‘All brilliant gloss’: the liminal visual in Softley’s The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

This article examines Ian Softley’s 1997 adaptation of Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove as a study in the representation of liminal sociocultural moments, specifically through its infusive representation of the character of Aunt Maud, played in the film by Charlotte Rampling. James’s Maud is the financial centre of the narrative, a complex and contradictory weaponization of philistine convention and vulgar immorality, a collage of surfaces repeatedly described as gloss on a double-sided coin. James felt that the diffusiveness of Maud’s power was the novel’s structural problem, because it inhabited a liminal space where the desires of the individual coextend with the desires of the market, and thereby dislocated the centre of critique and control in the text, moving the reader further and further away from the commercial trappings of their cultural moment. The filmmakers claimed that eliminating Maud allowed them to update the novel’s language, costumes, etiquette, and environment for a younger audience, but the film was dismissed as a pandering cash grab, an attempt to make Henry James a brand. In this way, the film diminishes Maud’s presence but empowers her narrative agency; resituating James’s brand of displacement, alienation, and loss into a liminal environment makes Maud’s commercial influence so inescapable and self-reflexive that it makes the film look like one of her many enterprises.