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    Washington Square
    Washington Square
    Washington Square
    Ebook313 pages5 hours

    Washington Square

    By Henry James

    3.5/5

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    Henry James's most memorable novels, a story in which love is answered with betrayal and loyalty leads inexorably to despair.

    In Washington Square, originally published in 1880, Henry James reminisces about the New York he had known thirty years before as he tells the story of Catherine Sloper and her fortune-seeking suitor Morris Townsend. This perceptively drawn human drama is James' most accessible work and an enduring literary triumph.

    Washington Square Press' Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This edition of Washington Square has been prepared by Peter Conn, Andrea Mitchell Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. It includes his introduction, notes, selection of critical excerpts, and suggestions for further reading as well as a unique visual essay of period illustrations and photographs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateMar 8, 2016
    ISBN9781451686807
    Author

    Henry James

    Henry James (1843–1916) was an American writer, highly regarded as one of the key proponents of literary realism, as well as for his contributions to literary criticism. His writing centres on the clash and overlap between Europe and America, and The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as his most notable work.

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    Reviews for Washington Square

    3.5/5

    11 ratings39 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I liked this book, but I did not like any of the characters. It holds up well as a snapshot of another time, a different society. Prefer Jane Austim et al.
    • 5/5
      I have read this book several times before, and it still reveals new things to me. This is a masterful novel, full of intriguing characters and a great plot. And although it's rather sad, James says so much about human nature. It's one of his more accessible books, and a good place to start for someone interested in getting to know his work.
    • 3/5
      A physician-father (Austin Sloper) marries well and loses, first, a young son, and shortly thereafter, his wife after the birth of a daughter. He realizes early that the daughter is of average intelligence and not beautiful, whereupon he gives up the raising of the child to his live-in widowed sister, for whom he has little respect. But it's convenient and he remains unengaged with the daughter. The daughter, Catherine, grows up shy, uneasy in relationships, and very inexperienced in society. Catherine has an income from her mother, and can expect a large inheritance on her father's death. She is a target for suitors more interested in her money than in her person. Dr. Sloper has high regard for his own ability to evaluate the worth and temperment of acqaintences he meets. When Catherine meets Morris Townsend, she is smitten by the attention he gives her and rapidly develops a love for him. Dr. Sloper recognizes that Morris has a mysterious background, but he doesn't rapidly follow up on investigating the young fellow's life path until he is surprized by the rapid development of a serious relationship between the shy Catherine and the worldly Morris. Upon talking with Morris's sister, with whom Morris lives, all his fears about Morris's character are realized. But it's too late, Catherine has agreed to marry Morris, even though Morris did not ask Dr. Sloper for his daughter's hand in marriage prior to his proposal. Dr. Sloper refuses to give his approval to the marriage and, in addition, announces that Catherine will not inherit any money from him if the marriage occurs. Dr. Sloper proposes that Catherine accompany him on a tour of Europe for six months before she marries, to which Catherine and Morris agree. In some ways, the Dr. Sloper, the physician, acts like a scientist experimenting with a guinea pig in a laboratory. He is detached from a real relationship with his daughter, He just tries various experimental procedures and watches the result and adjusts according to the response.After they return from Europe, Catherine and Morris see each other. Catherine explains to Morris that there is no chance that her father will relent from his plan of disinheritance. Morris realizes that Catherine is not going to inherit her fathers estate and begins, badly, to withdraw from his committment to Catherine, and disappears from the City in a short time. Catherine is devestated, recovers, but is forever wounded by the affair. Long after the engagment is ended, Dr. Sloper still is suspicious that Morris will return. He still will not return the will to its former state of inheritance.
    • 5/5
      This was actually assigned me in high school--but amazingly, unlike what is so often the case, I didn't hold it against it. I find this a heartbreaking book--but oh so well worth reading. It's been compared to Jane Austen in its focus on family dynamics, courtship and social satire, but unlike Austen this is really an anti-romance. Catherine Sloper is not cut out of the cloth of which romantic heroines are made. A "good" girl but plain, socially awkward, and none too bright--and her clever father can't forgive her for it. The heart of this book is the battle between father and daughter over a man wooing Catherine. And the hell of it, is her father is right about Morris Townsend, but so badly misjudges and mistreats his daughter that I couldn't quite root for him to succeed. Catherine does change through the course of the book, and some might read the last paragraphs as triumphant--but I found it a Pyrrhic victory. I haven't (yet) gone on to read more of Henry James--I understand this is one of his more readable books--he's known in his later works for very ... er... complex sentences, but that's not the case here in this short novel that falls early in his output. The book was the basis for two films, The Heiress with Olivia de Haviland and Washington Square with Jenifer Jason Leigh. Both are worthy and faithful adaptations.
    • 3/5
      I decided to listen to this book after listening to The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields which is about Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton and Henry James were good friends and I became curious about this writer. Apparently this book is often compared to Jane Austen's work but I'm not a big fan of Jane Austen and it is therefor no surprise that I didn't particularly like this book.In a nutshell this is the story of a plain but rich girl (Catherine Sloper) who falls in love with a handsome but poor man (Morris Townsend). Catherine's father suspects Townsend's motives and refuses permission for them to marry. He takes Catherine on an extensive tour of Europe hoping that she will give up on Townsend or vice versa. When that doesn't work he makes it plain that Catherine will inherit none of his wealth. Townsend calls off the engagement because he doesn't want to deprive Catherine of her inheritance or so he says. It's pretty clear that Townsend was only interested in Catherine for her money and when he realized that he wouldn't get it he dumps her.Maybe this was a new storyline when it was written but it certainly isn't now. I found it hard to care about Catherine even though I felt I should. She just seemed so insipid. At any rate I was not impressed and I won't be running out to find other books by Henry James.
    • 3/5
      Rich people live in Washington Square.This story is about one rich woman and poor man.After I read this story, I felt sad.But,I wonder if Moriss actually loves Catherine.I think that rich people is not always happy.
    • 3/5
      This is the first Henry James book I have read. It's somewhat depressing and painful on the part of the heroine, and ends with an equally depressing but correct ending. The themes are wealth, matrimony, honesty and integrity.
    • 4/5
      A father and his daughter debate a young man's intentions in a story conveying messages about the admixture of pride and love. As the father of a very young daughter I've received its precaution not to invest too much in a singular vision of the future woman my daughter will grow up to be. The author does an admirable job with the daughter's character arc, very convincingly moving her through the stages. I couldn't decide which way I wanted the ending to go, and still have mixed feelings about how it wound up - as I think I'm supposed to.I was surprised by how present the narrator is in this work, which I thought was antithetical for Mr. James. A quick search confirms this novel was from his early period before he became so entrenched, also explaining the easy reading. This short work is a good place for anyone to start who wants to sample James as an author without getting too bogged down.
    • 4/5
      The great tragedy of this novel is that no one really understood Catherine, and she had so much to give and such value to offer in a relationship. Her father judged rightly of Morris and Aunt Penniman - but never saw the prize in his daughter. I felt such empathy for Catherine in the end, and sorrow that these two men in her life used her so poorly. Mr. James' prose is a joy to read - his descriptions are so interesting and so apt.
    • 3/5
      I preferred the movie by Jennifer J.L. it is amazing, and the soundtrack makes the tears in my eyes fall.
    • 3/5
      Well, a Henry James story that I actually found readable - a first after quickly giving up on Turn of the Screw and In the Cage. This was a reasonable story about a shy daughter of an overbearing father who is taken advantage of by an avaricious young man after the fortune she is due to inherit from her mother and, in the future, from her father. Felt very Jane Austen-like, but without the charm and James is a less good writer. I felt sorry for Catherine trapped between two men trying to manipulate her emotions, though there is a suggestion at the end that, years later after the father's death, her former lover may have turned over a new leaf. 3/5
    • 4/5
      After seeing The Heiress on Broadway (starring Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame!), I felt compelled to read the novel behind the play. I'm not sure how long the book has been on my shelf, but the measure is in years rather than months.

