Curious

In a letter to William Dean Howells, Henry James described his early work Washington Square as “a tale truly American.” After spotting Washington Square on M.’s shelf Easter morning, I eagerly “borrowed” it with James’s own sentiment in mind. I find it less disappointing than James did in retrospective moments.

Instead its transparent, if reductive, vision of American culture proved a stimulating surprise. WS boils American culture down to a handful of shamefully naked parts: a minimalist backdrop, a dull set of four principal characters, and the customary, even cliched, plot most often associated with a comedy of manners.¹ Yet James employs these innocuous elements in order to powerfully illustrate the American mentalité within a subtle, psychological novel.

Washington Square was a setting that James would have found familiar. James consciously constructed this community around sleepy drawing rooms, genteel architecture, and idyllic walkways.² Washington Square’s facades, like most of the characters within the novel, are scarred by a particularly American pretense. Nevertheless, James’s confined backdrop falls in step with the psychological undercurrent in his novel. This constricted setting mirrors the American mentalité with which James took exception.

James’s social commentary on the American mentalité crystallizes as the characters in WS develop. Dr. Sloper and Catherine Sloper deserve special attention in this context. Catherine, despite her empty-headedness and lack of ambition, represents potentiality. She is limited, being neither attractive nor clever. She does not fit into American society because she lacks the brains, physical beauty, and the social ambition that could earn her a role within it. (Ironically, even the artistic skills she possesses can do little to redeem her in the eyes of American society; only her financial assets earn her a second glance for they are tools for those attempting to redeem their own social identity.) Yet James endows Catherine with a deep and enviable impressionability in contrast with both the world-weary characterization of James’s European females and the spirited (even flighty) Daisy Miller. As the novel progresses, Catherine gains readers’ empathy as James develops her moral self.

Dr. Sloper epitomizes the stringent aspects of the American mentalité. His self-assuredness arises from his ability to both know his function and to keep it admirably. He measures others by those same standards. Dr. Sloper’s view of himself (and others) has been solidified through his successful climb up the social ladder via marriage and his social intelligence. The one thing he cannot control, his daughter’s success or failure in society, threatens his hard-earned contentment. Dr. Sloper may have climbed beyond the petty, commercial maneuvering of men like Morris Townsend, but he remains entrapped by the need to keep up appearances, to maintain his standing. His social ascension entraps rather than frees him.

Catherine is his greatest disappointment as she fulfills neither his expectations nor society’s. When Morris Townsend, a young man without prospect or principle, bids for Catherine’s attention, Dr. Sloper’s disappointment swells. Morris’s ability to make significant impressions on Catherine’s psyche both surprises and frustrates Dr. Sloper since he had long ago given up hope for his daughter’s development. Morris’s impact on Catherine threatens Dr. Sloper’s authority, but Dr. Sloper cloaks his disapproval in the language of social mores. Dr. Sloper objects to Morris on the grounds that this young man cannot fulfill a son-in-law’s appropriate function:

“I don’t dislike [Morris] in the least as a friend, as a companion. He seems to me a charming fellow, and I should think he would be excellent company. I dislike him exclusively as a son-in-law. If the only office of a son-in-law were to dine at the paternal table, I should set a high value upon your brother: he dines capitally. But that is a small part of his function, which, in general, is to be a protector and care-taker of my child, who is singularly ill-adapted to take care of herself. It is there that he doesn’t satisfy me. I confess I have nothing but my impression to go by; but I am in the habit of trusting my impression. Of course you are at liberty to contradict it flat. He strikes me as selfish and shallow…”

Of course, Dr. Sloper’s diagnosis seems quite accurate. Although far from monstrous, Morris amply reveals his selfishness, validating Dr. Sloper’s judgment. Yet Catherine is not a child, thus Dr. Sloper’s continual emotional manipulations weary us. He continually asserts her liberty to choose but, much as one would manipulate a child, he also continuously reminds her that her choices will destroy their relationship. He reminds us of all the parents warning their charges: “Do you want to make Mommy sad? If you choose to act like that I will be very upset.” Such emotional manipulation leaves Dr. Sloper, and the reader, jaded. Dr. Sloper’s integrity fades even as his daughter’s begins to blossom. His principled disapproval may seem justified:

“I am helped by a habit I have of dividing people into classes, into types. I may easily be mistaken about [Morris] as an individual, but his type is written on his whole person…the type to which [Morris] belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in question is the determination–sometimes terrible in its quiet intensity–to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going.”

But his disapproval is couched in self-interest and this vulgarity rivals that of Morris Townsend. Dr. Sloper’s tone strikes the wrong chord. Catherine has seen all that he and his worldview has to offer (e.g., her travels abroad) and rejected it by consciously choosing another life. When his impressionable daughter embraces her liberty, Dr. Sloper’s attempts to protect his artless daughter become a means of suppressing her instead. The father may be a principled ruler, but he is far from a “very good man.”

In Washington Square, James betrays his readers’ initial expectations. While the artless Miss Sloper begins as a misfortune, she ends as a Jamesian triumph. Her prospects never shift (Catherine remains a spinster), but she gains momentum as a moral force within the novel. Her moral success begs the reader to reevaluate the overreaching social mores which guide and enforce the American way of life even as Dr. Sloper’s moral failure challenges the integrity of American dogmatism.³

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¹Many critics point out the ironic parallels between James’s tale and those of Jane Austen, an author for whom James offered little praise.

²Although Washington Square is the birthplace of Henry James, it remained his home for only two years before the family began their extensive travels abroad; his childhood experience in Washington Square probably entailed little more than those same benches and drawing rooms in which Catherine Sloper spent so much time.

³William James, Henry James’s brother, popularized early American Pragmatism. “He developed the notion of truth as a “leading” that is useful: it can change as human experience changes. The morality, as well as the truth, of an idea or action should be judged, according to James, in a similar way — in terms of its outcome in human experience.”