Rowe, John Carlos. “For Mature Audiences: Sex, Gender and Recent Film Adaptations of Henry James’s Fiction.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John R. Bradley. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 190-211.

  Difficult as it is to generalise about films by different directors, writers, producers and performers, we might still identify certain ideological forces informing films that to varying degrees overtly conform to or challenge just these ideological conventions. I want to look closely at the intersection of ideology, high culture and contemporary film in three recent adaptations of James: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. I want to focus primarily on the sexual ideology overtly challenged and in at least some cases subtly reinstated in these films, often thanks to the historical and cultural aura attached to their literary models. What ever their differences in form, content and even specific market targets, these three films represent James’s fictional works as so sexually charged, even organized, as to force their viewers to address an issue that until recently James’s subtlest interpreters have relatively neglected.4 It is tempting to attribute the foregrounding of parental, sexual, marital and reproductive problems in these films to simple causes. Dianne Sadoff argues that Softley’s The Wings of the Dove depends on sex as a cinematic ingredient that ‘helped launch the art-film as a marketing niche in the 70s and is now essential for box office success’5 Although too specialised in their scope and audience to be considered cultural influences, recent critical studies of Henry James by gay scholars and queer theorists, such as Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick, have provoked some cultural commentators to complain that American society is so obsessed with sex as to read everything, including great literature, in terms of it. Thus Lee Siegel argues that our contemporary ‘sexualization of everything’ has transformed the relatively peripheral treatment of sex in James’s fiction into an obsessive fascination, destroying our appreciation of ‘literature’ and contributing to our acceptance of the mass-media cult of sex-and-violence.6 P( 192)

 Campion’s meta-cinematic devices and moments are sufficiently regular to alienate viewers from nostalgic identification with characters, locales and the historical period, in order to keep our attention focused on what persists from the past in our present circumstances. Holland is less overtly Brechtian, but Washington Square relies on the collision of two strategically different nineteenth-and twentieth-century stereotypes of feminine identity. P( 193)

 Softley does more than simply push the dramatic action of James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) forward several years to 1910 for more overt signs of modernization, such as motorcars and women smoking, but also to bring the cinematic action closer to the beginning of the Great War. Although the London Underground dates from 1863, the opening scene of the film is set there to link Kate Croy’s (Helena Bonham Carter) deviousness with modernization, the New Woman and the vague threat of an awakening proletariat. Kate’s fantasy of public sex with Merton Densher (Linus Roache) in the Underground’s lifts – ‘ Stand Clear of the Doors’ warning the viewer away from such perversity – will eventually be realised in Venice, when she seals her cinematic bargain with Densher—‘Show me how you love,’ Densher begs—by leaning against the wall of a Venetian alley and having sex with him standing up. Softley’s London, crowded with honking taxis and towering double-deckers, closely resembles Eliot’s London in The Waste Land (1922), as well as the vulgarity of the masses that Eliot would consistently satirise in terms of degraded sexuality, such as that of Lil and Albert in ‘A Game of Chess’ and the typist and ‘young man carbuncular’ in ‘The Fire Sermon’11 P( 194)

 In Softley’s film, our contemporary society of technological devices, commercial demands and moral expediencies collides with the more graceful, but vanishing, Edwardian culture that is staged in the elegant interiors of Maud Manningham’s London house and Lord Mark’s country estate, Matcham. The rapid alternation of opening scenes from Kate’s fantasy of the Underground to Maud (Charlotte Rampling) craning over Kate at her dressing-table, maid dutifully standing at attention in the back of the room, and from Maud’s elegant party to Merton and his friends debating labour and class issues at the local pub establishes an atmosphere of different social realities in conflict, which in a general way describes the tone of James’s novels after 1890, including The Wings of the Dove. Softly appears to criticize both an older aristocratic culture and the vulgarity of modern society. Maud Manningham is not quite represented as the massive ‘Britannia’ at her account books, as she is in the novel, but she is certainly identified with the selfishness and commercialism of the ruling bourgeoisie. Lord Mark (Alex Jennings) is rendered far more decadent in the film than in James’s novel. Drunkenly stumbling about his country estate, fondling Kate while she sleeps and giving the impressionable Kate ‘ideas’ about how to exploit Milly (Alison Elliott), Lord Mark is a caricature of aristocratic failings James more subtly satirises in his fiction.

 Although Softley offers us an apparently difficult choice between the ‘old world’ of decaying cultivatin and the brave new world of machines and machinations, the choice is actually far easier to make than it first appears. Displacing the waning aristocracy and the grasping upper-middle class, Milly is cinematically constructed to combine youth, beauty and moral propriety. The film unconsciously Americanises European culture in a gesture that repeats the cultural colonialism of wealthy Americans which Henry James himself often sharply criticised.12 Softley shoots Venice through the lens of John Singer Sargent’s portraits both of British society women and of his Venetian cityscapes, apparently to mark the threshold of modernity in the film’s dramatic action.13 It is a decidedly American Milly Theale who takes possession of Venice and makes it the elegant stage for her morality play, but this Milly comes to exemplify all the high-cultural values and aestheticism of the European aristocracy now purified of its sins. Alan Nadel aptly criticises the film for its ‘self-deluding enchantment with’ Milly as ‘the representative of everything American has to offer’.14 After all, didn’t American ingenuity and capital ‘save’ Venice from physical ruin in the twentieth century?