      My love of the show certainly influenced my reaction to the book, and it often felt like I was watching the play again as I read. As far as Henry James novels go, this seems to be among the most readable. He is famous for long, convoluted sentences, especially in later works, but there was very little of that here. Washington Square is relatively straight-forward and easy to follow.

      A description of Catherine:
      "She was a healthy, well-grown child, without a trace of her mother's beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a "nice" face; and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of regarding her as a belle. Her father's opinion of her moral purity was abundantly justified; she was excellently, imperturbably good; affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry, but she devoted her pocket money to the purchase of creme cakes..." p. 12

      and on her character awakening:
      "Catherine meanwhile had made a discovery of a very different sort; it had become vivid to her that there was a great excitement in trying to be a good daughter. She had an entirely new feeling, which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions." p. 104

      My rating:
      3.5/5 stars

      Bottom line:
      Overall, a very readable and enjoyable Henry James novel, but The Portrait of a Lady is still my favorite. The play is highly recommended!
    • 2/5
      This is a love story.The cool man and the very shy women are main characters. They fall in love.But,her father against it. I think this story is very typical,so Iwas not surprised the end.I could imagine the last easily.I couldn't understandher feeling.
    • 3/5
      I pitied every principal character for their having to eat the fruit of who they were; I never grew to like them. Strangely, I pitied John Ludlow the most--for his passion being given no chance.
    • 4/5
      Is it better to be clever or good is the question that lies at the heart of this short novel. The question is raised about the dull but dutiful daughter, Catherine, by her father, Dr. Austin Sloper. Dr. Sloper has had two major losses in his life with the deaths of a son and his beloved wife which may have contributed to his barely disguised disdain for his infant daughter. Catherine?s physical needs are met by her father with the help of meddlesome Aunt Lavinia, but Catherine is a very sheltered young lady with little self-esteem when the charming and handsome Morris Townsend joins the cast of characters and the struggle to dominate Catherine begins.Washington Square is a short book and one of the most accessible written by Henry James. It is worth the few hours of time it takes to eavesdrop on society in New York City before the time of the Civil War. Life was slower back then and women largely depended on men to live a fulfilled life. It is gratifying to see how Catherine, despite being thought common by her father, used her common sense and growing independence to control her own destiny.
    • 4/5
      Henry James has a talent of getting to the essence of not only typical personages, but quite surprising and unexpected characters. Page by page he slowly unfolds their true nature. His narrative runs with such fluidity and is worded so exquisitely that upon reading it you get this quiet kind of satisfaction, of gaining something very beautiful and worth knowing. That's what I felt. At first the plot might not seem anything out of the ordinary - an idle dashing young man calculating a marriage to a wealthy, yet not apparently popular young woman. But it's much more than that, as we discover...
    • 3/5
      Utterly claustrophobic. In this tiny world every scene relates to the courtship of the heroine (Catherine) by a transparently mercenary suitor, Townsend. Some things worth noting: 1) nobody at any point beats Townsend like a wild baboon. Such is justice in this world. 2) Henry James apparently found this narrative so compelling that he can speak of nothing else for a few hundred pages. I call that obsession, and more charitable people would call it... focus? 3) Seriously, I'm not asking for a vulgar diversion like a talking parrot sidekick or a sudden alien invasion. But please, two hundred and eighty pages of endless pondering... should she marry the twit? What happens if she doesn't? Maybe she should? Oh no, Muffy, she daren't! ......zzzzzzz please please Henry you don't have to sprawl like Dickens across your imaginary world, but give us just a smidge of variety!
    • 3/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classic" books for the first time, then file reports on whether or not I think they deserve the labelBook #10: Washington Square, by Henry James (1880)The story in a nutshell:Agreed by most to definitely be one of his minor works, Washington Square is in reality not much more than a novella, written between major novels in the late Victorian Age as James often did throughout his career. And there's not much of a plot either, to tell you the truth; it's primarily the story of Catherine Sloper, a pleasant but rather dim-witted and plain-looking young woman living in the ritzy old-money New York neighborhood of Washington Square, along with her father who she shares a large house with, Austin Sloper, a typical middle-aged business-focused white guy who sorta laughingly condescends to all the people around him who aren't middle-aged business-focused white guys. In fact, this is the crux of the problem between the two of them, the conflict that fuels almost the entire storyline; it seems that Catherine has met a good-looking charmer named Morris Townsend who wishes to marry her, but her father deems him a simple-minded dreamer who's most likely after her money, and Catherine herself as just too much of a blockhead to be able to make a realization like this on her own, which is why he forbids the two to wed for her own good.The father and daughter then whisk off to Europe for a year, as upper-class Americans so often did at the time; but instead of Morris heroically coming to the rescue and bringing his true love back, it turns out that her father was right all along, with Morris