59 pages • 1-hour read
The Wings of the Dove
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Parts 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of terminal illness and death.
Part 1: “Book First” - Part 2: “Book Second”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Kate Croy is a beautiful, clever young woman with a tragic past. Her mother and two brothers have died. Her sister, Marian Condrip, is widowed with four children. Her father, Lionel Croy, a consummate narcissist and pathological liar, has committed an unnamed terrible deed and been cast out of polite society. After her mother’s death, Kate is taken in by a wealthy aunt, Maud Lowder. However, Aunt Maud will only support Kate if she agrees to cut off all contact with her dissolute father. At the opening of The Wings of the Dove, Kate is in her father’s shabby apartment to discuss these arrangements. He keeps her waiting by pretending to be sick. When he finally appears, Kate tells him that if he wants her in his life, she will reject Aunt Maud’s terms. However, her father refuses. He thinks that Aunt Maud will ensure Kate will marry a rich man, at which point he can come back into Kate’s life and take advantage of her newfound wealth. He intimates to Kate that he has heard she has been seeing a poor man, and he chastises her for this unsound judgment.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Kate is in her room in her aunt’s “tall rich heavy house at Lancaster Gate” (39). She can sense her aunt’s presence downstairs. Her Aunt Maud is a wealthy, formidable woman who is accustomed to imposing her will on the world through the sheer force of her immense fortune. Kate, having grown up in precarious circumstances, is forced to admit to herself that she has grown to like the fine things that come with living in such a grand home.
The day after her visit with her father, Kate seeks advice from Marian, a relatively poor widow with four children, but her sister brushes off Kate’s concerns about the arrangement. She tells Kate to do whatever Aunt Maud says, because Marian expects her sister’s financial support as well. Marian tells Kate to agree to Aunt Maud’s “match[ing]” her with a titled man like Lord Mark, even though Kate is in love with the middle-class and rakish Merton Densher.
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
Densher is a newspaper writer who styles himself as a gentleman of leisure by going for walks in Kensington Gardens in the middle of the afternoon, even though he has to work late into the evening to keep up with his work and the pretense. He is tall and slightly awkward but charming. Kate and Densher meet in the Gardens in the afternoon to talk.
Densher and Kate first met at a party several months ago and had immediately felt a spark between them. Kate’s mother died soon after, and Densher and Kate lost touch. Six months later, they ran into each other on the London Underground and quickly reconnected. Since that time, they have seen each other regularly.
After speaking with her father, Kate had reasoned that if her father knew of the association between herself and Densher, Aunt Maud was no doubt aware as well. Kate warns Densher that Aunt Maud will soon ask him what his intentions are. She worries Aunt Maud will not approve of their match because Densher is not wealthy. Kate tells Densher that her father and sister have both encouraged her to follow Aunt Maud’s directions and marry someone wealthy.
Densher boldly proposes they elope, but Kate tells him to speak to Aunt Maud first.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
Soon after, Aunt Maud sends Densher a telegram and asks him to come see her at her house, Lancaster Gate. Densher arrives at the house, and Aunt Maud keeps him waiting for at least 15 minutes. Densher assumes this is a power play, as she had told him what time to come visit and then kept him waiting in the ornately and richly decorated drawing room. While he waits, Densher is overwhelmed by obvious displays of wealth in the room, and he’s forced to consider his own poverty in comparison.
Finally, Aunt Maud appears, but the conversation does not go as Densher expects. She does not make any categorical demands, like stating that Densher is not good enough for her niece or that he cannot see Kate. Instead, she tells him that she likes him, but she wonders “was he good enough—by his own measure?” (81)
Soon after the meeting with Aunt Maud, Densher’s boss proposes that Densher go to the United States for four or five months to do a series of society reports. Densher is too junior to refuse the offer. Kate takes the news of Densher’s departure well. They agree to write to each other regularly and confess their love to one another. Densher proposes marriage, and Kate accepts. They are secretly engaged to be married, although Kate states she will tell Aunt Maud about the engagement if Aunt Maud asks her directly.
Parts 1-2 Analysis
The first two books, or parts, of The Wings of the Dove, set up a narrative that deploys many of the conventions of sentimental 19th-century realist novels (which depict ordinary characters in their everyday lives) or Naturalist novel (which convey realistic plots through a scientific or observational lens) to subvert and systematically dismantle them.
Books First and Second establish a classic “marriage plot”—a typical 19th-century narrative in which two people are in love, but must confront obstacles to their marriage. Often, though not always, these obstacles are due to the differences in their class or circumstances. Well-known examples of the marriage plot include Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811) and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1876). In James’s novel, Kate is a classic English rose who comes from a wealthy family that has lost its fortune. She’s expected by her aunt to marry the titled Lord Mark to provide social mobility for her family. In return, she can expect to inherit her childless aunt’s fortune, cementing her own fortune and future. As the novel opens, Densher’s poverty and lack of title provide the primary obstacles to their union, establishing the stakes of the narrative: If they marry, they will be penniless. The question of whether Kate and Densher will be able to overcome this obstacle to marry for love provides the plot with its narrative engine—a central conflict that will remain unresolved and ambiguous up to the final page of The Wings of the Dove, defying the convention of the marriage plot and preventing the emotional catharsis readers expect from the neat endings of marriage plot novels, whether happy or tragic.
Traditionally, 19th-century fictional literature, even when classified as realist or Naturalist, foregrounds emotional events like death and illness for heightened dramatic emphasis and pathos. In The Wings of the Dove, James subverts these expectations of sentimentality. For example, when Kate reflects upon her mother’s recent death, convention would call for a weepy scene with Kate at her mother’s bedside as she dies. Instead, James describes Kate’s realization that “she had almost liked, in these weeks, what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother, the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister […]” (42). Not only have these tragic events occurred prior to the events depicted in the novel, but Kate takes them in with a cold lack of sentimentality, as problems to be solved rather than tragedies to be mourned, positioning her as an atypical character.
James’s silence around the exact nature of the cause of Kate’s mother’s death and the details of her father’s iniquities in these early chapters points to his thematic exploration of Indirect Communication Through Implication, Insinuation, and Silence, which will be developed throughout the work both in narrative and form. The 1997 film version of The Wings of the Dove starring Helena Bonham Carter posits that Lionel Croy is addicted to heroin; this reading is broadly supported by the text, as Lionel Croy claims he had recently been “to the chemist’s [pharmacist]” (27) and Kate later describes him as having taken to bed, despite not truly being “ill.” The need to read between the lines to understand what is going on is a necessity for the characters within the work, whose actions and words are governed by the accepted conventions of their time.
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