Henry James

wrap up of Washington Square

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When Henry James invites us into the house on Washington Square, Austin Sloper isn't a happy man. His only living child, Catherine, is disappointing, dull and stolid - by his assessment during a European trip "she's about as intelligent as a bundle of shawls."

 

Dr. Sloper married an lively, elegant woman who had "the most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan", claiming in retrospect that his program in life was to learn something and be useful and "the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity". Unfortunately the son his wife bore, died at the age of three and the wife also succumbed after the birth of Catherine a bit later. And Dr. Sloper was left with viewing life through the thwarted lens of grief and loss - and judgment.

 

Catherine, now twenty-two, endowed with a generous trust from her deceased mother, knew little of life when she met dashing Morris Townsend, a distant relative of a cousin's bridegroom. Morris zeroed in on our heroine, decked out in a red dress trimmed in feathers, like shark to chum, and for naïve Catherine, the rest was history.

 

Understandably the good doctor wanted to know more about this gentleman who appeared to be monopolizing his seemingly unattractive daughter, wondering if the money alone accounted for the magnetism. Through some sleuthing of his own, he learned that Morris was an idler, a squander of an earlier inheritance, now living apparently "upon" his sister. This information confirmed all his suspicions about Morris 'mercenary intentions.

 

To Catherine, Morris was astonishingly handsome - "he had features like young men in pictures...he looked like a statue". After years of being sidelined she was dazzled to have gained his attention and, "the present had suddenly grown rich and solemn."

 

But not so for Dr. Sloper.

 

The rest of the story seesaws over the strong wills of father and daughter, each trying various stratagems to bring the other around to his point of view.

 

Acting as comic relief to the struggle is Dr. Sloper's sister, Lavinia. When Catherine was 10, her father invited Lavinia to come live with them as a feminine mentor for his daughter in the absence of her mother. Said James, "she accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie." Lavinia is a matchmaker and does everything in her power to smooth the way to the altar for Morris and Catherine, while trying to stay in her brother's good graces and keep a luxurious roof over her head, a high-wire walk indeed.

 

When despite all her efforts, Catherine realizes that her father is not to be dissuaded; she steels her heart against him and heads down a lonely independent path. Even bundles of shawls take shape when pressed hard enough!

 

Henry James anoints his prose with layers and layers of nuance. One reading gives you the meager plot, the second the humor, irony, delight, social satire, and genius of his writing.  The characters though placed in an era of stringent social strictures, exhibit the same emotions, longings and dreams of the present day readers. There is treachery, disappointment, betrayal, but there is also, the triumph of the individual who acts decisively in crisis. While no Austen happy ending, something propels us back again and again to the ending where Catherine in the parlor, picks up her morsel of fancywork and sits down with it again -"for life, as it were."

 

Ah, we too settle.