Washington Square
James, Henry. Washington Square. New York: The Modern Library, 2002.
Don’t undervalue irony; it is often of great use.
- Dr. Austin Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square
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Henry James didn’t much like Washington Square when he initially published it in 1880. A quarter century later, while compiling a volume of his fiction for republication, he opted to leave Washington Square out. Though I subscribe to the school that believes an author is not necessarily the best judge of his or her own works, I find myself in agreement with James in this instance.
At its outset, the novel, set in early 19th-century New York, shows considerable promise as a tale of young lovers grappling with a father’s disapproval. Morris Townsend, an attractive but unemployed young man recently returned from Europe, pursues the plain and altogether unremarkable Catherine Sloper, who has inherited $10,000 per year from her late mother and stands to inherit an additional $20,000 per year upon the death of her father, the widely respected physician Dr. Austin Sloper. Dr. Sloper naturally opposes his daughter’s engagement to a man who has already squandered his own inheritance and lives on the meager income of his widowed sister, while Dr. Sloper’s flighty and mettlesome sister, Mrs. Penniman, promotes the match by serving as an unsolicited and rather unreliable intermediary between the two lovers.
Washington Square is not a bad book, per se; rather, its insufficiency lies in its want of a sympathetic, admirable, or remotely likable character. Morris proves to be the mercenary Dr. Sloper believed him to be all along, as he abandons Catherine when it becomes clear that her father will disinherit her if she becomes Morris’s wife. Rather than comforting his daughter, though, Dr. Sloper derives a sadistic pleasure from his daughter’s pain. Indeed, ”he rather enjoyed having to be so disagreeable” to his daughter during her engagement, and when his sister states, “It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have been trifled with,” the doctor’s response is one of cold triumph: “It does [. . .] for I had foretold it! It’s a great pleasure to be in the right.” Even Mrs. Penniman, who ought to serve as Catherine’s surrogate mother and confidante, exploits the drama of her niece’s situation for her own amusement, using Dr. Sloper’s objections to Morris as an excuse to arrange secret meetings with him in unfamiliar churches and neighborhoods. When Catherine goes to meet with Morris, Mrs. Penniman feels disappointment not because her niece’s lover has left her jilted, but rather because she disapproves of the setting: “To visit one’s lover, with tears and reproaches at his own residence, was an image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman’s mind that she felt a sort of aesthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case, the harmonious accompaniments of a dark storm.” The unceasingly ironic narrator mocks them all, but the humor does not disguise the fact that an attractive, lazy man seeks to take advantage of an innocent young woman while her bored and wealthy elders look upon her trials as entertainment.
I had hoped that Catherine would emerge an acceptable heroine. Indeed, she does speak her mind with honesty and conviction at several points in the novel, prompting even her father to experience “a sudden sense of having underestimated his daughter.” She also displays a more powerful control of her emotions than most young women in her situation could evince. But, on the whole, Catherine is neither beautiful nor brave. James frequently describes Catherine as healthy, large, and having a broad back, meaning, in addition to having a plain face and no special accomplishments to attract suitors or friends, she is unbecomingly plump. Shy and largely submissive, she initially lacks the passion for Morris to defy her father but later cannot move past Morris to consider another suitor. Catherine is astounding only in that she is so quintessentially average and frustrating in that she, along with the other three main characters, neither grows nor changes over the course of the novel. More than twenty years later, Dr. Sloper’s wishes dictate from the grave, Morris and Mrs. Penniman continue to conspire, and Catherine is content to live out her life as a spinster doing needlework on her porch. Though the writing throughout Washington Square is fluid and funny, the lack of a satisfactory hero or heroine and the stasis of plot and character render the novel as lackluster and disappointing as Catherine Sloper herself.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comments (2)Thirteen Moons
Frazier, Charles. Thirteen Moons. New York: Random House, 2006.
She seemed full and complete. Though the rational, unraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever. We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.
