Illness as Capital in The Wings of the Dove

Milly Theale, the heroine of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove 1902 , gains a lot of power in the fictional reality of the novel, a power which relies on her financial wealth as well as her unnamed fatal illness. Critics usually see Milly’s character as either that of an innocent victim or that of a cunning manipulator. This article proposes to read Milly’s situation and her decisions as determined by her accumulation of different forms of capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term in order to move beyond this dichotomy and towards an understanding of the socio-psychological constraints of symbolic power at work in the novel. Since Milly’s money as well as her physical frailty contribute to her social eminence, both become sources of what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital on which depends the exercise of symbolic power. For capital to function as symbolic capital, its power-generating properties need to be denied. This article argues that Milly’s unnamed illness is one such misrecognized source of symbolic power. Tracing the process by which Milly is defined as socially deserving by other characters as well as the crisis-induced alteration of her self-image, this reading reveals the limitations that class and gender division impose on the self- perception of the novel’s characters. Focusing on the function of Milly’s illness and death, her final act of leaving her money to those who deceived her can then be read as an exertion of symbolic domination that works independently of allegedly conscious vengeful intentions