turning out to be a kinda skeevy loser who actually was kinda after her money, and who sorta slinks off in this weasely way once she gets back into the country and declares that her allowance will be cut off if they wed. Instead of this making her grateful to her father for seeing the light, though, Catherine just ends up pissed at both of them, eventually growing into a matronly middle-aged old maid who becomes the buddy of the younger crowd in the neighborhood, but who never experiences love for herself even once.The argument for it being a classic:The argument for Washington Square being a classic is not a strong one, truthfully, and seems to most concern what the small novel is not -- it's not one of James' ponderous epics, not one of his later experimental works, but rather a simple and entertaining little story in the spirit of Jane Austen, told in about the most straight-ahead fashion possible. This is why people become fans of James in the first place, after all; he's considered by many to be the godfather of the modern realistic novel, the kinds of no-nonsense, clearly-written stories that comprise most Pulitzer winners and other academically-revered books. Certainly there are a lot of other novels in James' ouevre that are better-written, better-known, more historically important and a much better argument for being a classic, even this book's fans would say; it's just that Washington Square is one of his most accessible novels, a great way to ease yourself into his larger and denser pieces, and thus should be included in "The Canon" as well.The argument against:As mentioned, the argument against Washington Square being a classic is clearly the stronger one, and consists mostly of what we've been talking about; that it is simply too slim and obscure to be considered a classic, certainly a good beginning for people new to James' work but definitely not something to be held up against early-career trans-Atlantic sagas as The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians, nor the proto-Modernist experimental stylings of such late-career novels as The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. It may be a good introduction to James, critics argue, but that comes with a price; it is also a frothily light novel, its plot so wispy as to almost not exist, and not something that will give you a good idea of why James fans are so nuts for his work in the first place.My verdict:So I have to confess, this was the very first book of James that I've ever tackled, and I picked it deliberately because I was a little intimidated by his larger and more well-known ones; James has a certain reputation, after all, especially among academic intellectuals who enjoy thick and challenging books, and I've also heard that his larger novels can sometimes get extremely bogged down in their middles. Ah, but like everyone else, I've discovered the problem to starting with a classic author's lighter and less-important work, which is the same thing mentioned in the criticisms above; that you just really can't get a sense from work like that about why people love that author so much to begin with, of why their work got so famous and respected in the first place. Washington Square comes and goes with the reader barely noticing; just when you think the story's about to get ratcheted up and interesting, suddenly it's over, and you realize that the entire point was to provide not much more than a trifling and amusing afternoon of diversion*. It was decent enough for what it was, and I'm definitely looking forward to checking out the 1997 movie adaptation with Jennifer Jason Leigh, but I certainly can't say that I "know" James' work in any kind of significant way because of reading it, nor can I in good conscience declare Washington Square a classic.Is it a classic? No*And by the way, some final proof of just how lightweight this novel is -- James himself, when doing a retrospective of his ouevre late in life and putting together the revised 24-volume "New York Edition" of his work, actually left Washington Square out on purpose, reportedly because he couldn't even read through it again as an older man, disgusted as he was with the frivolity of the story. When the author himself is disgusted with one of his own books, it's usually not a great sign that it'll be making the canon list anytime soon.
    • 4/5
      After muttering, grumbling and hating on Henry James for upwards of 40 years (ever since I struggled and failed to read The Ambassadors for an American Lit course in college), I have finally read and enjoyed one of his novels. In truth, I enjoyed it quite a lot. This is the story of unattractive, un-brilliant, motherless Catherine Sloper, who has no prospects of marriage until she somehow attracts the attention of young Mr. Morris Townsend, of the "other" Townsends. His prospects are no better than hers, for although he is delightful to look at, and a charming dinner companion, he has no money, no career and no family connections of the better kind. Catherine's father, a prominent New York physician, will have no part of Catherine's determination to marry Mr. Townsend; she has her own income from her dead mother and Father cannot change that, but he can and emphatically will remove her from his Will and the assured thirty thousand a year she might expect after his death, unless she gives up Mr. Townsend. The exploration of human emotions, motivations, and relationships in this novel are subtle but superb. The movie, "The Heiress" with Olivia deHaviland and Montgomery Clift was based on this novel. The outcome is fundamentally the same, but rather more dramatic in the movie.Review written in September 2011
    • 5/5
      I cannot believe how much I loved Washington Square! It was great! It actually borders on fantastic! Washington Square is about Dr. Austin Sloper, a very prominent doctor, his daugther Catherine Sloper, a very unassuming girl, and Lavinia Penniman, Dr. Sloper's meddlesome sister and Catherine's aunt. Now, Dr. Sloper is a very smart but calculating and clinical man. It seems he grew colder when his first child died and then his wife during childbirth with Catherine.