 All three films work out their various conflicts principally through the representation of feminine identity and their respective ideals of a ‘proper’ woman at the end of the twentieth century govern how bodies and sexualities are employed in these films. P( 195)

 Softley’s alternative is an aestheticised and feminised asceticism, which in its early twentieth-century trappings in still recognisable as a version of late twentieth-century appeals for a new celibacy, both in response to the threats of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and to the presumed ‘moral breakdown’ of the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. Milly’s task in the film is to instruct and discipline Merton while purging the force of the threatening New Woman, Kate, who is associated with our worst modern tendencies. P( 202)

 From her opening fantasy of sex with Merton in the Underground, Kate is identified explicitly with pornography. Sex in an elevator is a standard pornographic convention, as is sex on the billiard table. Wearing her silk wrap with the peacock-feather design to Maud’s party, Kate lures Merton up the staircase with its blue tiles to the billiard room. The styles in this scene are Art Nouveau with a decadent, Orientalist aura which foreshadows the scene of a semi-comatose Lionel Croy in a London opium den. Jealous of the kiss Merton has given his his companion and anticipating her later jealousy of Milly, Kate kisses him erotically and possessively commands: ‘I want you to go back and kiss her with that mouth. You came with her’ Even this cinematically added dialogue is derived from pornographic films, in which figures in ménages a trios swap kisses and bodily fluids. In between these two scenes, Kate follows Milly into a bookshop, finds her reading Tennyson and drags her into the males-only section, where Kate shows her an explicitly pornographic illustration in a Victorian book.25 When Kate introduces Milly to Merton in the National Gallery, she draws the two of them to Gustav Klimt’s nude in Danäe (1907) and then leaves them to contemplate it. Great art, it seems, has been degraded by Kate’s lewd intention to match her lover and her friend. From the very outset, Kate is linked indissolubly with pornography.26

 Yet the corruption she represents is not simply the immorality of sexual desire confused with material interests, honest ‘love’ entangled with the deviousness demanded by the economic realities of the age. From the beginning, Kate is also identified with the new technologies, with the working classes and with progressive politics. Milly is rarely identified with modern urbanism; she appears more frequently in the rich Edwardian interiors of London or splendour of Venetian palazzi  which belong to the sheltered ruling class. When we do see Milly in the city, she is either coming from Sir Luke Strett’s office, where Kate spies her from the top of a double-decker and pursues her into the bookshop, or her face and upper torse are viewed fragmentarily through Sir Luke Strett’s primitive ‘radiological’ equipment, as if she is the victim of this ‘mad scientist’.27 In Softley’s film, Milly has the modern disease of cancer, rather than James’s more romantic and vaguely specified ‘heart trouble’. Kate is the real embodiment of modern cancer and she follows the symbolic logic that Klaus Theweleit has analysed so well in his critical reading of early twentieth-century cultural anxieties which link woman, the masses and modernisation.28 P ( 203)

 In the local pub, Merton is distracted from his political debate with his friends—‘The upper class isn’t going to change of its own accord’—when Kate appears; ‘You can’t just leave in the middle of an argument,’ one of his male companions complains. When Kate meets him at his desk in the newspaper office, Merton describes the story he is writing about the doctor, recently elected to the Royal College of Surgeons, who sews up the hymens of prostitutes, especially young girls, so that they can pose as virgins, increasing their sexual capital. And, of course, her father Lionel Croy is associated with the drug culture that Softly identifies as one of the evils of uncontrolled urbanization and modernisation. By no means politically progressive herself, Kate is none the less associated with workers, prostitutes and the masses in general, emphasising the potential disorder they threaten. Her social ambitions do not so much contradict her association with the masses as represent their envy and desire as the secret motives of their rebellion. In James’s novel, Milly identifies with the working class, specifically with prostitutes, in her walk around London following her visit to Sir Luke Strett.29 When she ends up in Regents Park in James’s novel, Milly wonders how her own misery relates to the suffering she has witnessed in her walk, but Softley represents Milly in Regents Park watching a group of children playing football. When they look at her, she comments, ‘Wonderful!’ but threatening rain causes them to run, as if away from her, rather than replying. The children and family Milly cannot have are nostalgic reminders of lost feminine identity, corrupted by characters, like Kate, whose dysfunctional family is the standard for the contemporary viewer.