- Will Cooper in Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons
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Like Charles Frazier‘s previous best-selling novel, Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons is a beautiful, enthralling novel embracing multiple genres, enveloping a tale of frustrated love in naturalism, history, and politics. We first meet the novel’s hero, Will Cooper, as a 12-year-old orphan sold into indentured servitude at a frontier outpost by his aunt and uncle. Will rides west alone, save the companionship of his horse, Waverly, along the way encountering the girl who will both fill and break his heart, Claire, and his nemesis, Featherstone. Upon arriving at the store he must keep, Will meets Bear, the Cherokee who later adopts Will as his son.
I expect the Will-Claire-Featherstone love triangle has already captured the attention of filmmakers. Will first meets Claire after winning her from Featherstone, her husband in name, at a late-night card game, only to have her stolen back that same night. Will finds her again as a teenager, and together they indulge in a season of hormonal hedonism that eventually ends in a rather comical duel between Will and Featherstone. But Jackson’s Indian Removal policy soon takes effect, and Claire, a mixed-blood, heads west to Indian Territory, while Will makes the tortured decision to stay behind and aid his adopted family, Bear and the Cherokee of Wayah.
The Cherokee of Thirteen Moons are refreshingly human. Unlike the noble but destined-to-die Uncas and the savage Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, the inhabitants of Wayah live lives characterized by pastimes other than the shedding of tears and blood. They hunt and farm. They drink. They throw bawdy parties that feature costumed caricatures of the English, French and Spanish with wooden heads and fake phalluses. And, most importantly, they realize the need to innovate in order to ensure their survival and maintain control of their ancestral lands. Bear recognizes the authority of paper deeds and private property in the white civilization enveloping his people and begins buying the land on which Wayah is built before Will arrives. Will in turn uses the profits from the stores he acquires in his late teens to finance the purchase of additional tracts, thereby expanding Wayah’s holdings slowly, deliberately, and legally, eventually merging the land and its people into the one unassailable American institution: the corporation. The Cherokee thus employ the whites’ own devices against them. In addition, Will employs his skills as an autodidact lawyer to thwart the U.S. government’s many attempts to move the Wayah Cherokee westward. Under the joint leadership of Bear and young Will, the tiny Indian empire grows, its vast square mileage dependent on a tenuous balance of loans, debts, trades, and the whim of the War Department. Though less racy than the affair with Claire, the politics of Indian Removal dominate Thirteen Moons, as Frazier incorporates historical figures from Andrew Jackson (whom Will calls the Old Possum after forming the opinion that Jackson’s hair resembles a dead opossum) to Elias Boudinot to illustrate the callousness with which Indians were forced west and, in some cases, betrayed by their own wealthier advocates.
As Will ages and Eastern politicians, most of whom have never encountered an Indian, implement Removal, the exuberance of Will’s youth gives way to actuality, and, after years of chasing a woman who will not marry him and fighting for an Indian nation the whites in power would just as soon exterminate, the energetic hero of Thirteen Moons arrives at the unfortunate reality of his own limitations and moral flaws. While Will suffers perennial guilt for sacrificing an Indian rebel to the U.S. military in exchange for Wayah’s continued existence, he views his ownership of slaves with unapologetic ambiguity. As a Confederate colonel, Will leads his Cherokee soldiers into admittedly stupid skirmishes that cost lives and achieve nothing. And, while constantly travelling in an effort to escape his heartbreak, Will allows his business interests to crumble, thus endangering the livelihood of the very community he worked so long to save.
As the years progress, the whites keep coming. They arrive in never-ending waves. The world Will sees as an old man only faintly resembles that of his youth, as the railroad and the logging and the immigration have transformed and broken and scarred the land. After a lifetime of effort, the aged Will feels the weight of his own inefficacy, similar to though lesser than the feeling of loss and futility most 19th-century Indians must have felt after decades of broken treaties, renegotiations, Removal, and outright warfare. Thirteen Moons concludes with an old man ritualizing his own powerlessness, firing bird shot at a train it will not penetrate or impede, feebly demanding attention without effecting change. Will continues his fight for justice — ironically, weakly, but nonetheless noticeably — reminding us in short yet violent bursts of the human price of nation building.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comments (3)Adam Bede
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Signet Classics, 2004.