      Dr. Sloper doesn't care for Catherine. He might love her but he doesn't think well of her appearance or her limited intelligence. When, at a big party, Catherine meets and is smitten with Morris Townsend, Dr. Sloper immediately thinks he's after her money since Catherine already has her 10,000 inheritance from her mother and will get 35,000 after Sloper's death and Townsend blew all of his money coasting through Europe.

      It doesn't help matters when Lavinia gets involved acting as a conduit for Catherine and Morris. Things sort of snowball from getting very intricate but simply constructed. I believe in a less gifted author than James (I'm looking at you Nicholas Sparks!) this could have been ridiculous, corny, complicated, and plain stupid.

      However, James knows how to write straightforward prose. Events were always quick and just the facts would suffice. A 12-month vacation abroad was about a chapter or so. It was fantastic. Not to say it was scanty. Quite the contrary, it was incredibly verbose. The last few chapters were great. It could have ended happily and been one big cliche instead it ended like it would have in real life.
    • 4/5
      While I did not find it exactly amazing, I did really like Washington Square. Henry James has a way with words that is all his own. One can almost tell immediately when they're reading one of his works. Washington Square actually took me to a place I had been once a couple of decades ago, and I just couldn't help but appreciate the social anthropology found within its pages. In a great many ways, one becomes involved with the lives there. More to come in the blog.
    • 4/5
      The happening is quite an ordinary one, nothing too grand, or incredible. The female protagonist, Catherine, is one of the dullest creatures I've ever encountered in literature (and real life, for that matter). The book is not riddled with melodramatic expressions, or epic gestures.
      Despite all that (or because, I've yet to decide), it is one of the more compelling books I have ever read.

      I adore Henry James' irony, that is most apparent in this book. I love his hopelessly flawed characters. I love his writing style.

      I also find it interesting that while compiling his work, Henry James excluded the book because he didn't like it. I have an affinity to the works the artists themselves despised.

