Descrição
This article reads Henry James’s bias against his native America ironically. I offer a two-fold reading of the staging and performance of stupidity: it is both a strategy of resistance and a rhetoric of disavowal of responsibility. I contend that Henry James offers Milly Theale, the American rotagonist of “The Wings of the Dove”, the possibility of playing up to European assumptions about the New World through a performance of stupidity. I also argue that feigning ignorance is also renouncing responsibility, as exemplified in Merton Densher’s conduct. James abstains from conclusions, allowing stupidity to rule in the end.
