Branding Milly Theale: The Capital Case of The Wings of the Dove

This article offers a materialist interpretation of James's 1902 novel, in which Milly Theale's iconographic association with capital underpins a thoroughgoing critique of class relations at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Milly's aggrandizement of her material power into a culturally transcendent hegemonic force is dialectically opposed by Kate Croy's own more class-conscious understanding of her social circumstances. Through her purchase of the cultural goods of Venice, Milly brands herself with the image of the dove, an image masking the ultimately coercive power she exercises over others.