Kaye, Richard A. “Portraits of Lady Chatterleys: Jamesian Triangles, Lawrencian Eros and the Triumph of Cinematic Adaptation in The Wings of the Dove.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John R. Bradley. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 240-59.   

 It is the females who seem most transformed in Softley’s adaptation. In their New Womanish self-assurance, Kate Croy and Milly Theale seem closer to the heroines of Lawrence’s fiction (populariesd on screen in Ken Russell’s adaptations of Women in Love and The Rainbow) than to James’s female protagonists. P( 243)

     Softley’s The Wings of the Dove begins with a stunning sequence that establishes Kate Croy as a figure of keen sensual feelings. While the opening titles appear on the screen, Kate boards a train in a London station, and when she enters the carriage she immediately spots a young man. He seems to be a stranger, and seeing a young woman standing alone he silently gestures to her to take his seat. Taking it, she stares forward as the edge of his coat softly shakes before her face. They leave the train together and, after boarding a lift, they silently embrace, then make love. The camera frames the man’s hands as he ravishes the woman, the moving elevator offering us only a fragmentary view of their bodies. As Kate cries out with an excited ‘Merton, no!’ the scene jumps forward and the camera offers a close-up of a wide-eyed Kate seated at a mirror in a bedroom. Suddenly it is real time in Aunt Maud’s light-drenched house. We have either just witnessed a woman’s fantasy of a tryst in the London Underground (a psychic underground of sorts) or Kate’s memory of an actual amorous encounter. P( 247) 

 She grills her niece as to where she has been all mourning, and after blowing powder from Kate’s face attaches a necklace to the young woman’s neck with a cool admonishment: ‘Try to look as if you’ve worn it all your life. It’s yours.’ The pressure of sheer appearance is exquisitely registered, as we see Kate trapped in the requirements and attitudes of an entire class. Even after the audience understands that Kate and Merton have been fugitive lovers, this opening scene endures as strikingly ambiguous. It is a suggestively psychological moment, one that underscores the intensity of Kate’s attraction to Merton. Nothing – not Aunt Maud’s strictures, certainly not Milly’s fortune and successful ‘counter-seduction’ of Merton – will eradicate it. The deliberate ambiguity of this sequence is purely Jamesian, yet it also  evokes Lawrence in its depiction of a young woman’s intense,  secret carnal life  and a young couple’s  total surrender to an erotic imperative. Kate is utterly modern in Softley’s film, as much a casualty of circumstance as a woman bewitched by a her own perilous human experiments. P( 247) 

      There is a stressed-out modernity to the characters, especially the women. In Softley’s film we are in a world of new images, a London of busy motor traffic, loose-fitting Edwardian attire and edgy modernist art. In place of the novel’s celebrated sequence in the Uffizi Gallery, where Lord Mark and Milly stand before Bronzino’s portrait of the sixteenth-century noblewoman Lucrezla Panciatichi, we find Kate and Milly attending a Gustav Klimt exhibition as they stare with bemused embarrassment at nudes. The women smoke comfortably with their male companions and, in one scene, Kate and Milly giggle over erotica in the back of a London bookshop. Where once the ‘innocent American flirt’ Daisy Miller suffered a social death (and a then real one) for strolling with an Italian suitor through the streets of Rome, the American naïf Milly Theale flirts with Merton Densher as they wander throughVenice and there is scarcely an objecting murmur. Merton’s colleagues at his newspaper may be startled to see Kate visiting him in their offices, but her appearance there a  minor, pleasing trespass.

     Whether Softly was thinking of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated assertion that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed’ is unclear, but the chief effect of his slight time-shift is to introduce us to a world that seems to be rushing forward.14 In an interview, Softley has claimed that he changed the year to 1910 because he wanted to modernise the setting and speech to avoid the pitfalls of Merchant-Ivory adaptations. He wished the movie to appear contemporary. ‘I wanted the film to seem like the drama was unfolding now. The language is not of 1910, attitudes are looser and the mood deliberately timeless.’ In fact, the movie offers an evocative historic specificity. Edwardian manners here seem edgy, poised over a historical precipice – the First World War, most obviously, when the class divisions alluded to throughout the film will be temporarily minimized. P( 248)

      Milly had, under her comrade’s eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her as in a clear cold wave that there was a possible account of their relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn’t. 15 

      Yet it was, none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate continued even now preeminently remained for her; and a reason – this was the great point – of which the young woman herself could have no suspicion. Twice over thus, for two or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her, in the light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher’s eyes had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather more beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might one’s self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as the ‘other’, the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was aware of this…16  

         Kate: Do you hate me for standing you up?

         Merton: You didn’t just stand me up – you set me up.

         Kate: Did you like her?

         Merton: No.

         Kate: Did she like you?

         Merton: Well, she asked me to come to Venice.

         Kate: Why don’t you?

