The Wings of the Dove

Chapters 29 and 30

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

Chapter 29
I've read that James wanted the character of Milly to be a sort of a monument to his dead cousin Minny Temple. Knowing that, it is my sad duty to report that this novel just dies when Kate Croy isn't in the scene. You can't quite bring yourself to admire her. On the other hand, you can't help not admiring her. Milly, on the other hand, is a vague character most of the time and when she isn't vague she is insipid.

Okay, let's go back to the Veronese in chapter 28. Susan Stringham tells Merton that he too has a place in the picture:

You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup.

There is, as I noted before, no young man holding his head and cup up in Christ at the House of Levi.  I've since learned that some people identify the painting as the Wedding Feast at Cana. Perhaps because of this guy:

The problem is that that guy isn't surpassing the others and while he is holding up a  wine cup; and he isn't holding up his head particularly either. And there is no dwarf in the foreground of this painting.

I can see a logic to it. Susan might have two paintings in mind. The first might be to describe the moment when she speaks with Densher by comparing it to Christ in the House of Levi. The second might be the Wedding at Cana to define her hopes for the later moment when Sir Luke and the musicians show up. It would also describe what Susan (and presumably Milly) is hoping for.

But that stretches the point and there is a person in the first painting who surpasses all the others and holds up his head and the wine cup. That person is Jesus. Obscene comparison? Well yes, but that would be the point. Christ at the House of Levi is a travesty of the Last Supper.

And looks what happens on page 405 of my edition (emphasis added):

"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your days."

He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for YOU." And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion—that Milly was so interested.

That's obscene. That Merton who, however good Kate is at manipulating him, might see the fact that his victim really loves him as his suffering and, much worse, that he should mentally liken it to the crucifixion, is obscene. And James, of course, means for it to be.

There is a brilliant psychological touch in the opening of this chapter. Merton is rather quietly accepting of Milly's death while she struggles. I wouldn't mention it at all except that we see this played out the opposite way in so many movies nowadays. How often do we see the dying person being in full acceptance while the living are in denial and unable to get over it. In real life, we get over other people's deaths so quickly it's chilling.

Chapter 30
I mentioned a while ago that Merton is the one character in the book who is an insufferable snob. And we see more of it here where he is tortured by the fact that Milly's servant visibly doesn't approve of what he is doing:

One had come to a queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered.

Part of the problem for Densher is that everyone else, including Milly herself, is encouraging him to do the wrong thing. Except that isn't such a rare moral quandary is it?

The big thing that happens in this chapter is that Lord Mark shows up and speaks with Milly. We don't know what he says as that all happens offstage. Not yet anyway. But Densher seems to. How?

His guilty conscience projecting? Perhaps but it would be weird if that conscience should be correct about what other people are really doing and thinking.

More telling, and what ought to be more important to our understanding is a comparison Densher makes toward the end of the Chapter. Because Merton imagines Lord Mark as having said something to discredit him to Milly, he thinks of himself as separated from both women. First Milly:

He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it were--that Kate had named.

Does it bother you as much as it bothers me that Merton seems to see himself as some sort of noble victim here? 

Now on to his thoughts about Kate (emphasis added):

The thing Kate had named was not to have been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof. These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own intensity increased.

These two excerpts follow immediately upon one another by the way ( on p. 422 my edition). Which brings me back, as you knew I would come back, to that final visit to Merton in his rooms just before she left. What did she do/ Well, I think she had sex with him. And notice how he now qualifying that. he sees her as doing this partly in her own interest. Okay, but he really pushed for this. She didn't.

No I'm not blind to the huge problem with Kate's behaviour we are probably about to discover next chapter. (Actually, we'll definitely discover but I'll maintain the polite fiction that I haven't yet read it here.) But Merton doesn't know that yet and he is already sliding away from her. The two thieves are already at odds with one another and each is as bad as the other. And Kate is least every inch a woman. Merton isn't much of a man.