Illness as Capital in The Wings of the Dove

Year 2014, Issue: 40, 75 - 94, 01.10.2014

Wibke Schniedermann

Abstract

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

Keywords

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale, symbolic capital, symbolic power

References

• Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Print.
• ---. The Logic of Practice. 1980. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print.
• ---. Masculine Domination. 1998. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Print.
• ---. Pascalian Meditations. 1997. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.
• ---. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. 1994. Trans. Randal Johnson et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
• ---. “Der schöne Geschmack. Zur Prosa von Virginia Woolf.” Liber [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Literary Supplement] No. 1 (Oct. 1989): 13-15. Print.
• ---. Sociology in Question. 1984. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage, 1993. Print.
• Byrne, Katherine. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
• Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print.
• Conger, Syndy McMillen. “The Admirable Villains in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.” Arizona Quarterly 27.2 (1971): 151–60. Print.
• Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. New York: Feminist, 1993. Print.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 3. 2nd Ser. Cambridge: Riverside, 1904. Print.
• Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
• James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove. 1902. Ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.
• Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. Print.
• Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. Print.
• Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, 1977. Print.
• Spunt, Nicola Ivy. “Pathological Commodification, Contagious Impressions, and Dead Metaphors: Undiagnosing Consumption in The Wings of the Dove.” Henry James Review 34.2 (2013): 163-82. Print.
• Voirol, Olivier. “Reconnaissance et méconnaissance: sur la théorie de la violence symbolique.” Social Science Information 43.3 (2004): 403- 33. Print.
• Wakana, Maya Higashi. “Society in Self, Self in Society: Survival in The Wings of the Dove.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47.1 (2005): 31-60. Print.
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: CRW, 2004. Print.