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.

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