The Notebooks from 1894-1895, when he began to reflect on the novel’s seminal motif, to the 1909 preface to The New York Edition. If the commentary also acknowledges the importance of Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), analysed here along with the novel’s biblical and Victorian motif of the dove, the intention is to warn against the imprisonment of the heroine within any metaphorical cage. Milly Theale is not, in her self or for her self, a dove. Having established a procedure for reading the novel by way of the writings of Henry James, before and after the work, the commentary examines all thirty-eight chapters of the ten books. The Wings of the Dove can thus be apprehended as a “stupendous” work, complex in its plotting, awfully simple in its implacable depiction of the fates of its three young protagonists.