The Ethics of Desire in The Wings of the Dove

Metaphor, Hysteria and the Ethics of Desire in The Wings of the Dove

Sigi Jöttkandt, SUNY Buffalo

International Henry James Conference, Paris, 2002

What I‘d like to do in the next twenty minutes is make a case in support of Kate in The Wings of the Dove but not in the form of an apology. I would like to suggest that Kate, far from also being the victim of circumstances her apologists often take her for, in fact represents one of the only two ethical characters in this novel, the other being Milly herself. Clearly, what I mean by ethics here will need some explanation since it is not immediately obvious that a woman who instructs her fiancé to make love to a stricken woman in the hope that she will soon die and leave all her money to him can easily be said to be acting ethically. The concept of ethics that I will develop here takes its cue from how I understand Lacan’s formulation in his Ethics Seminar where he first introduces his famous ethical injunction “do not cede your desire.“[1] Now, in case this sounds like an ethics worthy perhaps of a Restoration libertine but certainly not of an early twentieth century, middle-class woman whose era is about to embark upon what is arguably one of the most horrific manifestations of our collective death wish in history, it is important to remember that when Lacan talks about desire, what is essential to it is that it remains unsatisfied. A satisfied desire is no longer desire, so it is around the fundamental dissatisfaction of desire that (at least one kind of) psychoanalytic ethics is found. Far from being an injunction, then, to pursue one’s good at the expense of one’s fellow man, the Lacanian and, I will argue, Jamesian, ethic is one that is dedicated to maintaining a certain distance from the thing that threatens to give complete satisfaction. What Kate does for Milly, and this is why I find her an ethically viable character, is that she teaches her friend the fundamentally unsatisfiable nature of desire and, in the process, gives Milly a way out of the deadlock confronting her in the form of her “apotheosis.“

Let us begin with this scene which represents the first real intimation of Milly’s illness. Recall how Lord Mark, detaching Milly from the others at the party at Matcham, invites her to view a portrait which is thought to so resemble her. Critics have made much of James’s unusual phrasing in this comparison - “Have you seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one, that‘s so like you?” (135) - which inverts the conventional reflecting sequence that would expect Milly to be “like” the painting, not the other way around, an inversion which continues into the following scene when "Lady Aldershaw [. . .] looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly" (139). Milly’s subsequent breakdown in front of the portrait seems to be a reaction to precisely this subject-object transposition, a point made by Marcia Ian for whom Milly’s collapse represents a moment of "penetrated identity [that] moves Milly to tears of happiness [because] her deepest sense of herself . . . has been gently exposed and acknowledged . . . to be identical to and indistinguishable from the way others see her" (Ian 119). I find it hard to see how she comes to this conclusion, however. Not only does Milly, minutes later, claim to fail to see the resemblance, but, as I will elaborate, her tears hardly seem the result of an excess of happiness. Milly does, nevertheless, see something in the portrait: "Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. ’I shall never be better than this’" (128). Gert Buelens has suggested that what Milly acknowledges here is what he calls the syntagmatic character of the relations dominating Milly’s experience in London. However, I follow Ken Reinhard in seeing in Milly’s recognition neither a mimetic nor a metonymic relation but an allegorical one: what Milly sees in the face of the "lady in question" is her own death looking back at her from beyond the grave.

For Ian thus to interpret Milly’s tears as an expression of penultimate happiness and self-transparency completely misunderstands, to my mind, the meaning of Milly’s apotheosis. For an apotheosis is not simply a supreme moment or quintessential example of a thing. An apotheosis is also an elevation to divine status whose concomitant implication, as Strether in The Ambassadors points out, is that one is already dead: "after a real apotheosis . . . there’s nothing but heaven" (265). Far from being an expression of absolute happiness, Milly’s tears express rather the horrifying realization of the absolute senselessness of comparing time with the end of time. James tells us, "It was perhaps as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any connexion whatever" (137). Instead of comparing moments and finding one superlative, Milly’s discovery that the meaning of life is death turns all temporal hierarchies into bitter irony, since everyone, no matter how long they live, will eventually die. Death equalizes everyone and everything, making a mockery of the woman in the Bronzino portrait with her "full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds" (137).

