Missing what was true:
Problems of Seeing and Knowing in
Henry James’s 'The Wings of the Dove'
Jill Boswell
 

In the first of this occasional series, Jill Boswell, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, makes use of some Kleinian ideas in a study of one of Henry James' novels.
 

My title is taken from the reflection of Kate Croy, as she prepares to meet her father. She is certain he intends to make use of her in some way, and she thinks: " there was no truth in him. This was the weariness of every fresh meeting; he dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him. The inconvenience as always happens in such cases was not that you minded what was false, but that you missed what was true."(1) For Kate, the pain of her relationship with her father is not, I think, simply because of his lies, but because of his impenetrable plausibility. He is an isolated, shadowy figure, and never to be seen in the context of other relationships. This makes him one-dimensional to the reader, but I think James is also making a point about him as a father who has become detached from any good or truthful relationship. Kate senses in him an absence of internal links both past and current, and she can have no trust in anything he says.

James’s late masterpieces, of which The Wings of the Dove is one, offer particular difficulties to the reader. The one I want to highlight here, which I think is also relevant to Kate’s problem, is his "point of view" technique, that of presenting the action through the consciousness of only one character at any time. We are not told directly what other characters think, or how they see the protagonist of the moment. So in this scene, he shows us Kate's bitter contempt for her father - for his failure in life, his lack of honour, his cynicism in his dealings even with his wife while she lived and now with herself and her sister. We can never deepen or refine our judgement of him because we never get a different perspective. At the same time, we cannot be sure of Kate’s intentions, and whether what she says to him is sincere. Is she really prepared, as she claims, to sacrifice the brilliant prospects offered her by wealthy Aunt Maud, instead to live in poverty with her disgraced and outcast father? We know that James’s characters frequently deceive themselves as well as others, and since he makes almost no use of the "author's voice", he seldom gives us the privilege of knowing more than they do. Instead we are obliged to build gradually as we read, putting things together however imperfectly, and in a state of ignorance and even frustration. It’s not only facts that are hard to be sure of, it is the constant moral uncertainty: who is lying, who telling the truth? No one can be depended upon, and finding that, like Kate, we keep "missing what is true", we long for some reliable, objective help from our author. The salient difference between Kate’s father and Henry James as author is, of course, that though James too can seem impenetrable, in reality his vision is both multi-dimensional and profound.

Central to this is his use of irony. Not to be confused with satire or superior knowingness, irony is integral to his technique, for it constantly implies that another point of view exists, without stating what it is. Thus, nothing is to be taken at face value. Instead of being told what to think, we are forced to engage with the characters’ moral dilemmas as these slowly emerge through the constant interplay of perspectives as they endlessly talk to each other and reflect on their experience.

The principle of differing perspectives is perhaps embodied most convincingly for psychoanalysts in the theory of the Oedipus Complex, with its twin emphases on differentiation - as to gender and as between generations - and on relationships within the family. The theory assumes in everyone, regardless of actual family circumstances, a deep, unconscious and always conflictual engagement with the internal constellation of the oedipal triangle - that which separates, yet joins, the child and the parents. I shall suggest that this predicament is a central theme of The Wings of the Dove. But further, I think that reflecting on it helps us to appreciate James’s work, because he consigns us repeatedly to the position of the outsider, of the child as it were, curious, ignorant and frustrated, and having to develop our ability to read - and constantly re-read - situations by means of the shifting perspectives which are all we are offered.

Ronald Britton’s work (1985, 1996)(2) on the Oedipal situation has particularly interesting implications for this question of perspectives. He reminds us of the importance, for a child, of recognising and accepting that the parents have a sexual relationship which excludes itself. “If the link between the parents perceived in love and hate can be tolerated in the child’s mind, it provides him with a prototype for an object relationship of a third kind in which he is a witness and not a participant. A third position then comes into existence from which object relationships can be observed. Given this, we can also envisage being observed.”

