Shame’s Pallor and the Paranoia Imperative in The Wings of the Dove
Wenwen Guo
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
Abstract
In Teasing out the relationship between shame, knowledge, and paranoia, this paper gives a mimetic paranoid reading of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902). It contends that James realizes a totally shame-bound subject in Kate Croy, whose face pales when she is gripped with the sensation of shame. Unlike the paranoia-driven characters like Kate Croy and Susan Stringham, Milly Theale and Merton Densher retain an open-mindedness that ushers in abundant affective rewards. Paranoia, contra Silvan Tomkins and Eve Sedgwick, it argues, yields more than monotony and, similar to shame, can reverse and traverse boundaries that remain unproductively closed otherwise.
Keywords: Henry James, Shame, Pallor, Paranoia, Affective Theory
Wenwen Guo (wenwen.guo@emory.edu) is a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, U.S.A. She is currently teaching at Dillard University as the Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellow. Her dissertation interrogates a host of early to mid-twentieth century American fictions by Henry James, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemmingway, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, mainly through the theoretical lens of affect theory, particularly the affect of shame. Her broader research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, multi-ethnic American literature, affect theory, and animal studies.