Monday, January 9, 2012

The Wings of the Dove

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Okay, it's time to move along. I've been going through this thing far too slowly. No one could possible be following this as it would be painful to do so at the pace I'm moving.

Chapter 21.

The people who made the movie version were attracted to the film noir elements in the book—which is to say the femme fatale (Kate Croy) who leads the hapless man (Merton Densher) into the awful act against the innocent victim (Milly Theale). And that, in their view anyway, justified disregarding much of the plot and sense of the novel as well as altering characters circumstances. Despite that, it's a good movie although it isn't a good movie of the novel, if you know what I mean. That granted, however, Henry James understands film noir better than they do and this chapter proves it. If the film makers had paid closer attention to what James does in this chapter and been faithful to that, they would have made a much better movie than they did, possibly even a great movie.*

The key thing in this chapter is that Merton goes to see Milly because Kate wants him to. He doesn't know, yet, what Kate's plans are. He has to suspect something but he may be excused for not guessing just what and just how mercenary Kate means to be.

At first he is tempted to just break the thing with Milly off.
He had talked with Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her.
But he does not break it off as he gets along easily with her and every just slides along. And that is how we make bad moral decisions isn't it? It's easy to just slide along.

But there is a moment that I have called the "And then it was night" moment. This is a moment that occurs in many tragedies when the plotters of evil could just stop. They could pretend it was all a lark and then go home and nothing bad would happen. But if they go past it, they are in all the way. This is the moment where in great film noir—see Double Indemnity or Body Heat—when the man gets on the trolley ride the woman has been preparing him for with her and after that he must ride all the way to the end.

James, doing a much better job than the film, shows us in this chapter how Merton gets on the trolley. And here is how he reasons part of his fall through.
The sharp point was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think she doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she does like me awfully!"--that would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one nothing but good.

*The best filmed version of Mansfield Park is a movie called Metropolitan. It changes the plot significantly—moving it to 1980s New York—but, for all that, is much true to the spirit of the book. It's a shame the makers of The Wings of the Dove didn't think of doing likewise.

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