The Gift/s of Death

This chapter explores the relationship between the gift and death in turn-of-the century fiction, focusing on Mark Twain’s late writings (1890–1900s) and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902). Both Twain and James, renowned critics of sentimentality, eschew the tradition of the mid-nineteenth-century sentimental novel, which represented death as a gift merely in religious and didactical contexts. At the same time, both authors draw on sentimental rhetoric when addressing the gift-of-death subject and revise the ideology of disinterested giving at its very limits. Twain considers death to be the only perfect and “valueless” gift since it cannot be “traded.” In The Wings of the Dove, mortality becomes the absolute condition of the asymmetrical giving that adds a transcendental quality to Milly Theale’s bequest.