ABSTRACT
Like many of Thomas Mann's early artist figures, Hanno Buddenbrook is torn between a mother and a father who appear to represent art and Philistinism, respectively. Writing on Sophocles' Philoctetes, Edmund Wilson suggests that the bowman's "wound" is inseparable from the magic of his "bow" and that in Sophocles' tragedy disease enables those who suffer to create "superhuman art." According to John Carlos Rowe, in The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale is subjected to "pressure" by the other characters who all seek "to give an immediate iconographic significance." The reader's interpretive judgement of Buddenbrooks and The Wings of the Dove also finally depends on his letting his imagination fill out and refine the absences in the text. Fundamentally, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove reflect their authors' profound concern with the complex problems originating in the perception of a close relationship between art and disease.