      As of the time of writing this review, I've yet to read any other of Henry James' works, so I cannot draw any kind of comparison or general opinion non him as an author (other than adoring what he did with Washington Square). I have also yet to read the afterward by Michael Cunningham, will do so after I've read the book a second time.
    • 3/5
      I used to think I hated Henry James, based on my reading of The Wings of the Dove, in which I found the plot potentially riveting and yet ruined by James' prose style. Kind of like Women in Love, which I read during the same era. Then I picked up Portrait of a Lady while living in Thailand (which led to me being desperate for books in English other than the newest Dan Brown/John Grisham/you get the idea crap "novel") and rather enjoyed it. A recent read of Altar of the Dead convinced me that I ought to give good old James another try, so I picked up Washington Square, a perennial favorite in the world of SAT essay examples here in NYC. Since my students talk about it all the time, I already knew the storyline and figured it would be nice if I could discuss it with them.The story of Catherine Sloper's ill-fated romance with Morris Townsend is sad, but in that bittersweet, 'it didn't have to be this way' kind of way. There isn't any one person to blame for the sequence of events, but I did find myself wanting to reach into the book to smack some sense into almost all of them at one point or another. I did get the feeling that James was implying that he found the father to be the most to blame, which I can't entirely agree with. The action of the novel takes place almost entirely in the drawing room of Catherine's home on Washington Square, in a corporeal sense, and internally in a more accurate sense. This book is more of a character study than a novel, and looks at the ways in which one person's attitudes and actions can affect the lives of others, a point which is particularly appropriate when discussing a culture not known for its open communication. The writing itself was a lot less rambling than I remember The Wings of the Dove's writing to have been, and not as archaic as some of the other books from this era. However, I don't always notice older language, so I might not be the best judge of that. I did find this to be a very quick and easy read though, and reasonably interesting.
    • 5/5
      After learning that one of my favorite movies, "The Heiress" was based on this book by Henry James, I knew I had to read it someday. I ended up listening to it on Audible and loved it! I just love the formal language, the setting (time and place), and the story. I didn't like the characters, though, as they were either cruel, manipulative, annoying, or stupid. I don't understand why Catherine never married anyone else and why she couldn't see Morris for who he really was. And why did her father insist on being so cruel to his daughter and change his will, years after Morris left? In retrospect, the storyline was pretty well drawn out and kind of weird - dwelling on the Catherine/Morris ill-fated romance for over 20 years. But I still loved the book and the narration was spot on. Now I want to see the movie again, as well as a later version of the movie that I have not seen before.
    • 2/5
      Morris and Catherine love with each other . But Catherine's father does not like Morris .I think sometimes parents should not say " No. " for their children's love .Of course , maybe parents love their children . So they are worried about their children.But everyone has each personality .So I hope love of Morris and Catherine is congraturated by everyone .
    • 4/5
      I listened to the Librivox recording of this. The reader's mispronunciation of numerous words was distracting, but otherwise I enjoyed the story, probably one of the few by James simple enough to manage in an audio version.
    • 3/5
      Very dense slow read for me. I thought the character development was genius. But the plot just didn't warrant the density. It could be summarized in 3-5 sentences.
    • 4/5
      Catherine Sloper is a not-so-young woman who really hasn’t much to recommend her or to attract a husband. She is somewhat plain, not terribly intelligent, not accomplished in music, dance, conversation or art. However, she does have a significant income (from her mother’s estate) and expectations of inheriting far more from her father, a brilliant physician in mid-19th-century New York City. At her cousin’s engagement party she meets a handsome gentleman, who, encouraged by her widowed Aunt Lavinia Penniman, begins to pay her particular attention.

      The focus of this entire novel is money. But James manages to craft a tale that explores not only wealth, how it is used and what it means, but social class, family structure, filial obedience, parental responsibility, and strength of character. Catherine may be described by everyone as “sweet, but simple,” but she has a will of steel, and will show her father that he has grossly underestimated her.

      Honestly, I don’t know why I waited so long to read a Henry James novel. For some reason I thought he would be “difficult,” with long, complicated sentence structure and archaic language. If you have the same notion, get over it. This is a very approachable story. I was engaged and interested from the beginning. Of course, now I’ve added more Henry James to my tbr mountain … but I think that’s a good thing.
    • 4/5
       A psychologically acute construction of three interesting characters. Very short chapters with a lot of dialogue exchange, vocal as well as internal. Hardly any prose or description, the characters unfolded and grew as I turned the pages. Very nice.
    • 4/5
      This is a surprisingly ambiguous story with a deceptively simple plot. Set in New York in the early 1900s, the story tells the tale of Catherine Sloper, the rather plain, rather dull daughter of a wealthy, domineering father who becomes the target of a charming gold-digger of a suitor. Will she marry him over the objections of her father? See how simple that is? But this is Henry James, after all, so the plot extends – like the proverbial iceberg - several layers below the surface.Catherine isn’t a terribly sympathetic heroine – her dullness, her lack of intelligence, and her refusal to stick up for herself will almost certainly grate with self-actualized women of the 20th century. However, she’s much more sympathetic than the uniformly unpleasant cast of characters with whom she interacts in this tale, all of whom see her as little more than a tool to be manipulated for their own purposes. Her aunt uses her as the means by which to fulfill her own melodramatic fantasies of secret trysts and the tragedy of doomed love. Her lover sees her as the path to ready fortune and a life of indolence and ease. Even her own father demonstrates heartbreakingly few signs of genuine affection, viewing his daughter alternatively as an interesting scientific experiment (“how will she react if I apply *this* stressor?”) and as a ready affirmation of his own cleverness. The fundamental principle of sarcasm is making the wielder feel superior by belittling another, and in this tale Dr. Sloper wields sarcasm with the same brutal precision he brings to his surgeries.This is no pat morality tale, however, in which the wicked are punished and virtue is rewarded. Nor is it a thematically simplistic novel, characterized by a resolution in which the main characters change or grow in wisdom. The world isn’t as simple as that, and James does us the favor of positing that we know this as well as he does – and that, therefore, we can cope with an ending that is both morally and thematically ambiguous. The novel raises many provoking questions, some of which include: to what extent is a parent justified in preventing their children from making their own mistakes? At what point does principled defiance become merely obstinacy … or, worse, cruelty? To what extent do we (knowingly and unknowingly) justify meddling in the affairs of others to achieve our own ends? Can harm and humiliation caused by the betrayal of others be mitigated by a steadfast refusal never to betray oneself? And is this steadfast determination never to betray one’s own principles an acceptable substitute for living a life devoid of happiness? In other words, despite the relative simplicity of plot, this definitely isn’t the kind of book you take with you to the beach. However, the novel’s moral complexity makes it a worthy read and probably great fodder for book club discussions.

