ABSTRACT
More, perhaps, than any other novel by James, The Wings of the Dove takes as its most pervasive concern a fundamental premise of novelistic illusion - the desire to create a temporal replication of the world in a genre whose most striking characteristics in the nineteenth century are duration, continuation and revelation in time. All these are evident in the work of the novelists most allusively present in it - Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac and Hawthorne. By making the focus of his novel 'a young woman condemned to die under short respite' (AN, p. 288), James clearly forces his readers' attention onto a questioning of how events, identities, importantly bodily identities, can continue in time. This questioning is generically central to the novel as it preceded James's great and impassioned late achievements, its operation on the level of chronology, its use of the language of temporal duration to achieve the illusion that its characters are people with an historical reality who experienced events that actually happened, rather than figures who are arbitrarily invented regardless of plausibility or sequence. Through various rhetorical strategies, furthermore, the novel can force a reader already susceptible to this first kind of illusion to experience events from the perspective of any one physical sense. In James, this is predominantly and problematically sight, where he makes the reader understand in visual terms and to see, in a very literal sense, events from the point of view of any one character. The most celebrated instance of this, a discussion of which I approached in the first chapter, is the Lambinet sequence in The Ambassadors. Such static moments, where the novel attains almost to the condition of visual illusion, are, however, dependent for their impact on the first level of illusion, that of temporal duration. These two forms of historical and visual illusion can be said to mutually reinforce and recreate each other.