At this moment Kate comes upon Milly and, deftly extracting her from Lord Mark and the Aldershaws, asks whether she, Milly, isn’t ill. In reply, Milly makes her momentous request that Kate accompany her to the doctor. Now, although there have been several hints previous to this moment as to the state of Milly’s health, I follow Sharon Cameron here in seeing the experience with the Bronzino portrait as pivotal in the development of Milly’s illness which for Cameron is effectively "contracted" at this moment. However, while Cameron argues that it is the thought of death implicit in this moment that eventually kills Milly, I would like to suggest that Milly’s illness and, yes, even her subsequent death, actually represent her concerted and ultimately successful effort to defy the death posed by her apotheosis.

The following day Kate accompanies Milly to Sir Luke Strett. But rather than diagnosing her, the doctor simply suggests rather gnomically that her survival will depend upon her "taking the trouble to live" (154). Then, after her second visit to Strett, Milly embarks upon her famous existential wandering through Regent’s Park where she muses upon how, having approached the doctor for something firm to stand on, he has left her with a heightened sense of what she calls the "grey immensity" of life and of what it means. The meeting with Sir Luke, in other words, forces her once again to confront the idea of death. However, the difference between this and her apotheosis at Matcham is that this time Sir Luke has supplied her with "some queer defensive weapon" (152). What is this "weapon"? Although Milly, like most critics, understands the doctor as referring to the question of will, that is, of volition, using the archaic form of the verb “to want,” Sir Luke’s formula “she could live if she would“ can also be understood as a question concerning her desire. In effect, Sir Luke intimates to Milly that, in order to survive her confrontation with death, she must find something or someone to love, thereby countering her traumatic apotheosis with an open question whose Freudian overtones are unmistakable: what, as a woman, does she want?

The mystery surrounding Milly’s illness thus begins to clear once we realize that it is precisely in order to be able to keep living in the face of the knowledge of death that Milly becomes "ill." Instead of surrendering to her apotheosis, Milly vows to fight by interposing something between herself and her knowledge of her mortality. This something is the question Sir Luke has supplied her with, the question of her desire. Now, how does desire ward off death? As Scheherezade of the Arabian Nights discovered long ago, desire defers death by substituting dissatisfaction in its place. Desire rearranges a deadlock into a temporal series whose primary characteristic is persistent failure. But this failure is precisely what keeps the desiring subject alive: the perpetual dissatisfaction of desire maintains the fantasy that complete satisfaction (which is of course nothing other than death) will eventually be attained, but just not yet. By becoming ill, or, as I might as well now say, becoming hysterical (that is, a desiring subject) Milly embarks on the tortuous pathways of desire that, for as long as it remains unsatisfied, defends her against her apotheosis. The problem of course is that Milly no more knows the answer to Sir Luke’s question than did any of Freud’s patients. What does she do then? Like any good hysteric, she turns to another woman, Kate, to learn the truth about her desire. Kate will show her what and how a woman desires. But first she must find out what it is that Kate wants.

It is at this moment that what I am calling Kate’s ethical role comes into play in the novel. The next scene has Kate rushing back to Milly’s hotel to find out the news of her doctor’s visit. Milly hears a great clatter outside and steps onto the balcony to watch Kate alighting from her cab and who, in the process of paying and waiting for her change, sees Milly with whom she exchanges a series of nods and waves, but not without Milly once more having the peculiar sense of seeing her friend through Densher’s eyes.

Just so was how she looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her. . . . It lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting it produced an effect. . . . The first was that it struck our young woman as absurd to say that a girl’s looking so to a man could possibly be without connexions; and the second was that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connexion it must have for herself. (157-8)

Identifying with Densher, Milly discovers in a flash who it is that Kate desires and the immediate result of this knowledge is to hold back from Kate the details of her visit to Sir Luke: "’You mean you’ve been absurd? ’Absurd.’ It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done something for her safety" (158).

