Invisible Illness

Abstract:This essay engages Henry James's claim that The Wings of the Dove represents the consciousness of a sick young woman. Criticism has tended to interpret Milly Theale's consciousness as unrelated to her physiology and her physiology as unrelated to her sickness. I approach the text as both a Jamesian scholar and a person familiar with ordinary illness to register her as ordinarily, concretely ill. In addition to illustrating how Milly's thought patterns are rendered distinct from those of her healthy friends, I reflect on the tensions presented by relying on experience to generate textual analysis. These tensions include the risk of treating literary characters as real people, the threat of sentimentalism, and the suggestion of disability as psychologically rather than socially situated.