         Merton: Why should I?

         Kate:  Because I’ll be there and Maud won’t.

         Merton: What about poor old Milly?

         Kate:  Why poor old Milly?

         Merton: Well, she wants to be with you on her own.

         Kate: I’m sure she’d rather be with you on her own.

         Merton: Look, I’m not going to Venice. If you want to see me, you see me here.

         Kate: Don’t you think she’s beautiful?

         Merton: No.

         Kate: I won’t get jealous.

         Merton: No, I don’t think she’s beautiful.

         Kate:  I do. I think she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.

         Merton: Then I’m sure you’ll have a good time together in Venice. P( 251)

     Most importantly, Softley’s provides a visual language for the novel’s dialogue. Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady had presented London and Italy in sombre chiaroscuro tones, but the cinematography in The Wings of the Dove is more varied, taking in a London of brightly-lit rooms and public parks along with a Venice of shimmering piazzas and rich nocturnal hues. This shift in style is crucial in that Kate, Merton and Milly require Venice, the eternal city of goods offered and sold, for their masquerade. In one remarkable sequence, the threesome wander with Milly’s companion Susan (Elizabath McGovern) through the Piazza San Marco and Milly finds herself reinvigorated by Venetian splendours. She stands looking out over Venice’s main piazza, ecstatic. Of course, this is the Venice that Hollywood movies have taught audience to love since Katherine Hepburn was swept off her feet in the 1952 film Summertime (a movie that so successfully engendered Venice-love in viewers that it was said to have started a boom in tourism to Venice). Softley, on the other hand, avoids over-saturating his audience in a Venetian idyll. Immediately after this scene of Milly’s intoxication, we see her wandering through fish markets. This is another Venice, that of Gibbon, who was afforded some ‘hours of astonishment and some days of disgust by the spectacle of Venice’, and of Lawrence himself, who in his poem ‘St. Mathew’ wrote of the ‘focus-dark, sea-weed fringed waters’ of the Venetian canals. And it is the Venice that Thomas Mann would transform into an archetypal site of mephitic vapours in Death in Venice (1911). ‘I wanted Venice to be more decadent and earthy, ‘Softley noted in an interview. ‘I wanted it to be the kind of place where people go to lose themselves, in order to find themselves.’17 P( 253)

     We were presented with unclothed bodies, but the filmmaker did, I think, quite a remarkable thing there. The bodies were almost incidental, and he gave us those faces, and those faces were saying those lines without saying them. Perhaps this is the literary prejudice in wanting them said verbally.’18 P( 255)

      In his 1996 critical study of film adaptation, Novel into Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Brian MacFarlane makes the point that faithfulness has become the dominant idea animating all discussions of cinematic treatments of works of fiction:

     Discussion of adaptation has been bedeviled by the fidelity issue, no doubt ascribable in part to the novel’s coming first, in part to the ingrained sense of literature’s greater respectability in traditional critical circles…. Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single correct meaning which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense tampered with.19

MacFarlane goes on to note that such an approach tends eliminate three more fruitful avenues for discussions of screen adaptation: that adaptation is a convergence of all the arts, that filmic adaptation is a more complex process than simply transferring novelistic elements to a film vocabulary, and that there are components in a movie version of a novel that may add powerfully to cinematic meaning and are unique to film.

     MacFarlane’s critique is of special relevance in considering the achievement of Iain Softley’s adaptation. Not only does Softley’s movie provide a filmically imaginative rendition of The Wings of the Dove, it dares to do so in a way that extrapolates from one of James’s literary descendants, incorporating into James’s fiction a more explicit erotic idiom than James himself was willing to abide. Very little in the existing theoretical understanding of film adaptation, moreover, allows for interpretations that recast a given author’s works through the terms of another writer’s sensibility. Yet literary history, as I have been suggesting, occasionally can work backwards, particularly when it intersects with film adaptation. P( 256)

     Softley represents a new, post-Merchant-Ivory generation of filmmakers who have turned to James’s fiction and who are undeterred by its supposed ‘difficulty’. He is willing to tease out the triangular conundrums and bisexual implications of James’s writing that several generations of literary scholars have chosen to ignore. Given the film’s expansive sense of freedom in representing Jamesian themes, it is tempting to see Softley’s movie as the first screen adaptation directed by a member of the post-sixties generation of movie direciors, and one would be right to do so. (One of Softley’s previous films was the 1993 bio- pic Backbeat, about the Beatles’ pre-fame early years in Liverpool.) Yet Softley’s film is more than an audacious advance in movie adaptation of James’s fiction. It opens up a new way of adapting James’s works, based less on a principle of fealty than on imaginative revision. Just as Merton Densher is taken over by the spirit of Milly Theale, Henry James is now haunted by one of his least likely literary descendants. The inoculation against Lawrence that James demanded from Hugh Walpole lasted a little less than a century. P( 257)