Daisy Miller and Washington Square (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Henry James and Jennie A. Kassanoff

Daisy Miller and Washington Square, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

Strikingly modern in its psychological insight, social observation and stylistic innovation, Henry James’s fiction continues to attract and intrigue readers a century after its initial appearance. This volume offers two of his most popular and critically admired novellas: Daisy Miller and Washington Square.

In Daisy Miller, James paints a vivid portrait of a vibrant young American girl visiting Europe for the first time. Lovely, flirtatious, eager for experience, Daisy meets a wealthy American, Mr. Winterbourne, and a penniless but passionate Italian. Her complex encounters with them and others allow James to explore one of his favorite themes, the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.

Washington Square’s Catherine Sloper is Daisy Miller’s opposite. Neither pretty nor charming, she lives with her wealthy, widowed, tyrannical father, Dr. Austin Sloper, who can barely conceal his disdain for his shy, awkward daughter. When a handsome suitor, Morris Townsend, comes calling, Catherine’s father refuses to believe he is anything other than a heartless fortune hunter and sets out to destroy her romance.

Jennie A. Kassanoff is Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly and PMLA. Her book, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432031

Henry James

Henry James (1843–1916) was an American writer, highly regarded as one of the key proponents of literary realism, as well as for his contributions to literary criticism. His writing centres on the clash and overlap between Europe and America, and The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as his most notable work.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

It is, I think, an indisputable fact, Henry James remarked in 1879, that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world. This striking claim was delivered the year his first success, Daisy Miller: A Study, was published in book form, and a year prior to the serial publication of his quintessentially New York novel, Washington Square (published in book form in 1881); it highlights James’s fascination with his native land and equally reveals his own share in its self-consciousness. As James remarked in Hawthorne (1879), his extended study of the writer, the experimental element had not as yet entirely dropped out of the great political undertaking of the United States, and as a result, Americans were singularly conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family. Like adolescents exiled to the children’s table at some big family celebration, Americans felt themselves the victims of an international conspiracy to undervalue them. As James noted, they had been placed on the circumference of the circle of civilization rather than at the centre, a geometric and constella tional vantage point that offered few consolations. In orbit around the cultures of Britain and France, America was troubled by a lurking sense of relativity. While Europe’s ancient monarchies luxuriated in a quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards [their] own position[s] in the world, the United States was forced to renegotiate its national contract with every election, submitting to vote decisions that, in Europe, were the divine right of kings.

Like many of his contemporaries, James saw democracy as an ongoing challenge not only to traditional politics and aesthetics, but equally to America’s national identity. In the decade following the Civil War, as the country’s centennial loomed on the horizon, Americans found themselves deliberating anew on the core possibilities of democracy. As James himself admitted in Hawthorne, the postwar world was a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. Within this increasingly pluralist context, democracy seemed less an abstract aspiration than a hardscrabble process. As Dana D. Nelson has ob served, citizens had to develop their social and political subjectivi ties in relation to multiple, local, and nonidealized relationships with others, rather than in accordance with a single, stylized, aristocratic model (Representative/Democracy, p. 220; see For Further Reading). In coming to terms with the postwar period’s unwieldy new sense of proportion and relation, James found himself faced with two competing models of democratic practice: an abstract universality associated with antebellum democracy, and the embodied particularity of direct, postwar political engagement (Berlant, Uncle Sam Needs a Wife, p. 144). Drawing on the curiously relevant debates circulating around late-nineteenth-century mathematics, James offered a critique of America’s great political undertaking in both Daisy Miller: A Study and Washington Square.

James described Daisy Miller as the "little tragedy ... of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed as it were to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head and to which she stood in no measurable relation" (quoted in Edel, The Life of Henry james, p. 520; emphasis added). The story is indeed a meditation on measurability. When the American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne first encounters the strikingly, admirably pretty Daisy Miller, he straightaway sets out to quantify and categorize her. From the outset, she is not singular, but plural—an aggregated type rather than a distinctive individual: How pretty they are! he thinks (p. 8). In his quest for the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller (p. 14), Winterbourne is not alone. The majority of his American colony similarly seeks to account for Daisy’s particularity in mathematically generic terms. Like Mrs. Walker, the American hostess who collects specimens of her diversely-born fellow-mortals to serve, as it were, as text-books (p. 46), and Mrs. Costello, who can barely distinguish Miss Miller from her nearly identical cohorts (that young lady‘s—Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler‘s—what’s her name? [p. 51]), so Winterbourne himself struggles to identify how far [Daisy’s] eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal (p. 55). Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? (p. 14). When the members of his expatriate circle in Rome accuse poor little Miss Miller of going really ‘too far,’ Winterbourne’s regret takes a predictably fixed form: It was painful to hear so much that was pretty and undefended and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder (p. 53). Like his itemizing compatriots, Winterbourne cannot imagine disorder beyond its paradoxical categorization.