    Book preview

    Washington Square - Henry James

    INTRODUCTION

    Washington Square was published in 1880, when Henry James was still in his thirties. James was born in 1843, and he had grown up in one of the most remarkable American families of the nineteenth century. He was, according to his older brother, William, a member of the James family, and [had] no other country. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a tireless spiritual seeker and a friend of Emerson, Lowell, and other major New England thinkers. William pursued an academic career of great distinction, shaping the development of the disciplines of psychology and philosophy as a professor at Harvard. The family’s only daughter, Alice, spent much of her short life as an invalid, but produced richly interesting letters and journals.

    Henry James, Sr., provided his family with an eccentric but cosmopolitan education. As a child and adolescent, the younger Henry spent years traveling with his family throughout Europe, developing early on the habits of observation and analysis that would mark his mature fictional practice. Even as a teenager, he started to feel the call of a literary vocation; as he read the novels of Turgenev, George Eliot, and Balzac, he began to imagine himself in the company of such writers. He published his first short story in 1864, when he was barely twenty-one and the Civil War was still raging. When he died, over half a century later, in the midst of World War I, he had written more than twenty novels and over a hundred stories—several million words of fiction, together with scores of essays on art and literature, a dozen plays, travel books, biographies, memoirs, and thousands of letters. Many of his fellow writers called him The Master, in tribute to his tireless and lifelong dedication to the craft of fiction.

    At the time he published Washington Square, James had reached a major turning point in his life and writing. Concluding that America did not offer the aesthetic traditions or the social complexity that significant art required, he resolved to settle permanently in Europe. This New York novel thus serves as a kind of valedictory to James’s native land, and it is set specifically in some of the places he had known as a boy. James was born on Washington Place, a small street on the Square’s eastern side. Soon afterwards, the family moved to West 14th Street, where they lived for the next dozen years. Many years later, in a memoir called A Small Boy and Others, James looked back with affection on what he called the small warm dusky homogeneous world of New York in the 1850s. The streets and sights around Washington Square were, in his own phrase, a kind of Eden. He wandered the city’s lanes and avenues and even some of its back alleys, usually in the company of his brother, William, peeking into houses and taverns, visiting Barnum’s American Museum and the circus, delighting in the smells of flowering trees and freshly-baked bread that filled the air in the blocks around his house. When he came to write Washington Square, James included an extended and nostalgic homage to his fond boyhood memories in the novel’s early pages:

    I know not [comments the narrator] whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thorough-fare—the look of having had something of a social history.

    Through his narrator, James is looking back at the pleasant images of his own childhood and at the same time recalling the more intimate scale of antebellum New York—taking the reader back to what he once called a visitable past. The three decades that separate the novel’s action from the time in which James wrote the story encompassed years of ferocious change. After the Civil War, the nation experienced the astonishing industrial and urban development that would transform the United States into the leading economic power in the world, and simultaneously transform New York into the world’s financial capital.

    The New York of the novel is still a fairly quiet place, many of whose inhabitants know each other. The forces of change have already started to assert themselves: one of the characters talks about moving to some farmland uptown, building a new house, and waiting just a few years for the city to grow out to join him. Nonetheless, the general tenor of life in those years was slower, sensitive to custom and the idea of social norms.

    As it must, evil intrudes on the tranquility of this Eden. In his novel, James introduces a small cast of characters, who engage each other in a decorous and almost noiseless struggle, which is nonetheless sustained, bitter, and ultimately destructive. The plot of Washington Square has the simplicity of old-fashioned melodrama: a plain-looking, good-hearted young woman, the only child of a rich widower, is pursued by a charming but unscrupulous man who seeks the wealth she will presumably inherit. On this well-worn and slender premise, Henry James constructed one of his most memorable novels, a story in which love is answered with betrayal and loyalty leads inexorably to despair. Catherine Sloper, in the first impetuous act of her life, gives her love to the fortune-hunting Morris Townsend. Her father, a physician of large talents and even larger income, forbids the marriage, accurately judging her suitor’s character, but permanently blighting his daughter’s life with his cruelty.

    The book has several sources, including Jane Austen’s matchmaking novels and Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. The most proximate origin, as James identified it in his notebooks, was a story that the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble had told at a dinner party. Kemble’s story dealt with her own younger brother, whom she described as luxurious and untrustworthy. He had courted a dull, plain, common-place girl, attracted exclusively by her money. The girl’s father, a Cambridge Master, threatened his daughter with disinheritance if she married. The marriage never took place. When the still handsome, selfish, impecunious young Kemble returned years later, he proposed once again, and was once again refused. H.K.’s selfishness, Fanny Kemble concluded, had overreached itself and this was the retribution of time.