Here witnessing is seen as an essential step in learning about a reality outside the self. From observing a relationship that is not our own grows the idea of being observed, in turn, by a mind that is not our own. I take it that the capacity to conceive of other dimensions or perspectives, is linked with this. What he calls the “gaze of the father”, who is experienced as observing the child with its mother, symbolises for Britton an essential element in the development of objectivity in a child’s thinking about itself and about the world. I think he is saying that the self-consciousness that arises out of being observed, initially with the mother, is an inseparable part of the Oedipal situation. Britton draws our attention to the significance of being observed by someone involved but temporarily excluded; over time the three participants in the oedipal triangle will shift roles continually but without rupturing the essential structure. This permits a growing recognition of the objective “facts of life” of procreation, and of the world of relationships through which we connect internal to external. Britton applies this insight to clinical problems in analysis, but I want to make use of it in discussing an oedipal theme in this novel. (3, 4)


The Characters
In the opening scene, Kate’s relationship with her father introduces an oedipal relationship full of mistrust and deception. Here she rejects his dishonest plan to get hold of her Aunt Maud's money, but later she develops a far more cold-blooded plot of her own, when she meets Milly Theale, a young, brilliant but mortally ill American heiress who is touring Europe, then arrives in London and is taken up by Kate and her circle. Kate, beautiful, accomplished and intelligent, and burning with ambition to live in suitably grand style, is penniless; in the course of the novel she will befriend, use and lie to Milly. The plan is that Kate’s own fiancé, journalist Merton Densher (who is as poor as herself) shall court and marry Milly so as to inherit her enormous fortune. After Milly’s death the lovers will marry.

Kate’s first appearance in the novel shows her in a situation of artifice and ambiguity, foreshadowing her dealings with Milly, with Aunt Maud and with Densher himself. By contrast, our first sight of Milly is of a solitary figure perched on a rock in the Swiss Alps. She is gazing out into the abyss. In fact, she is being observed, by her older companion and friend Susan Stringham. Susan senses a hint of suicide in Milly, but also a suggestion of grandiosity. "She was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth", thinks Susan, "Was she choosing among them or did she want them all?"(5) Milly has taken up a position symbolically precarious for she suspects already that she is dying yet also commanding for she is an "American girl", that special James character, "heir of all the ages"(6), free, adventurous and, in Milly's case, also enormously wealthy - but desperately vulnerable.

In this rich and complex novel there are many themes one could pursue. I have chosen to focus mainly on Milly: her ordeal in having to face death before she has really lived, and her second predicament, which somehow becomes enmeshed with it: her involvement in Kate and Densher's relationship. Milly's struggle with these two issues is presented repeatedly through visual imagery, and in particular, through significant moments when she observes, and is observed by, others.

In London
After the scene in the Alps Milly tells Susan she wants to cut short their tour and go straight to London, both to see a doctor and to surround herself with people. Susan decides to look up an old schoolfriend, Maud Lowder, none other than Kate Croy's Aunt Maud. This rich and forceful lady, a childless widow, has high social aspirations which she hopes to further by adopting Kate and arranging a splendid marriage for her. It will involve detaching her from Merton Densher, a clever young man but a social nonentity, who is temporarily in America on an assignment for his paper. Aunt Maud has her eye on Lord Mark as a husband for Kate. He is aristocratic and suitably in need of money. But Kate is discouraging. Lord Mark quickly realises that Milly would be an even better catch, but he is touched by her naivety, and at their first meeting warns her about the predatory nature of fashionable London society, and Mrs Lowder's circle in particular: "Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing."(7)

Kate and Milly become friends, but soon, each is aware that the other has troubles she doesn't speak of. Kate's is principally her romantic but problematic engagement to Densher. Milly hears about it through Aunt Maud. This presents Milly with a new problem, for she has met Densher in New York, and is secretly in love with him.

Meanwhile Aunt Maud, pursuing her own plans to part the lovers, decides to bring Milly and Densher together. She persuades Susan to tell Milly that Kate doesn't really care for Densher; she is only being kind to him. Susan cooperates, although she knows it is not true. Her only desire is that Milly, her princess, should have what she wants whatever the cost.