Adam [. . .] had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy. [. . .] Desire has chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.
- from George Eliot’s Adam Bede
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Though rife with insight into human folly and heartbreak, George Eliot‘s Adam Bede (originally published in 1859) gets off to a slow start. Eliot sets her novel in the English village of Hayslope in 1799 and devotes the first 300+ pages of her novel to character development, presenting an expansive cast of characters in which everyone has his or her foil. The meticulous and hardworking carpenter, Adam Bede, stands in stark contrast to the wealthy and flippant Arthur Donnithorne, who joins the army only to preoccupy himself until he can inherit his fortune from an elderly uncle. The Methodist preacher and mill worker, Dinah, reaches out to those living the most dreary and desperate lives, while Mr. Irwin, the Anglican clergyman, enjoys a comfortable life and offers little religious guidance. Mrs. Poyser, the garrulous yet dedicated dairy mistress, is the opposite of her beautiful yet vain niece, Hetty, who spends her nights modeling her jewelry in front of the mirror. Adam loves Hetty; Hetty desires Arthur; Arthur longs to be liked by everyone. Adam’s brother, Seth, loves Dinah; Dinah loves the Lord. In the beginning, Adam Bede is a slow-moving story of laborious and often unrequited love.
Eliot reveals her penchant for drama in the latter part of the novel, where we see the extent to which Eliot understated Hetty and Arthur’s earlier involvement. Hetty, now engaged to Adam, finds herself pregnant by Arthur, who is in Ireland receiving military training. (No one notices the pregnancy, as Eliot frequently describes Hetty as pleasantly plump even before the pregnancy.) Hetty sells her jewelry and burns through her savings in an effort to reach Arthur, only to discover that travel is more expensive and Arthur farther away than she had anticipated. Arthur is a wealthy landlord; Hetty is an orphan and a peasant. She lacks money and options, and all she can look forward to is shame. Therefore, Hetty commits the crime she hoped would save her but which instead destroys the lives of those who love her — she commits infanticide, shaming the Poysers, and devastating Adam, and horrifying all of Hayslope.
Adam Bede thus becomes a novel about healing and surviving. While Hetty goes to prison, the Poysers remain on their farm and endure her humiliation. Arthur, despite inheriting his uncle’s estate, enters a voluntary exile, ironically finding life safer in the army than among his own tenants. Adam works, expands his house, and cares for his mother. Time passes. And through his pain Adam grows, emerging a wiser man capable of choosing a wiser love the second time around. Adam Bede is a novel that every high school girl should read, for it teaches us that our youthful heartache has a purpose and that our pain transforms us into better people.
Yet the story’s more uncertain moral, if we can even call it that, centers on what constitutes a good Christian. Everyone in the novel is a Christian in the vague sense of the word. Hetty attends church every Sunday, though she absorbs none of what is said. Mr. Irwin is amiable but apathetic, giving short sermons and saying little about God, even while speaking at Arthur’s coming-of-age party, a perfect opportunity to impress his young friend’s Christian duties upon him. Only Dinah, the travelling preacher woman, the aberrant Methodist, embraces the true essence of Christianity, reading her Bible rather than having it read to her, visiting Hetty in prison while her family shuns her, and coaxing Hetty to confession through patient prayer. Dinah chooses to live among the poor, for it is the poor and despondent who need her most. And yet, ironically, this model Christian is hindered at the novel’s end when the Wesleyan Conference outlaws female preaching. In Adam Bede, good clearly triumphs over evil in matters of the heart, but the novel’s spiritual tensions remain unresolved when patriarchal tradition trumps Dinah’s selfless and all-inclusive Christian love. While the novel opens with Dinah’s sermon, it closes with her submission and silence.
Adam Bede is thus a bittersweet story, for it questions as it soothes. While blatantly “bad” characters are punished (or punish themselves) in accordance with their crimes, the lives of the righteous and good are far from easy. The difference — the comfort, I suppose — is that the good at least learn from their pain, and while they do not overcome it, they build on it, and prosper.
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