Washington Square

Dr. Sloper, a kitten drowner at heart, knows what his daughter should do and indeed, were she a kitten drowner too, it would have all worked out for the best. But instead, she is too sensitive and is hurt by everyone. Her sensitivity is all she had going for her and when she learned not to trust it, she has nothing going for her. In a tragedy, the protagonist's flaw leads them to disaster but the reader gets something out of it. Here, the father prevents that from happening and no one gets anything out of it.

Washington Square is a masterful study in character. James doesn't set a foot wrong in detailing the actions and reactions of his four main characters as they swirl around a particular event: the proposal of marriage between Morris Townsend and Catherine Sloper.

Catherine's father, the Doctor, is sure that Townsend is a gold digger and threatens to disinherit Catherine if she says yes. Her aunt, Lavinia Penniman, is an incurable romantic who is set on her niece's marrying Townsend. Catherine herself is deeply in love, and will believe nothing bad about her intended. The situation is ripe for tragedy -- someone is bound to be hurt, and that someone is Catherine.

Although presented as undesirable and simple to the point of stupidity, show more Catherine never loses her integrity of character. Although presented as submissive, she nevertheless retains her individuality, and refuses to bend to her father's demands. Her tragedy is realizing that the two people for whom she felt the most love and respect do not return her esteem. Yet this knowledge does not break her. She sets her course and follows it to the end.

James' trademark ambiguity of feeling and precision of prose are both showcased in this short work. POV is omniscient third, structure is linear. show less

This is a re-read. Although my rating hasn't changed, I thought I'd jot down a few things that occurred to me while listening to this.

This is my first experience with a Henry James audiobook, and the feeling was quite different from holding a book in one's hands and letting the eyes do the walking. For one, I found the narrator's voice a surprise: not completely an unpleasant one, but a distinct difference from the voice I heard in my head, when reading it. By this narrator's standards, Sloper is positively stentorian with an over-the-top sensibility about it all, running as an undercurrent: and so he gave me a constant image in my head of a Dastardly Do-Right caricature, twirling his moustache, and pursing his lips; Catherine came show more through as rather nasally and whiny, and who stopped just a hair's breadth from an unfortunate lisp; Lavinia Penniman sounded like another nasal babbler with far too much petulance; and Morris Townsend was presented as a younger Dastardly Do-Right, sans moustache and definitely twirling an ebony cane at all times, even while he slept. He also came across as positively adenoidal at times.

The trouble is, I see none of these characters quite in the same light as does this narrator, so it presents a problem of interpretation. If I went by this alone, I would say Henry James was the greatest purveyor of early overly-sudsy soap operas: melodramatic, improbable, unconvincing, artificial, superficial ... the list is long.

On the other hand, when I read James I have a sense of his melodrama, yes, but also of his amazing ability to paint Human Nature, with the eye of a miniaturist par excellence. His analysis of human foibles and exploits; his representation of the vagaries of the human heart and spirit; his ability to slice through eccentricities and weaknesses and frailties is really marvellous. I see too, where he overlaps with Dickens in zeroing in on the idiosyncratic; how he confronts melodrama with high art.

That's who Henry James is for me.

I did enjoy the "experience" of the audiobook, and I think I will seek out more -- but I'll be careful to screen the narrator next time.

As to the novel itself, I find satisfaction in Catherine's ultimate awakening. I see her as a somnambulist: sleep-walking her way through her life, paying lip-service to father, aunt, young man. While she may appear to be opposing her father by staying true to her engagement, it still demands no real action on her part. She blithely follows her father around for a year whereas any young woman of heart or passion might have kicked the old man in the shins and run off with Townsend. It would have ended in ultimate heartbreak, no doubt, but at least she would have been awake and feeling something.

While there is a hint of passion within her feeble attempts to encourage Townsend to commit himself, she gives up far too easily and one intuits almost a sense of relief as she gives her life up to the humdrum. Suitors are dismissed off-handedly: she shows no interest in living; only in existing.

Very early on, Sloper describes her as "lacking animation" and of having no real vitality. That is the clue, for me -- the word origin points to Catherine's complaint: no life, no breath, no animus -- wherein soul is the breath of life, and Catherine's lack of it suggests she has yet to come to life, to take possession of her own soul. For most of the book, someone else owns her soul and she inertly refuses to re-possess it.

It takes her twenty years to take a breath and animate herself. While in the end, she only chooses embroidery, at least she chooses something positive and creative. To have chosen Townsend would have been to have chosen death by consumption, for he would have eaten her very soul. While Sloper may have been a despicable old beast by withholding love and compassion, at the very least you could say he saved her from a fate worse than death for Catherine would have withered and died early in Townsend's grasp. show less

What can you say about Henry James? I found this to be the most accessible of his novels that I've read. But like Portrait of a Lady, I came to despise many of the characters and to wish that others would catch the clue bus. The sense of slow, inexorable, relentlessly impending doom was both compelling and frustrating, as it was in Portrait of a Lady. You want to shake James's protagonists or slap them silly or yell at them "Don't fall for that S.O.B.!" the same way that you want to yell "Don't go in the basement!" to the clueless victim in a horror film.

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 show more 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 show less

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, show more 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. show less

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