Gradually a network of lies and deceptions spreads among all the characters, enmeshing them and often confusing the reader. Kate's blatantly self serving scheme, into which she gradually draws the compliant Densher, is only the most crude. A careful reading of the novel shows that Milly, who is highly intelligent and perceptive, is never really deceived. On the contrary: she too, with great subtlety, manipulates everyone around her into keeping silent on the very facts on which Kate's "plot" is based, namely, her own illness and her feelings for Densher. James tells us in his Preface that they will all be drawn in to Milly's tragedy "as by some pool of a Lorelei .. terrified and tempted and charmed".(8) Each for his or her own motives is willing to comply with the deceit. His implication is that her fate will engulf them all.

Once Milly has learned of Kate's secret relationship, she reads Kate's face in a new way: it becomes for her "a face on which Mr Densher's eyes had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather more beautifully than less, into his". The idea of their gazing so "beautifully" at each other takes hold of her: she now sees this aspect of Kate as "the 'other', the not wholly calculable ...... it had abruptly become for Milly the thing"(9) about her friend. The inarticulate and fragmented quality of Milly's thought here reflects, I think, her shock at having to face that these two people, both highly significant to her, are a couple. Kate suddenly looks different to her, "other" and unknown. There is a suggestion that Milly's attachment to Kate is already both intense and possessive, almost childlike.

In a complex passage, Milly goes on to reflect that she is not merely being pushed out, but placed "on the edge of a great darkness". Now the two women can never be close there is "a sort of failure of common terms". Kate could never concern herself with "such a one as Milly Theale"; in particular, she could not be expected to notice how ill she is. It seems that, although Milly has kept her illness secret from Kate, she has felt they could still be close. It is the discovery of Kate's relationship with Densher, a kind of betrayal, that pushes her out on to the edge of the "great darkness". Her exclusion, with its clear oedipal overtones, then amounts to being left to die. Kate, experienced as a maternal figure, won't even notice this when she and Densher are gazing at each other. For Milly, we know, the terror of death is both current and realistic. The emptiness of her life, related to the fact that her family are all dead, would contribute to the hold that death has on her mind. For her, oedipal exclusion, with the envy and jealousy it arouses, appears unbearable or even catastrophic.

Here I want to return for a moment to Britton’s work on the Oedipus Complex. He uses the image of the Oedipal triangle to show the structure of various links between the child and its parents. This is essentially a visual image, and as I said earlier, he conceives of the links as observations: of the parents’ sexual relationship, by the excluded child, or of its own relationship with each parent, by the other parent. Thus, the sides of the triangle are constructed from the various sightlines, so to speak. The developing recognition of this structure by the child results in “closure of the triangle”, and, says Britton, this "provides a limiting boundary for the internal world". He is suggesting that it provides an imaginary mental space, within which the child can start to bring together its internal phantasy world with the "real" external world. It implies tolerating separateness from the mother, her relationship with the father, and the child's own powerfully ambivalent feelings towards them.

For Milly, as we have seen, observing the sexual relationship from which she is excluded seems immediately linked to disaster. She sees them but believes Kate no longer sees her: there appears to her to be no link from the couple to herself. They see only each other, she is dead to them, and so death claims her.

Throughout for Milly, people either don’t see her predicament, or they are felt as observing her in a way that threatens her. Looks of kindness or pity are especially unwelcome to her. In terms of the theory I’ve been discussing, this would reflect her horror of observing or being observed, in the oedipal situation. But as the story develops, we start to recognise a fatal conjunction of this characteristic of hers, with the further reality she endures: the denial, hypocrisy and betrayal actually inflicted on her by others. Her desire to disown knowledge of her predicament - to “turn a blind eye”, as John Steiner (1985)(10) has called it - gives her an apparent ingenuousness which enables, almost encourages, the others to take advantage of her. I will try to show how this emerges in two important scenes presented through Milly’s consciousness.

