Beschreibung:
<jats:p> In The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson writes Language has of necessity recourse to indirection, to substitution: … it must replace [an] empty center of content with something else, and it does so either by saying what the content is like (metaphor), or describing its context and the contours of its absence, listing the things that border around it (metonymy). Thus language, by its very nature, is either analogical or fetishistic….” (122–23) The phrase “empty center of content” is a particularly suggestive one when applied to Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove. It is easily reminiscent of the young woman around whose “really larger vagueness,” in the words of a wholly sympathetic character, the novel’s action revolves (James, Wings 82). Critical interpretations that regard Milly as an essentially “empty” quantity are legion, some finding fault with her for being “too much like emptiness.” “She isn’t there,” F.R. Leavis complains, “and the fuss the other characters make about her … has the effect of an irritating sentimentality”(183). </jats:p>