Peeling Back Whiteness: Neurasthenia in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

It was not Milly’s unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her—though certainly, as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted.”[1]

With her ardent quest for an identity-granting disease, Milly Theale, the heroine in Henry James’s 1903 novel The Wings of the Dove, embodies the ambiguous place of women in the neurasthenic discourse of whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Milly is sometimes seen as embodying the conflict between a colonial Europe and a more primordial America.[2] More materially, some critics have attempted to reach a clinical diagnosis for Milly’s “unpacified state.” Tuberculosis, cancer, and chlorosis are among the prevailing conjectures, but the idea that Europe could be the “American sedative,” coupled with the possibility that Milly might stage “some complicated drama of nerves,” suggests neurasthenia as a plausible cause (James, Wings, 83). Regarded both as modernity’s curse and as a national treasure by the neurologist George Beard, neurasthenia warrants, among the medical community in the late 1860s, “a trip to Europe.”[3] If the cure to her anxiety is not the nerve-calming Europe, then Milly’s incapacity does not allegorize the Beardian critique of American modernization. Instead, her victimized femininity furthers Elizabeth Allen’s reading of women’s paradigmatic function in James’s novels, as Milly seems to embody the lethal consequences of self-identification as a white American neurasthenic.[4] James’s critique of neurasthenia’s white logic models a method for tracking the ways whiteness finds refuge in masking itself through other properties of identity. 

The neurasthenic backdrop of The Wings of the Dove comes from James’s personal and the cultural experience. When he signed the contract for Wings in 1900, his brother William had just finished a third treatment at Bad Nauheim for neurasthenia. As Henry James began the manuscript in the summer of 1901, the convalescing William had just left Lamb House.[5] Beyond the references to nerves, Wings’s representation of Milly recalls the cultural conception of Beardian neurasthenia. In his 1881 monograph, American Nervousness, Beard reworks neurasthenia into a supremacy narrative, touting it as the “proof and result of the extravagance of [American] civilization,” resulting from “stress and agony and excitement.”[6] American becomes Beard’s shorthand for a particular white identity: the male upper-middle-class brain-worker. “North American Indians, Indians of the Americas, and negroes” do not qualify for this national trait (Beard, American Nervousness, 118, 131, 188–89). Beard’s scientific tone as he investigates why these “savages or semi-savages” are impervious to neurasthenia only thinly masks his racialized reinterpretations of the disease.

Milly is James’s specific embodiment of the Beardian white neurasthenic. Calling her “one of the finest, one of the rarest, cases of American intensity,” James mirrors Beard’s nationalist logic (James, Wings, 83). And yet she is not the driving force of white/American modernization, capable of making “original, creative, pioneering, and productive” contributions, because women feature in Beard’s taxonomy only superficially (American Nervousness, viii). As an embodiment of “phenomenal beauty,” Beard’s female neurasthenic is also “thin, angular, stooping, anxious, [and] pale” (65, 338). James’s portrayal of Milly as “slim, constantly pale, delicately haggard, anomalous, agreeably angular” aestheticizes Beard’s representation (338). Despite her dove-like temperament, Milly is not the weary neurasthenic depicted by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” With “too much” forehead, nose, and mouth—a description that can signify as racializing—Milly is even more tangential to the white male discourse of neurasthenia (James, Wings). Milly, with her debatable beauty, is less white. Her pursuit of illness as “something firm to stand on” springs less from her desire for “unprecedented beauty” than from aspirations to a status from which she is axiomatically excluded by gender: fully white American (James, Wings).

Milly’s pursuit of a diseased identity encapsulates her faith in neurasthenia as metonymic of full white/American-ness. Despite her upper-class status, Milly needs a diseased identity to reclaim herself as white/American, which speaks to the power of the neurasthenic discourse as raced, classed, and gendered. David Schuster recounts patients “approach[ing] physicians with the intention of being diagnosed with neurasthenia,” which he takes as evidence for the power of literary suggestion.[7] But Milly’s resort to self-diagnosis may not be a result of voracious reading, the forgotten Tauchnitz volume being an example. Rather, it is neurasthenia’s close association with a masculinized, raced, and classed whiteness that enables its more widespread ideological purchase. Like the patients described by Schuster, Milly hopes the diagnosis of neurasthenia will bring other white privileges, privileges that might allow her to overcome her gendered limitation.