The Portrait
First is the country house party where Lord Mark shows Milly the portrait by Bronzino which is said to resemble her. They are at Matcham, a splendid stately home, and she imagines the other guests are staring at her with "lingering kind eyes" as he takes her to view it deep within the great house. Looking at the portrait through tears, Milly in a famous passage recognises the likeness, "the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn ...a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness. ...The lady in question ... with 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".(11)

A moment later Kate enters the room with other guests, speaks to Lord Mark about the likeness, "And now she looked at Milly for whom again it was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes”. The others leave and Milly, alone with Kate and "the pale personage on the wall", feels "suddenly sunk in something quite intimate and humble" she feels ill. But Milly acknowledges to herself that really she collapses "to escape from something else", namely that look on Kate's face which she is more and more uncomfortably seeing at every meeting. "'Is it the way she looks to him?'", she asks herself. She asks to be taken home. Milly senses that her collapse is due to her envy of the couple; she tells herself it isn't their fault that she feels like this, and she impulsively confides in Kate to the extent of asking her to accompany her to see the doctor the next day. Briefly, this once, she allows Kate a caring role towards her.

In this scene, I think, we see Milly identifying with the woman in the portrait, grand but dead, and perhaps on that basis being able to grieve, until Kate appears. At once thoughts of her own death seem to join with unbearable envy and jealousy of the sexual couple. But James also emphasizes Kate's gaze, connecting it with the "kind eyes" of all the grand people who have gazed at Milly during the afternoon. We, the readers, will have inferred that the other guests were really avidly curious about the American heiress with her mysterious illness. Milly herself is sensing something in her environment that is only masquerading as kindness. We are left to wonder what Kate really thinks as she sees Milly in tears in front of the portrait.

Milly as "Dove"
Perhaps the decisive moment for Milly comes on the evening when she receives, from Kate, the title of "dove", in a supremely ironic exchange whose echoes will sound again in the last pages of the novel. In this scene the two older women, Maud and Susan, go out for the evening leaving the younger ones together. Before leaving, Aunt Maud takes Milly aside to ask if she will find out from Kate whether Merton Densher has returned from America. Milly prevaricates; she would prefer not to speak of him. Then she looks up and suddenly sees Kate framed in the window of the balcony on which she has been standing, "very handsome and upright, the outer dark framing in a highly favourable way her summery simplicities and lightnesses of dress. It was for several seconds again as if the total of [Kate's] identity had been that of the person known to [Densher]".(12) Sensing again (but more acutely) the sexual aliveness of Kate, Milly feels sure Densher has returned. Alone with Kate, she is again submissive to her friend, who talks animatedly all evening but says nothing about Densher, though (as we later learn) she really had met him on his return earlier in the day.

Kate's excitement is evident to Milly: she is "restless, charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory" and again, "almost avowedly performing for the pleasure of her hostess". Milly now sees clearly that she is being "dealt with handsomely, completely", and "listening, watching, admiring, collapsing", surrenders to Kate, who is again for her "the handsome girl", exhibitionistic and provocative.

For a moment, Kate herself seems more frank: the reader may surmise that her plan to use Milly is forming in her mind. She warns her not to trust any of them. The atmosphere changes: Milly feels menaced, "alone, with a creature who paced like a panther".
"’You may very well loathe me yet’”, says Kate.
"’Why do you say such things to me?’ She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. 'Because you're a dove.' With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said."
She thinks she will accept the name; "it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh wasn't she?"

It seems to me that Milly here has found her vocation: to appear helpless, fluttering and innocent. Being "a dove who could perch on a finger" while at the same time a “princess” to be treated with reserve and respect, may offer her a sort of disguise, a protection in an environment less and less to be trusted. This is borne out presently when Aunt Maud, now returned, asks her what she has learned about Densher. Milly gives her a "dovelike" answer, "and she gave it .... as earnest, as candid. 'I don't think, dear lady, he's here.' It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a dove." Maud gives her a look of deep criticism then, "'Oh, you exquisite thing!' The luscious innuendo of it, almost startling, lingered in the room ... like an oversweet fragrance." Milly sees it as "the extravagance of assent" - presumably, to her own mendacity. I believe she regards this moment as a triumph for her. The triumph will ultimately be consummated at or even perhaps by her death, when, as the lovers come to recognise, she will stretch out her wings - the wings of the title - to cover and so to control them, and effectively, in the end, to part them.