Two points need to be made here. The first is that, although at this moment Milly intuits the meaning of Kate’s look as signifying her desire for Densher, she spends the rest of the novel trying to test this knowledge against what Kate and everyone else tell her. The difference can be described as that between knowledge and belief. Although she knows from this point on that Kate and Densher are lovers (an unconscious knowledge upon which she constructs her own mimetic desire for Densher), Milly believes Kate’s denials insofar as they give her the freedom to embark upon her own path of unsatisfied desire in her romance with her friend‘s fiancé. Secondly, this flash of insight provides Milly with an understanding of how desire organizes itself around prohibition. Comprehending, finally, the meaning of their joint refusal to acknowledge Densher to one another, Milly intuits how a prohibition has the power to transform impossibility into deferred possibility. Refusing even to mention Densher‘s name enables Kate to retain the future prospect that they will eventually marry.

What does Milly do with this discovery? She immediately puts it to work by prohibiting Kate and the others from any mention of her illness. Why? Recall how the experience at Matcham was characterized by the fusion of Milly with the Bronzino portrait. Her apotheosis threatened to collapse the system of symbolic oppositions that are to keep her identity as a subject distinct from the object world, resulting in the unbearable and traumatic thought of her own death as the ultimate end-point of all individual, social, indeed, representational differentiation. Now, however, with Kate’s lesson in hand, Milly discovers that representation itself provides a certain defence which can be mobilised against this threat by converting the unrepresentable – death by apotheosis – into the much more manageable unnameable. The moment Milly refuses to allow Kate and her friends to say what is wrong with her, she generates a liberating space within language that allows her to try on the various names her friends supply her with, the princess, the dove, the American girl, yet without ever being fully defined by them. As the “symptoms“ of her hysteria, these metaphors give Milly partial representation even while they seem deliberately to point to themselves as being peculiarly insufficient to describe her. These metaphors thus perform the same kind of double function as the hysterical symptom which similarly both conceals and reveals its hidden message about desire. Generating metaphors through her constant demand that her friends tell her who and what she is – “Why do you say such things to me?“ (171) she asks Kate early on, who am I, what do you take me for? – Milly creates the conditions that will enable her to keep living in the face of the threat of death: by holding out the possibility that there really is a name that would adequately describe her, but just has not yet been found. Because, as an hysterical subject, Milly’s dissatisfaction is constitutive, because there is always something which escapes every one of her friends’ attempts to name her, Milly avoids becoming trapped by their names, at least for as long as something remains outside the representational system that cannot be said.

What is this something? To understand this we need to return to the question of Kate‘s and Milly’s desire. Although the mimetic nature of Milly’s relationship with Kate recalls René Girard’s formulation of the triangular structure of desire, it is important to note the difference between Girard and the James here. In Girard, desire is structured around an object which the subject perceives to be desired by another. In James, however, as I suggested earlier, there is a fundamental split between what Milly, at least unconsciously, knows is Kate’s desire, and her belief in Kate’s and the others’ denials. Thus whereas the Girardian subject imitates the other by copying its desire, James’s subject, Milly, does not fully know what the other (Kate) wants. Until her traumatic illumination by Lord Mark, Milly remains ignorant of the full truth of Kate’s desire. And it is this question, this lack of knowledge as to what Kate really wants (which is also the question of what her, Milly’s, own value is for Kate, that is, what it is that Kate wants from Milly) that can be said to sustain Milly’s life. Once her question has been answered, once she discovers the truth about Kate’s relationship with Densher, her entire fantasmatic structure dissolves. What keeps her alive, in other words, is not Densher’s love, as the sentimental reading of the novel would have it. It seems clear that on this score Densher’s overtures towards Milly were less than convincing, and it would take a character with considerably less of the “wisdom of the serpent” (141) not to see through the impression he makes which Kate describes as “a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for his pains” (280). What keeps Milly alive, rather, is the open question of Kate’s desire which, so long as it remains at least partially unknown, maintains Milly on her own endlessly dissatisfied, torturous pathways that keep her from answering Sir Luke‘s question of what it is, as a woman, she wants.