The phantasmic nature of whiteness, however, also enables James’s and Milly’s parodic de-reification of white male privilege. Unable to capitalize on her illness as a shortcut to whiteness, Milly deconstructs the gendered symbolism of medical discourse phenomenologically. Initially interested in possibly “destigmatiz[ing]” male patients, medical discourse has constructed an “explicitly class-conscious rhetoric” of neurasthenia, with race and gender as contributing factors.[8] Beard’s influential contemporary, the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, strengthens the gendering project by repackaging neurasthenia as the “effeminacy” threat to both white America and modernity.[9] Turning the gendered threat on its head, Beard fuses neurasthenia with whiteness and to consign women to the background altogether. In Milly, James presents the paradox of a female neurasthenic not granted her whiteness. That race and class are not the dominant factors in the optics of whiteness is made evident to Milly when “Boston was not in the least seeing her” (James, Wings, 77–78). Despite her “set of New York possibilities,” Milly is excluded from the inner circle of patriarchal Boston elites. Milly wears her ideological non-whiteness outside in her habitual black attire, a practice which prepares for her later symbolic transcendence (James, Wings, 304). The black dress attests at once to her desire to highlight the whiteness of her skin in contrast to the fabric and to manifest whiteness as an ephemeral quality. Having forced the white American identity as a neurasthenic on herself, Milly then showcases her whiteness with a “wonderful white dress” at Palazzo Leporelli (James, Wings, 304). More than a morbid desire for the “abyss,” the death-bound Milly allegorizes James’s critique of the longing for whiteness at any cost. Milly’s demise is possibly James’s conclusion that the white neurasthenic female is not a viable existence (James, Wings, 121). Only through death may Milly “spread [her white wings] the wider” (James, Wings, 380).

Milly’s fate highlights death as the ultimate form of whiteness. The white façade she performs reinforces how the white man is “an overseeing subject without properties.”[10] Milly performs a testimony to the prosecution of whiteness politics that demands reified, disembodied purity. The implications of her performance come into relief through Merton Densher’s equally frustrated desire for whiteness. Milly’s value to Densher lies in her upper-class status, which, despite her femaleness, is, according to the logic of the time whiter than Densher’s middle-class background. Before the mid-twentieth century, the British society still clung to established “metaphorical and literal depictions of racial whiteness” that exclude most of the working class.[11] In time, as Alastair Bonnett notes, the connotations of whiteness would shift from superiority to commonness. But in the late 19th century, working as a journalist, Densher remains “marginal to the symbolic production of white identity” (Bonnett, “Symbolic (Re)formation,” 320, 327).  Fortune, in the shape of a marriage to Milly, could be the “orientation”—to draw on Sara Ahmed’s conception of whiteness as a racial positioning—Densher needs to reposition his not-yet-white, albeit male, body.[12] Positing a white female neurasthenic and arriving at the conclusion of this white female neurasthenic’s nonviability, James does not simply reinforce stock portrayals of neurasthenia as invalidism.[13] Rather than confirm the white supremacist logic by producing self-identified white subjects, as Patricia McKee (1999) has suggested, James’s tragedy of the dove features a biting attack on the imperialist and patriarchal reasoning of whiteness.

Imperfectly incorporated into the orthodox white regime in Boston, Milly Theale finds release first in her European journey and then in death. Like Milly, Henry James fled to the Continent, continuing the familial tradition of “struggl[ing] for their share of the family resources” with excuses of health (Feinstein, Becoming, 194). Perhaps James found it hard to fit into New England high society because, unlike his father, his brother James, sister Alice, and many of his friends,[14] he did not experience any nervous disorders until 1910. This late episode of neurasthenic attack, or a belated display of his “tainted inheritance,” adds to an ideological distance from the United States. If color marks out “social differences” rather than physiological traits, then the delineations of color boundaries could also evolve over time (Feinstein, Becoming, 304; Bonnett, “Symbolic (Re)formation,” 323). As Milly casts off her colored invisibility and dons fatal whiteness, perhaps white subjects could also become colored.[15] Once understandings of whiteness have become a transparent backdrop for other ideological frameworks, organizations of gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, among other categories, lose their historical specificity.[16] The kind of archeology of whiteness attempted here cannot heal  imperialist and expansionist wounds, but it can unpack and problematize existing groupings of intersectional identities developed over time. James’s The Wings of the Dove, when reexamined through the lens of whiteness, can be one such layer of dying skin.