JAMESIAN LIE
69
or the fact itself shifts the orgaruzmg principle of the text from
the temporal logic of a character engaged in the story's movement
to the spatial perspective of a narrator who ignores his character's
time for the sake of his own designs. And the design has inspirations
of its own: we see
it
spilling over the character's consciousness in
all those passages where the narrator tells us what his center
"might have thought." Most important, the potential thought
has
as great a propelling force as the actual thought. In fact, the
dis–
tinction between the potential and the actual is superficial, and the
narrative hunger for meanings in
The Wings of the Dove
produces
plot; speculation is not simply about events but also promotes them.
This displacement of the drama from the characters' lives to
the narrator's mind
has
its most serious consequence in Densher's
relation to Milly and in James's attitude toward that relation. The
sophistry in which Densher must indulge so strenuously in order to
justify his continuing to deceive Milly could strike us as exemplary
proof of the Jamesian moral sense gone awry. James, whose center–
of-consciousness method leaves an ample margin for ironic com–
ment, is strikingly tolerant of Densher's self-righteous conclusion
that he's behaving decently toward Milly simply by remaining per–
fectly still and refusing to lie with his lips (a strategy which serves
Kate's plans beautifully). But, more interestingly, the tortuous moral
arguments by which Densher tries to justify his failure to act drama–
tize
an awkward transition from a novel of social relationships to
an allegory of spiritual appreciations. The importance of Milly as a
possibility
internal
to Densher makes James underplay the mur–
derous implications of his hero's treatment of her as a distinct human
being. And this community of consciousness is not, as Anderson
argues, due to James's use of emblems "rigidly determined" by an
allegorical int"ntion merely "expressed in, but not created by lan–
guage"; allegory is what happens dramatically in
The Wings of the
Dove.
Densher's flabby reasoning allows him to move from one
spiritual allegiance to another without ever disturbing the perfect
stillness of his being. Indeed, the very sequence of events
in
the
novel, especially in the
last
books, seems to be determined by the
development of Densher's surrender to the dovelike in human na–
ture. Everyone "lets him off": Lord Mark by delivering the fatal
blow to Milly, Sir Luke (who understands that Densher "had meant
