Sounding the Deep “Oh!” in The Wings of the Dove

This essay reads the repetition of the interjection “Oh!” in the dialogue of The Wings of the Dove as revealing the pressure of the unsaid and unsayable in the late Jamesian novel. By asserting that this pressure is key to understanding the relationship between character, consciousness, and expression, this essay responds to literary scholarship that contends that Jamesian consciousness is not mimetic of human psychology. While this “anti-psychological” criticism is an important corrective to psychological determinism, such an approach underestimates the importance of the illegibility of character interiority to the linguistic skepticism at the heart of James’s portrayal of consciousness.