Chapter 4 - Promising to Love

Summary

The danger of viewing morality as provisional rather than permanent is explored in my fourth chapter, on The Wings of the Dove. I read the various promises in the novel as challenging rather than confirming J. L. Austin’s theory of the speech act. The promise is Austin’s most celebrated example of a statement that performs an action rather than offering a description. In The Wings of the Dove, however, description is itself an action, a means of shaping the world rather than merely reporting on it. As a result, the distinctive status of the promise dissolves, producing in James’s antihero Merton Densher a damaging crisis of faith.