Wenwen Guo

Bio

Wenwen Guo is Assistant Professor of English at Brenau University. She is interested in the questions of affect, subjectivity, consciousness, and mental health, particularly the ways in which literary texts complicates existing discourses. She has published journal articles on Henry James, Octavia Butler, and Sigmund Freud, among others.

Contributions

Peeling Back Whiteness: Neurasthenia in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

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It was not Milly’s unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her—though certainly, as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted.” [1] With her ardent quest for an identity-granting disease, Milly Theale, the heroine in Henry James’s 1903 novel The Wings of the Dove, embodies the ambiguous place of women in the neurasthenic discourse of whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Milly is sometimes seen as embodying the conflict between a colonial...

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