    In translating Fanny Kemble’s story from England to New York, James conferred a distinctively American literary genealogy on Dr. Sloper. Just before he published Washington Square, James had written a book-length biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne. James argued that Hawthorne was the best novelist America had produced, but that even Hawthorne had been trapped by the meagerness of America’s cultural resources. Nonetheless, whatever James’s view of Hawthorne’s limits, Washington Square clearly exhibits Hawthorne’s powerful influence. Dr. Sloper unquestionably recalls that gallery of Hawthorne’s male figures, from Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter to Dr. Rappaccini in Rapaccini’s Daughter, to Ethan Brand, in the story of that name. Cut off from what Hawthorne called the magnetic chain of humanity, these are men who exchange love for a pernicious curiosity, who permit humane feeling to be dominated by manipulative intellect. Like them, Dr. Sloper puts the demands of his superior knowledge ahead of whatever claims love might make. He is right in his suspicions of the fortune-hunting Morris, but the joy he takes in his powers of observation and deduction inflicts a terrible cost.

    His daughter, Catherine, has grown up knowing that he finds her unattractive and unpromising; sadly, these are opinions with which she agrees. And, as the narrator makes clear, she is indeed far from brilliant. But she pays a high and undeserved price for her failure to measure up to her father’s expectations. Although Dr. Sloper is rarely explicit in his cruelty, he regards Catherine with bemused contempt, and treats her with an elegant irony that ultimately reaches to a species of sadism. Mrs. Almond, the shrewder of his two sisters, asks at one point whether he shall ever relent in his opposition to Morris. The doctor’s reply takes the form of a rhetorical question—Shall a geometrical proposition relent?—a self-chosen metaphor that vividly reveals the sterile inhumanity of his own conception of himself.

    Throughout the first half of the novel, Catherine is presented as the passive object of everyone else’s exertions. The unscrupulous Morris wants to maneuver her into a marriage that will assure his permanent comfort. Aunt Lavinia Penniman, Dr. Sloper’s second sister, eager to serve as matchmaker, conspires with Morris out of a brainlessly misconceived benevolence, mainly to satisfy her own longing to play a featured role in a fairy tale elopement. Dr. Sloper challenges Catherine again and again to see Morris’s deficiencies for what they are and give him up.

    Catherine will neither marry Morris in defiance of her father, nor will she renounce him. Midway through the novel, dissatisfied with the stalemate, the doctor decides to take his daughter on an extended tour of Europe. After several months of travel, during which Catherine continues to display a stolid obedience but also continues to receive letters from Morris, the story reaches an emotional climax in a lurid scene set in the Alps. Father and daughter find themselves on a high ridge, separated from their guide and alone together under a threatening sky.

    Dr. Sloper chooses this gothic setting, amid the hard-featured rocks, to challenge her: He stopped in front of her, and stood looking at her with eyes that had kept the light of the flushing snow-summits on which they had been fixed. Then, abruptly, in a low tone, he asked her an unexpected question: ‘Have you given him up?’ In this dangerous setting, his question seems deliberately intended to frighten her: ‘I am not a very good man,’ he tells her. ‘Though I am very smooth externally, at bottom I am very passionate; and I assure you I can be very hard.’

    Even under this duress, Catherine refuses to yield. A few weeks later, in a Liverpool hotel room on the eve of their return to America, the doctor confesses his defeat in an exceptionally vulgar figure of speech: ‘We have fattened the sheep for him before he kills it.’ In the face of this unconscionable assault, Catherine is reduced to dumbstruck silence. Her simple decency begins to assume the dimensions of heroism, though she doesn’t recognize it herself. Heroism is the last thing that this shy, insecure, instinctively agreeable young woman wants for herself. On the contrary, she wants only to be a good daughter, a task that, throughout her life, had actually filled her with great excitement. But her father’s adamantine resistance arouses a strength she never quite suspected she possessed.

    Catherine’s courage is tested again on her return from Europe. When Morris is finally convinced that Dr. Sloper will never accept him as a son-in-law, and that marriage will not bring the wealth he had longed for, he simply walks out. At that point, Catherine has lost whatever chance of happiness she may have had. The adoration that had bound her to her father has been stifled, and the love she has offered to her suitor has been rejected.

    From her own point of view the great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring. Nothing could ever alter these facts; they were always there, like her name, her age, her plain face. Nothing could ever undo the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and nothing could ever make her feel towards her father as she felt in her younger years.

    Though still in her early twenties, she can see all the way to the end of her life, and the vista is unrelievedly bleak.

    In the end, Catherine extracts a kind of revenge on the two men who have wronged her. Though she is absolutely sure she will never marry Morris, she refuses to share that conviction with her father, thus denying him his mean-spirited triumph. He in turn attempts to punish her, by writing her out of his will, but it is a gesture that merely ratifies his own failure. Catherine grows into a quiet middle age, a mild and modestly conservative presence among her nieces and nephews. Two men make marriage proposals, but she rejects them. ‘I didn’t wish to marry,’ is all she can say; but it is clear that her capacity for affection has dried up.

    As for Morris, he reappears in the final pages of the novel, after years of absence, a stout, pathetic figure, stripped of whatever glamour once attracted Catherine. Urged on by the irrepressible Lavinia, Morris makes one last attempt at reconciliation: even her small income would be preferable to the poverty in which he is now trapped. Catherine listens for only a moment or two before she dismisses Morris, then stands alone and motionless, her eyes on the ground. There is no hint of exultation in Catherine’s self-assertion. For her the future holds only survival, and the constant dull ache of the double abandonment she has suffered. The novel’s last sentence captures her fate with chilling precision: Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.