In this scene we seem to witness Milly's humiliation at the hands of Kate, culminating in the patronising "dove" epithet. It is Milly's clear, if unarticulated, perception of Kate as sexually aroused and the almost palpable presence of Densher in the room that seems to menace her. She feels forced to witness Kate's triumph. Kate's look of pity, her wincing, further shows her that her own hopeless situation is observed: the illness and her sexual defeat. Once more she appears to submit, but now by becoming this ambiguous creature, the dove. The Christian imagery of the kiss, the submission and the suggestion of ultimate transcendence, is handled with true Jamesian irony in a scene in which nothing is as it seems.

As her tragedy closes about her, Milly increasingly uses both her wealth and her imperious will, to sustain the illusion. She moves to Venice, and establishes herself in magnificent style in the Palazzo Leporelli. In its frescoed and echoing chambers, and in the glow of ever more candles, she holds court, although soon she is too weak to go out. Kate and Densher, who have followed her there, continue to plot.

The third scene I want to describe, takes place at Milly’s last evening appearance, when though clearly very ill, she appears in a wonderful white dress and adorned with a necklace of priceless pearls. We are reminded of the Bronzino portrait, the very great personage, with her “recorded jewels”. Kate and Densher - who have been pretending their relationship is at an end - nevertheless are to be seen talking earnestly together through most of the evening. They are sealing a bargain: Densher will propose to Milly, and in return Kate will visit him at his rooms where they will become lovers.

Densher still has scruples about deceiving Milly, whom he greatly likes. “I can but try,” he says to Kate, “ Only, you see, one has to try a little hard to propose to a dying girl.”

“She isn’t for you as if she’s dying.” replies Kate, knowing this is what he would rather believe. Densher realizes the influence Kate has on his thinking.

“There before him was the fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them, literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side, happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across to them in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time only a silence.”(Vol II Bk 8, ch 3)

This description is mediated through Densher, and we realise he knows that he is being manipulated and controlled by Kate. Her love for him, seen earlier as a transforming passion, has slowly degenerated into a ruthless need to dominate and possess. Gazing into Densher’s eyes she almost forces him to believe what she commands. We note the “perching” image, with its ironic link to the earlier “dove” scene. But here Kate is a bird of prey. As the pair look together at Milly, they see her candid smile, but her pearly teeth turn to the priceless pearls that Kate should be wearing, not Milly. “The value of her life” - which is all that Milly wants, and which she so desperately clings to, turns to “the essence of her wealth”, which is all the lovers want from her. So they at this moment know to the full their aim of plundering her wealth, and her very life, and momentarily they themselves are abashed by her gaze.

We do not doubt that Milly’s “candour” conceals her knowledge of their relationship and of their plot. It is perhaps the most chilling moment in the whole novel. Interestingly, just as Densher barely knows the hold Kate exercises over his thinking, Milly barely acknowledges what her eyes tell her. It will require a further intervention by Lord Mark to force her to face the truth: that Densher has never loved her; that he has been engaged to Kate all along. Milly now turns her face to the wall. Although she sees Densher once more before she dies, this is only to ask him to leave Venice.


Milly's Victory
Back in London, on the night of her death he receives a letter from her, but Kate in jealousy flings it, unopened, on the fire. This letter becomes an obsession with him. He will never know its contents, but he endlessly imagines them; and his fantasies are woven into a precious relic of her. "He left it behind him when he went out .. but came home the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child."

With this startling image James shows us, I believe, how Milly as dove has come to exercise a terrible and stifling power over Densher, and in so doing, destroy his sexual partnership with Kate. Her "stupendous" bequest to him is not so much her money, which he can refuse. More potent is the intrusion of this guilt laden memory of her, as if she had in truth become the child of the oedipal situation, excluded, betrayed and abandoned to death.