 In such a modern world, what is the use of love? Although Softley had available in Susan Shepherd Stringham (Elizabeth McGovern) a character from the novel capable of unisexual love, he uses her principally as Maud judges her: ‘Milly’s servant.’ Susie’s relation to Milly in James’s novel is complex, at times subtly erotic and reinforces Milly’s brief identification of her suffering with the exploitation of the working class. But softly is too intent on focusing modern corruption in terms of deviant sexuality than to grant Susie any positive agency in his film. Kate’s initial identification with pornography and prostitution quickly swerves in the direction of lesbian ‘unnaturalness’. When Lord Mark drunkenly awakens Kate in her bed at Matcham, his leering eyes matched by his vampirish teeth, she seems infected with his aristocratic devilry. Indeed, his suggestions about Milly’s illness lead Kate directly to Milly’s bed, where Kate reenacts Lord Mark’s violation of her privacy. Kate is, however, a better liar, complaining to Milly: ‘It’s freezing in my room….These wretched aristocrats can’t even heat their houses.’ Kate’s scorn for the aristocracy hides her envy and ambition, but her lies contaminate what otherwise would be her innocent cuddle with Milly, their heads posed in Pre-Raphaelite manner. P ( 204)

 Softley offers us several long shots of the three of them not quite constituting a group, notably during their picnic on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, as Milly photographs Kate and Merton and on their romantic ride in the two gondolas, as Kate reaches across the gunwales to Milly and Merton, crying out, ‘Milly, Milly. Come closer!’30 Kate’s duplicity turns even conventional scenes of feminine bonding, such as when Milly does Kate’s hair and Kate reciprocates by applying Milly’s lipstick, into betrayals of friendship. P ( 205)

 Softley’s symbolic composition of this threesome as perverse and unnatural takes centre stage at the Carnevale, when Milly and Kate emerge from their gondola arm in arm. Milly is dressed in the golden gown and mantilla of a Spanish hidalga and Kate, with full moustache, is wearing the toreador’s suit-of-lights. Milly and Kate recall Carmen and Escamillo outside the bullring in the final act of Bizet’s Carmen (1875), but the opera is now strangely perverted by Kate’s transvestism and the setting in Venice, rather than Seville. Following them, Densher is disguised as a picador and Susie and duenna in her black silks. Milly wears her Venetian bauta, but Kate carries her mask, as if to say that she is not really disguised. While Milly and Merton dance and romantically kiss, Kate watches, but now without her moustache. Dropping two masks, then Kate declares herself in fact the unnatural bisexual who wishes to possess both Milly and Merton sexually and psychologically. Once again, her jealousy overcomes her, however, and she literally drags Merton away from the piazza, significantly losing Milly and Susie in the thronged masses, to complete her sexual bargain with him.

 With its evocation of Casanova’s and Byron’s sexual exploits in Venice, its hint of opera and foreign cultures, the Carnevale is another instance of Softley’s anxious representation of the masses. In a back alley, as if behind or beneath the throngs of people in democratic celebration, Kate and Merton seal their pact by having sexual intercourse against a scabrous wall of the city. More passionate than he will ever be in any of his other romantic encounters with Kate or Milly in the film, Merton seems particularly excited to be making love to transvestite, whose suit-of-lights reflects narcissistically Merton’s own image and gender. In the novel, Kate and Merton’s bargain is sealed by her agreement she will come to his rooms if he will court Milly. In Softley’s film, illicit sexuality, the public sphere, transvestism, bisexuality and homosexuality are deliberately confused. The following morning, Kate appears to Milly still wearing her toreador’s costume, but now in explicit déshabillée –the tie undone, the blouse open and creased – as if the clothes she has slept in are also expressions of her loose morals. And, of course, Kate lies thoroughly, consistently, but unconvincingly as she answers Milly’s questions about her relationship with Densher.

 Her ascents are now clearly metaphors for this transcendental inclination and in her nearly superhuman scamper up the scaffolding in the Church of Santa Maria della Salute she is leading Merton towards a more spiritual calling. When they kiss passionately behind the restorers’ curtains, we see just the edge of the fresco behind them, with its angels pointing the way to the several other angels that now litter the Venetian scenery. Milly’s identification in the film with this particular Venetian church is not simply an ironic commentary on her illness, but further confirmation that Milly will redeem the modern world from its plague as effectively as the Virgin delivered Venice from its seventeenth-century plague.31 P ( 206)

 The passion between Milly and Merton is decidedly erotic, especially in the church, because it is meant to counter the vulgarity of Kate and Merton’s public coupling and the more general obscenity of their relationship. Before Milly and Merton kiss in church, she has already tested him and knows he accepts her rules of sexual guilt and ascetic aspiration.

 Softley’s The Wings of the Dove reacts in fear to opportunities for women in the workplace, the family and interpersonal relations, recycling modernist anxieties regarding the anarchic feminine to graft nineteenth-centry conventions of femininity as aesthetic and spiritual with the neo-individualism of the present moment. P( 208)