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By Root 16282 0

” qualities, quickly captivates Maud, and is introduced into Maud’s London circle. Milly’s wealth, though she carries it gracefully, inevitably attracts attention. In the London scene of the day, wealth makes one “a great personage.” Maud and her friends treat Milly as such, although they also regard her as eccentric. Milly is sensitive enough to see that she is being patronized, and wishes she could escape from the stereotype. She especially wants to be respected by her new friend Kate and by Merton Densher (whom she had met in New York when he visited the city as a journalist). Milly sees that the Londoners she meets seem preoccupied with money, but she does not yet understand the deeper currents and plots being hatched around her. For the moment she is happy to be caught up in the excitement of London, in broadening her knowledge of the world (and her knowledge of herself). She is living more fully through her new friends.

Milly is a symbol of the innocent but thoughtful American guided by an innate idealism and an intuitive sense of what is right. Milly, like her country, is without a significant past to shape her identity, and is also without culture but is hungry to learn. In Kate, equally a creature of her circumstances, opposing qualities are represented: She is shrewd, knowing, a survivor by temperament and by necessity. She is driven by values forged within a framework of practical reality. Her values are purely exigent, and she is on the make because she has no other choice. In the general condition of fin-de-siècle England, Kate suffers both from too much history and from a radical uncertainty about the future. Kate’s family fortunes are on the wane (as England’s commercial fortunes, too, are under siege). Kate, living by her wits like other Londoners, faces a crumbling social order, still beset with vestiges of privilege, and a crass, cash-driven morality where money and competition reign. Although Wings is framed almost in mythic terms—the fair princess versus the Dark Lady, innocence against guile, America’s innate goodness against England’s expediential morality—James’s genius lies in his making the characters alive and concrete, palpably real as they interact and make their ways within the London scene, and never mere caricatures.

Milly is caught up almost immediately in a plan of Aunt Maud’s to detach Kate once and for all from the impoverished Densher. Maud finds out that Milly has met Densher in New York and quickly decides to try to link Milly with Densher—to her it is self-evident that any sensible man would be attracted to a woman of Milly’s wealth, along with the added bonus of Milly’s apparent pliability. Once attached to Milly, Densher would be moved to the periphery and Maud would be free to advance her plan to marry Kate to Lord Mark. As subterfuge, Maud advances the notion that Merton Densher is a “family friend.” Kate, who is in love with Densher, at first resents this move by her aunt, but soon enough realizes its potential uses for her own purposes. Gradually, with the twists and turns of real life, Kate’s own plot takes shape as a way to thwart her aunt. She will outsmart her aunt by adopting her aunt’s very plan.

Kate’s plan begins to take shape when she discovers that Milly may be seriously ill. The idea is that Kate will encourage Densher to be nice to Milly—she senses at once that Milly is attracted to him—and she will thus persuade Milly that there is nothing between Densher and herself. Milly will in due course fall in love with Densher, Kate believes, and want to marry him, which will result in Densher inheriting her fortune. By exploiting the dying girl’s desperate wish to find love, Kate will escape her aunt’s and Lord Mark’s clutches. She will have it all: the man she loves as her husband, Milly’s money, and her own freedom of action. Kate’s approach to life is epitomized by her comment to Densher in book second that “I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That ... is how I see myself