Authoring "the real thing": Influence, Impressibility, and The Wings of the Dove's Queer Style

Abstract

Abstract:Except for The Bostonians little scholarship focuses on women's homoerotic desire in Henry James's fiction. This article responds by reappraising The Wings of the Dove's much-discussed queerness. While most interpretations emphasize Lionel Croy's unspeakability or Susan Stringham's homosexual panic, this paper locates queerness in Wings's seductive entanglement of influence and impressibility—an entanglement that indexes female-female desire. Reading Wings in this way reveals that powerful attachments between women occupy such a place of centrality in James's fiction that to overlook them is to overlook a crucial aspect of the nuanced representation of sexuality critics have traced across his oeuvre.