    * * *

    Washington Square was published serially on both sides of the Atlantic. The novel appeared in six installments in England’s Cornhill Magazine and in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in New York, both America and Great Britain. Both magazines included illustrations by the noted artist, George du Maurier. Book publication followed, in December, 1880 (though the original title page is dated 1881). On several occasions, James himself expressed reservations about the book. When it was about to be published, he called it a poorish story in a letter to his friend, William Dean Howells; and he wrote another friend, Grace Norton, that it was a slender tale of rather too narrow an interest. To his brother, William, James wrote that "The young man in Washington Square is not a portrait—he is sketched from the outside merely. . . . The only good thing in the story is the girl. Years later, when he was preparing the great collected edition of his work—the twenty-four volume New York Edition"—Washington Square was among the novels he omitted.

    How to explain James’s small regard for a book that many readers have found irresistible? Perhaps he disliked its reliance on melodrama, or its reduction of several of the main characters to near-caricature. Or perhaps he was reaffirming his discomfort with the American scene in which the story is set. Certainly, he would rarely again set a novel wholly or even in large part in the U.S. (The Bostonians [1885] is perhaps the most significant exception—and James omitted that novel from his New York Edition as well.)

    Beyond that, the novel’s narrative tone is ultimately uncertain. There is a good deal of comedy in the book, and much of it is fine. But the narrator plays his comic part too readily; in particular taking inappropriate liberties with his own limited heroine. It is one thing for the book’s other characters to insist on Catherine’s inadequacies: their callousness is in fact measured to the inch by their treatment of her. It is quite another thing for the narrator to participate in Catherine’s diminishment, since she is intended to provide whatever moral centering the book possesses.

    A couple of examples will suggest the problem. The first occurs early in Morris Townsend’s courtship: ‘We shall meet again,’ he said to Catherine as he left her, and Catherine thought it a very original speech. Rather than simply conveying Catherine’s narrow upbringing and her naiveté, a comment such as this reduces her to lumpishness, and reveals the narrator as a merely sarcastic observer and commentator. Or when Mrs. Penniman suggests that Morris Townsend admired Catherine’s bright red dress: Catherine did not say to herself in the dark, ‘My dress only?’ Mrs. Penniman’s announcement struck her by its richness, not by its meagerness. Here again the narrator’s undisguised superiority to his own heroine effectively subjects her to ridicule, as do his comments on her bad taste in clothes, her indifference to ideas, even her tendency to overeat. Having undercut his main character in such passages, the narrator has difficulty investing her with the gravity her role eventually requires. Even in his early fiction, James’s narrative strategies were usually far more subtle than this.

    Despite the relatively low valuation James set on the novel, Washington Square has remained among his most popular works. One evidence of the book’s enduring success lies in the numerous adaptations that have appeared. The first was a successful stage play, under the title The Heiress (1947), written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Two years later, that script was produced as a first-rate film; directed by William Wyler, this version of The Heiress starred Olivia DeHavilland as Catherine, Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend, and Ralph Richardson as Dr. Sloper. Yet another version of the same script was refilmed for television in 1961, with Julie Harris in the role of Catherine. In 1977, Thomas Pasatieri transformed Washington Square into an opera in three acts. And in 1997, a second Hollywood version of the novel was produced, this time under James’s title; Jennifer Jason Leigh starred as Catherine, with Albert Finney in the role of her father.

    These adaptations, and the novel’s steady sales over the past century, pay tribute to the vitality of James’s achievement. Whatever his own estimate, Washington Square has impressed generations of readers with the energy and insight of its central conflict, with its engaging and often witty narrative voice, with its clear-eyed account of an insular antebellum community, and above all with its unforgettable portrait of a young woman quietly asserting her dignity against the massed pressures of disparagement and greed.

    Peter Conn

    University of Pennsylvania

    Washington Square

    1

    DURING a portion of the first half of the present century, and more particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practiced in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. This profession in America has constantly been held in honor, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of liberal. In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.

    It was an element in Doctor Sloper’s reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not uncomfortably theoretic; and if he sometimes explained matters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one had heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which was after all the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason why Doctor Sloper had become a local celebrity.

    At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at its height. He was very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man of the world—which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I hasten to add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the least of a charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest man—honest in a degree of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete measure; and, putting aside the great good nature of the circle in which he practiced, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the brightest doctor in the country, he daily justified his claim to the talents attributed to him by the popular voice. He was an observer, even a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effect, and had none of the little tricks and pretensions of second-rate reputations. It must be confessed that fortune had favored him, and that he had found the path to prosperity very soft to his tread. He had married, at the age of twenty-seven, for love, a very charming girl, Miss Catherine Harrington, of New York, who in addition to her charms, had brought him a solid dowry. Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful, accomplished, elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of the pretty girls of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery¹ and overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal Street.² Even at the age of twenty-seven Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some of their accompaniments, were for about five years, a source of extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very happy husband.

    The fact of his having married a rich woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which, on his father’s death, he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money—it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful—this was, roughly speaking, the program he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a

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