The Wings of the Dove

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Okay, pay dirt. We're in Chapter seven and we are seeing the world through the eyes of Milly Theale. It's an experience much like Maisie's: Milly is innocent (not quite as innocent as Maisie) and only partly grasping the significance of what is going on around her. She is in London at a dinner party hosted by Maud Lowder. Sitting to one side of her is Lord Mark. He tells her she is "a success".

And here is poor Milly contemplating all this. There is an erotic quality to her experience. Lord Mark knows at least one significant secret about Millie and is suggesting that this secret makes her a success. He won't say what the secret is in so many words but hints at it in a way that is teasing. And Milly is not so sure she wants to enter into society in this way. She wants to enter into London society, there is no doubt about that, but perhaps not on these terms.

And she looks at Lord Mark and imagines how he might answer her question to Susan Stringham from the previous chapters:

Should she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long? "Ah, so possibly not," her neighbour appeared to reply, "therefore, don't you see, I'm the way." [Italics in the original, page 118 in my edition]

Yup, the reply invokes John 14: 6 "I am the way, the truth and the life". And I think James's intention here is obviously to suggest that Lord Mark's implied offer is a bit of a travesty of the original. Lord Mark represents temptation.

Next page we get the first bit of text that relates directly to the title. Bear with me for this is complicated. Milly looks at Lord Mark and at Kate Croy as the dinners goes along. She sees that they have some quality that is intriguing and desirable although perhaps not good. Certainly a part of this is the sexual power of Kate Croy, which Milly perceives to be an order above her own.

Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so odd that she should have to recognize so quickly in each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this anomaly itself, had she more time to give to it, might well, might almost have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast.

Put yourself in Milly's shoes ... well, shoes won't do. Put yourself in her dress and all the various layers she is wearing for being dressed that way would change the way a woman held herself and moved and would change her entire experience of a moment like this. She doesn't know anything but, as Minnie Pearl used to joke, she knows enough to have always suspected something and suddenly what had been like invisible radio waves of sexuality are now visible to her. Heady stuff.

Okay, but in Henry James nothing is ever simple. This is actually a pretty good thing to read if you've always hated Henry James and wondered what others see in him because he actually states outright what he is trying to here. he is trying to get us to see that Milly's mind is doing a whole bunch of things at once. No one, least of all Milly herself, can really be expected to fully gasp the significance of what is "just a part" of what is going on in her consciousness.

These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs. Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? 

The "crowded consciousness" is what Henry James is all about. It is because he wants to talk about this fact of human experience realistically—that there are always lots of things going on at once—that makes him write the way he does. And his desire to make us see that this new awareness of Milly's is  "just a part" is what leads him to bury it at the bottom of a great long sentence (122 words worth). It comes in four sections:

And it was just a part likewise that while plates were changed and dishes presented and periods in the banquet marked;

while appearances insisted and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like plashes of a slow thick tide;

while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from every one and every thing:

it was just a part that while this process went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. 

All this stuff is going on and, just for a moment, young Millie almost takes flight.

And I said, Oh, that I had wings like a dove ...