The Wings of the Dove

Without my meaning it to, this is becoming my reading project leading up to Christmas as Brideshead Revisited was last year.

Sometimes you hit on a little detail that explains everything. Late in his career, Henry James wrote to a young man named AC Benson and said,

Life's nothing—unless heroic and sacrificial.

Well that explains why he is beating us over the head with the idea of sacrifice in The Wings of the Dove. (Without meaning to diminish the significance of heroic sacrifice, it's also nonsense.)

It's a view that spread to others too. Evelyn Waugh seems to have felt something like it too, although he later came to reject this. Most notably we see this when Guy Crouchback speaks with Madame Kanyi, a refugee he is trying to help. She says,

It seems there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians - not very many perhaps - who felt this. Were there none in England?

And he replies,

God forgive me. I was one of them.

In Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Charles Stringham says how chic it would be to be killed.

And something like that notion runs The Wings of the Dove. I don't think it's just a coincidence, by the way, that AC Benson, whom James wrote the line above to, was gay. It strikes me as telling that when we meet Merton Densher for the first time he is loitering in Kensington Gardens which was then, as it still is today, a place where gay men went cruising for sex. The idea of doing something heroic and sacrificial was an appealing notion to these men.

When Merton meets with Aunt Maud, she manages to convey her meaning without speaking it. At one point Merton paraphrases what she, in his view might have said had she spoken directly,

You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing you.

Take that out of context, and you can imagine a gay man fearing this attitude in the guardian of another young man they were in love with as credibly as we can imagine it here regarding Kate Croy. [This is on page 63 of my edition]

Just a little later, as they are discussing Merton's departure for the United States, Kate makes a grand gesture.

Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: "I engage myself to you forever."

And then she piles it on:

"And I pledge you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life."

But meaning what exactly? What is the meaning of this vow separate from any ritual or social conventions? It's just some words said and they don't engage with anything else.