In discussing oedipal problems that stem from a failed relationship with the mother, Britton quotes Wilfred Bion's well-known work (1959) (14) on the maternal "container" the function of a mother who receives, contains and processes the child's unbearable and unknowable primitive experience. Bion gave as example an infant's fear of dying, which, without this processing by the mother, becomes "nameless dread". Milly's terror of the "great darkness" may reflect something of this. At the end of her life, Densher recognises that in fact no one has been willing to take in, and bear, the burden of her desperate feelings. He thinks, "It was a conspiracy of silence, as the cliche went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror; finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it."

This thought in The Wings of the Dove suggests a further development from the idea of the failed maternal “container”. I think it illustrates what may happen when a parental couple fail to establish a relationship together which can contain the child. In Britton's terms, they would be failing to maintain an oedipal structure which can hold in the face of determined onslaughts by a child desperate with terror, or with envy. This is foreshadowed in the opening scene when Kate knows that she misses what was true in her dealings with her own father, and connects it with the destruction of links within their family. He seems to offer her no sense of a relationship within himself based on love or trust. That she herself sees so clearly what she is missing, gives her a moral dimension throughout and for all her deceit and her ruthlessness, she is ultimately a sympathetic and a tragic figure.

Milly in a sense allows herself to be betrayed and abused through her unwillingness to trust and confide. There are hints that her own family had an element of delinquency in it. In the novel every relationship becomes more or less corrupted and the truth is ultimately seen as catastrophic.

I see James's “point of view” technique as central to this theme. As the drama develops, we sense the characters withdraw more and more from genuine interaction with one another. Even Kate and Densher become gradually alienated as the sinister atmosphere of deception and manipulation gathers force. James's genius compellingly reflects the pain and horror; more than that, I think he obliges us to share in it, not through his narrative but through a painful engagement with the fearful, self deceiving and conflicted consciousness of each of the characters. As Britton puts it, this involves “entertaining another point of view whilst retaining our own ... reflecting on ourselves while being ourselves.” I think reading James’s later novels always requires us to do this work. He declines to offer the specious comfort that somewhere, someone exists - the author for instance - who could offer the illusion of superior cognitive and moral knowledge. On the other hand, with the help of his steady - dare one say, paternal - gaze, we can bear the anxiety while being forced to look to our own internal “triangular space” for help with thinking, observing and placing ourselves within the complexity to which he exposes us.
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Note on the text: I have quoted from the Everyman edition of The Wings of the Dove, 1997, J.M. Dent, London. This is the text of the New York Edition of 1909, a revision by James of his first edition, of 1902.

Notes

1. Vol I Bk 1, ch 21
2. Britton, R. “The missing link” (1985) in The Oedipus Complex Today ed J. Steiner, London: Karnac Books
Belief and Imagination (1998) London: Routledge
3. Britton enriches the common view of object relations depending on “normal” projective identification or “mentalisation” (Fonagy & Target 1996) – in stressing the need for a more complex “third position”.
4. Fonagy, P and Target, M: Playing with reality: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol 77 pp 217-234.
5. Vol I Bk 3, ch 1
6. Preface to Wings of the Dove
7. Vol I Bk 4 ch 1. Lord Mark consistently acts as truth teller for Milly. He shows her things as they are; in particular he warns her from the first that Kate and Densher are in love.
8. Preface
9. Vol I Bk 4, ch 3
10. Steiner, J. (1985): “Turning a blind eye: the cover up for Oedipus” International Review of Psychoanalysis Vol 12, pp161-172
11. Vol I Bk 5, ch 2
12. Vol I Bk 5, ch 6
13. Vol II, Bk 8, ch 3
14. Bion, W. R.” Attacks on Linking” (1959) in Second Thoughts London: Heinemann. [Reprinted London: Karnac Books, Maresfield Library, 1984.]
15.Vol II Bk 10, ch 6
16. Vol II Bk 9, ch 4


I have not referred directly to any works of literary criticism in this paper. However, I have found the following particularly helpful:

Cameron, Sharon: Thinking in Henry James (1989) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Krook, Dorothea: The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (1962) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tanner, Tony: Henry James: Modern Judgements (1968): London, Macmillan.

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard: Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (1976) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Copyright © 2006The Melanie Klein Trust