Now we can understand why Lord Mark’s avowal of Kate’s and Densher’s engagement was so damaging to Milly. Lord Mark didn’t tell Milly anything she didn’t already know, but he collapsed the distance between her knowledge and her belief, cutting through the sustaining barrier that prevented Milly from learning the full truth of her value for Kate; his avowal, in effect, halts the productive generation of new names by confirming her identity as one thing, as an object. It is this, rather than any romantic disappointment with Densher, or a belated discovery of the evil in the world, that results in Milly’s decline: Milly’s collapse comes about from having the last barrier between her and the truth of Kate’s desire removed. Now instead of generating new and life-sustaining failures manifested by her linguistic symptoms, her metaphors, Milly suddenly finds herself trapped within the very language that had originally given her the power to resist her apotheosis. With the collapse of the barrier between her and the truth of Kate’s desire, language clangs shut on her, like the door of a birdcage, trapping and reifying her.

What happens next? Retreating to Venice, Milly famously “turn[s] her face to the wall” and dies. How do we interpret this act? The obvious, sentimental, answer (Densher’s) is of course to say that once Milly discovers the truth of Kate and Densher’s relationship, she loses her will to live. Still utterly failing to comprehend what has happened, Densher tells Kate “‘One can see now that she was living by will’” (357). What Densher fails to realize is that it is Milly’s death, rather, that represents her final act of will. Now, it might seem paradoxical to fight death, as Milly does, with death. For didn’t I argue that her entire desiring structure was inaugurated against the threat of death represented by her apotheosis? But a willing death, it seems for James, is quite different from the death that lies in wait for Milly in the collapse of all symbolic oppositions, the death by apotheosis. By willing death in this way, Milly in effect dies in order to “keep dreaming,” to maintain the fantasy that has sustained her as a desiring subject. Milly’s death thus recalls, albeit inversely, the dream Freud recounts of the father whose child cries out that he is burning. In the Freudian dream, the father wakes up, in order to continue dreaming, that is, in order to avoid the traumatic confrontation expressed by the child’s cries. Milly, in reverse, dies to avoid waking up; she dies in order to sustain the desiring fantasy that keeps her from being wholly swallowed up by the representational system. Her “hysterical” solution, then, is nothing but a cleaving to the sustaining barrier that prevents us from ever achieving the full realization of desire. Milly’s death is thus, in Lacan’s very precise sense, an ethical death, a death died in accordance with desire. And as it turns out, Milly’s death does indeed have the effect that she willed. For in addition to persuading a skeptical Lord Mark during those brief moments before the crisis in Venice that there is nothing between Kate and Densher, Milly’s final act ultimately keeps open the question of Kate’s desire. By the end of the novel, as we know, Kate’s and Densher’s relationship has so far deteriorated that, as Kate departs from Densher’s lodgings, we are left, famously, with the question of what Kate is going to do. From this perspective, Milly’s act has been a resounding success: we no longer know what it is that Kate wants.[2]

In contrast, then, to readings that see the novel primarily in terms of Densher’s ethical transformation, I have argued that, whatever else one might wish to accuse Kate of, she must at least be credited with showing Milly a productive way out of the deadlock represented by her apotheosis. To this extent, she must be thought of as being ethically much closer to her friend than to Densher whose failure at the end to accept Milly‘s gift merely reasserts the novel’s earlier bargaining principle that transforms individuals into objects of exchange. Dedicating themselves to desire, on the other hand, Kate and Milly display an ethical fidelity to what lies beyond the reciprocal cycle of exchange, to something that is unamortizable within the symbolic economy, namely, the unanswered and unanswerable question of what woman wants.