The Wings of the Dove

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


Chapter 28 begins with Merton Densher musing after a conversation with Susan about Milly not joining the group downstairs at her place that there is a sort of unspoken agreement that no one will bring up Milly's illness. Of course, only a spoken agreement can really be an agreement so this thought very gently slides into an exploration of the reasons Densher himself might refrain from bringing it up:

... this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct was marked by straightness?

And the important discovery here is that Densher apparently needs to reassure himself about his own integrity in this matter. If you have to ask ...

Later in their conversation, Susan Stringham compares the gathering at Milly's to a Veronese:

It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour. (P. 377)

She has something like this (Courtesy of Wikipedia) in mind:

And here is a dwarf for from just in front of the rail to the left her to be:

And Densher worries because he doesn't see any place for himself in this picture. Susan assures him there is even though he never asks her:

"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is that you'll be faithful to us—that you've not come for a mere foolish few days." (p. 377)

What can that mean? The painting above is Christ at the House of Levi and I think it is likely the one James had in mind because it's in Venice.  But, as near as In can tell there is no man holding up his head and the wine cup unless ...

Because, as we all know, the painting above was originally meant to be a Last Supper and Veronese retitled it after offending the church (and little wonder, it is offensive). So is this all meant to be a travesty of the Last Supper? With Densher the travesty Christ to whom Milly looks to for a resurrection? (Keep that thought in mind as I'll come back to it next chapter.)

Susan, however, is Mily's disciple:

"Oh the daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've given up all to follow HER. (p. 379)

And that has to refer to the story of Jesus and the Rich young man:

Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.”

That's from the Gospel of Mark. The story appears in all three synoptic Gospels but with different emphasis. In Mark, Jesus cuts Peter off when he tries to say he has given up everything implying that Peter misses the point.

Later, Kate joins Densher at the gathering at Milly's and two fascinating things happen. In the first, Milly is compared to a dove:

"She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground."

"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a given case--HAD, truly, in the case with which he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't HE in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on.

That's chilling. We might just remember that while doves are associated with the Holy Spirit and with liberation in the Bible they are also sacrificial victims.


Then there follows a fascinating scene that I won't say too much about because I wouldn't ruin it. Suffice to say, Densher gets a fuller notion of what Kate has in mind but he doesn't think about his integrity because he is wrapped up in a struggle to make her come to visit him at his rooms. (In the course of this discussion, there is a fascinating biblical allusion in which Kate talks about Densher possibly "Washing his hands" of her.)


This duel to get her to come to his rooms, of course, goes back to chapter 17 in which Densher thinks about the reasons she would never do such a thing:

She would have to stop there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage, respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness less.

Rather wrapped in this idea that she should do something for her, he continues that here. And she agrees.


What does she do when she is there? Her merely being there would be scandal enough at the time.


We don't find out as by the next chapter he is thinking of it in retrospect as something momentous but he doesn't say what. As I say, she doesn't need to have done anything more than to have visited to commit a major social transgression in Aunt Maud's eyes. That said, the thing is so momentous to Densher that I think she puts out. (I know, how utterly typical of me to think of it that way and to put it that way.)