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eBook details

• Title: Political Context Re-Considered: Henry James and Marriage Reform in the Wings of the Dove (Critical Essay)
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2005
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 250 KB

Description

CRITICS CONCERNED TO MAP GENDER-BASED POWER RELATIONS within Henry James's The Wings of the Dove have tended to focus both on the courtship ritual involving Kate Croy and Merton Densher and on Kate's relationship with her father, Lionel Croy, and Maud Lowder. What has emerged from the various analytical approaches which have attempted to establish a correlation between historical context and The Wings of the Dove is a broad consensus that James's characters subvert or collapse the traditional categories of gender difference in Victorian society that prevented women from participating in the public sphere. That is, such critics suggest that Kate Croy and Maud Lowder ambiguously wield a social and economic authority within the novel that was denied to women living in Victorian society at the time of the novel's conception. The central weakness of this approach has been to treat context and the signifiers associated with it as stable and monolithic, devoid of the expression of individual contradictory political intention. For example, Millicent Bell begins her analysis of The Wings of The Dove by endeavouring to review "its precise reference to the social and economic world of the early twentieth century, a stratum of meaning to which its narrative language and formal design are closely attached" (291). Additionally, specific historical events of the economic market involving specific individuals are overlooked in favour of analyses based on practices of exchange. Bell, for example, demonstrates the ubiquity and pervasiveness of a rhetoric or language of exchange, which has a kind of levelling effect in terms of gender-based power relations within the novel. For Kate and Densher, Bell suggests, "their mutual love comes to constitute a commerce by which--Kate dealing with Densher, Densher with Kate--each can bend the other to his purpose" (294).

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