Imagery in The Wings of the Dove, ethical and aesthetic - vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music

When Mrs. Stringham sees Milly Theale on the edge of an abyss, she imagines that Milly is contemplating suicide, but she also imagines that Milly “was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them” (3.1).  There are other possibilities, I know, but given the location Mrs. Stringham is thinking Matthew 4:8, which makes Milly, a wealthy twenty-two-year-old American woman into a Christ figure.  Whatever kind of Satan is tempting her is not visible to her friend.

Milly is surrounded by figurative language of the abyss, but also with Biblical language.  She is the dove of the title.  She has “lien among the pots” yet shall be “as the wings of a dove covered with silver,” assuming that Psalm 68:13 is the correct reference.  So then she should be the wings, but characters repeatedly refer to Milly as the dove, not the wings, as one would.

Milly’s actions towards the end of the novel, one or more of which might be considered a sacrifice, either redeem one or both of the couple that was trying to grift her, or destroys them, as a couple, or perhaps individually.  Or maybe one thief is saved and the other damned.  I do not know how to reconcile the contradictions of the two sets of endings, or the multiple possibilities of the ending.  Nor did James, I suppose, which is why he wrote the novel.

Another set of images attached to Milly aestheticize her.  She is frequently like someone in a painting, sometimes religious, but in a key scene, not.  “She was the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on every ground.”  And she is, in fact Milly looks exactly like the woman in this portrait, because it is on the cover of the edition of the novel I read, and I am told the resemblance is uncanny, and there we are.

The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angel-esque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded [?] jewels, her brocaded and wasted [?] reds, was a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy.  And she was dead, dead, dead.  Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her.  “I shall never be better than this.”  (5.2)

The way that the mortally ill Milly’s recognition is not of herself but of death – or that she only recognizes herself through death – is a great moment, one of the surprising yet exactly right psychological insights that suit fiction so well.  But I picked the quotation because it begins the strange process by which everyone else aestheticizes Milly, one more for example of the novel’s distances, while she transforms aesthetics into ethics.  She uses here wealth to become the Renaissance noblewoman in the painting, moving to a Venetian palace and so on.  But she does it as a way to live.

As with many ideas in James, where this falls between utterly bizarre and ingeniously insightful is unknown to me.

Maybe the answer is in the great scene at the National Gallery (5.7), where Milly wonders if she could “’lose myself’” among the paintings, where “[i]t was immense, outside, the personal question.”  She wants more aesthetic distance.

I could pursue a related set of images that are associated with Martin Densher, a journalist, engaged to Kate Croy but in pursuit of Milly, who compares people to texts.  His girlfriend, for example:

“You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.”  He almost moaned, he ached from the depth of his content.  “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”  (6.6)

Hilarious.  Or how about 8.1, where Densher thinks that he does not want to “read[] the romance of his existence in a cheap edition.”  Getting dangerously meta-fictional there, Henry.

Milly is not text to him, though, but music: “her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music” (8.1).

I do not yet understand Henry James’s use of imagery, but at least I have learned to look for it.

Image Blogger Appreciation Day

Welcome to Image Blog Appreciation Day!  My favorites:

Will Schofield’s 50 Watts is the reconfiguration of the legendary Journey Round My Skull, a repository for the most penetrating, surprising, and perplexing images he can find, and he has a good eye.  I could look  - or, really, stare - at those 19th century Danish puppet theaters all day.  The site has become an archive of book covers, textbook illustrations, children’s books, and miscellaneous weirdness that I now find overwhelming.  He does have a Greatest Hits page.  I want to emphasize, though, the literariness of the site, the sense that the images featured on 50 Watts are collaborating with the texts I wrestle with, that Victor Hugo’s paintings or Pataphysical artifacts or French sequels to Pinocchio are part of whatever story I am trying to tell, too, if I only understood them better.

50 Watts is my most frequent source for the images I steal for my internet avatar, including my current head of wheat.  Although 50 Watts is significantly less bloggish than Journey Round My Skull, I still designate it the Greatest Blog Ever.

Jane Librizzi, proprietor of The Blue Lantern, is also a storyteller – all of these bloggers are.  Librizzi is a master of pairing text and image, whether the text is a famous poem or her own essay.  This piece on Mariana Griswold von Rensselaer is a good example.  She also understands how literature and images interpenetrate – see this expert review of Theodor Fontane  and this little biography of Djuna Barnes.

Neil Philips, of Adventures in the Print Trade, has contributed valuable comments to Wuthering Expectations now and then.  His own blog would be dangerous if I lived in England, because it is part of his shop, and if he cannot sell you the image he features, I bet he can find something just as nice.

I have borrowed an amazing linocut by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth to showcase Neil, but I want to feature a recent post titled “Keeping Impressionism at bay” in which Neil uses an illustrated book of poems to deftly summarize and challenge the standard art history narrative.  Now that is too big a subject, the useful and frustrating contrasts between literary history, art history, music history, and so on, the way the field’s tell their own stories.  Some other time.  Neil’s post is a sort of primer on the subject.

Philip Wilkinson’s English Buildings is not exactly an image blog, but in the end it functions similarly.  He helps his readers see buildings carefully, to really look at them.  Then, after looking, to learn something about the period and history of the building.  Then to look again.  Wilkinson is a widely published specialist on English architecture, and he uses the blog to explore some areas that the standard architectural histories do not emphasize.

Every blog I have listed has this in common:  they know their field, and the story people in the field tell, how this movement led to that one, and this artist influenced the other, but they understand how inadequate and limiting that story is, and they push back against it in all sorts of fascinating ways.

I would feel bad if I omitted Steerforth and The Age of Uncertainty, another great scrounger of old images.  Steerforth is opening a bookstore – best wishes!

I would feel worse if I did not mention that all of these bloggers are unusually good writers – clear in their arguments, thoughtful in their choices.  When I visit their sites, what I mostly do is look, which is right.  But I also read with real pleasure.