Winterbourne judges Daisy according to a set of conventional norms rather than a cluster of metaphysical truths. For all his inner debates, he ultimately agrees with the verdict of those who intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative—was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal (p. 54). In the normative world of Daisy Miller, there can be no decree more damning. Daisy’s behavior is not so much wicked as it is atypical. As Winterbourne’s aunt Mrs. Costello blandly observes, Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough (p. 33).

Like Winterbourne and his cohort of reproving Americans, early critics of Daisy Miller took pains to classify and typologize James’s heroine. The Nation, marveling that no American book of its size has been so much read and so much discussed, saw the story as a cautionary tale. It is a perfect study of a type not, alas! uncommon. Daisy was the garish American tourist par excellence. The journal could only hope that Daisy Miller would find its way aboard all the ocean steamers that set sail across the Atlantic, and thereby be so presented to the ‘moral consciousness’ of the American people that they, being quickwitted, may see themselves here truthfully portrayed, and may say, ‘Not so, but otherwise will we be’ (James’s Daisy Miller, p. 106). The critic for the North American Review, Richard Grant White, agreed that in Daisy Miller Mr. James has undertaken to give a characteristic portrait of a certain sort of American young woman, who is unfortunately too common. The text, he hoped, would have a corrective effect on American travelers: It is perhaps well that [James] has made this study, ... which should show European critics of American manners and customs the light in which the Daisy Millers are regarded by Americans themselves (James’s Daisy Miller, p. 107).

Other readers, however, were not so sanguine. Daisy Miller was an outrage on American girlhood, they declared (James, Daisy Miller; Pandora; The Patagonia; and Other Tales, p. v). Indeed, her story was so scandalous as to cast doubt on James’s patriotism. The New York Times, for one, took this charge seriously enough to mount a spirited rebuttal. Mr. James, the Times insisted, was obviously possessed by a sincere patriotism: Only someone truly committed to his country could [consecrate] his talents to the enlightening of his countrywomen in the view which cynical Europe takes of the performance of the American girl abroad (James’s Daisy Miller, p. 103).

For his own part, James grew weary of the debate and eventually tried to put the matter to rest. In the twenty-four-volume New York Edition (1909), he summarily dropped the story’s subtitle, A Study, and insisted that the tale had neither prescriptive nor descriptive designs on American womanhood. My little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms, James explained (Daisy Miller, p. vi). His readers were not to confuse art with life: My supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else (p. viii). This effort to contain Daisy’s multiple meanings, however, seems nothing if not a self-conscious parody of Winterbourne’s own effete aestheticism. As Winterbourne strolls into the malarial Roman arena, blithely quoting Byron, he belatedly recalls that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors (p. 57). As a fictional character himself, Winterbourne’s insistence on the difference between art (the poets) and life (the doctors) is an awkward one. An aesthetic taxonomist of the worst kind, his empirical observations are too little and too late.

In probing such distinctions between art and life, and the generic and the specific, Daisy Miller exposes the tension between what Russ Castronovo has called the conservative true democrat and the more revolutionary radical democrat. According to Castronovo, the true democrat is the citizen who imagines freedom as a freedom from society. His activist counterpart, the radical democrat, however, sees freedom as the freedom to participate in the daily forms and activities that constitute community (Necro Citizenship, p. 142). Winterbourne is, in this respect, the cautious true democrat. Because he worships conformity, stasis, and polite restraint, he relies on the bland certitude of standard categories. Faced with Daisy’s extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity, Winterbourne can only accuse her of a want of finish (p. 10). Displaying the true democrat’s antipathy toward inconclusiveness and disorder, he rejects her unfinished appearance—an appearance that threatens democratic consensus and closure (see Nelson, p. 240).

Unlike Winterbourne, who begins and concludes Daisy Miller in the same place—‘studying’ hard in Geneva and rumored to be much interested in a very clever foreign lady (p. 62)—Daisy herself charts a dynamic path through the text. Resisting the docent culture of museums where dreadful old men ... explain about the pictures and things (p. 38), she insists instead upon unscripted, unmediated encounters with the real. She rejects tour guides of all sorts, balking at the repeated interference of the vigilant matrons who would police her behavior. Like her literary successor, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Daisy wants to see for [her]self (James, The Portrait of a Lady, p. 203). She longs to generate a little fuss—to experience the messy turmoil of direct, democratic engagement (p. 26). Thus, when the American ingenue bids goodnight to Winterbourne after their second meeting, she playfully remarks, I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something! (p. 27). Craving dissent, Daisy seeks a public sphere in which one can speak one’s mind without the stifling intervention of self-styled representatives or chap erones. Hers is a world of direct democracy. Unlike Winterbourne, who cloaks his desire to see her beneath the conventional pretense that he has come to Rome to visit his aunt, Daisy is alarmingly direct: I don’t want you to come for your aunt, ... I want you to come for me (p. 30). Like her frank gaze (she avoided neither his eyes nor those of any one else; she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she saw that people were looking at her [p. 28]), Daisy covets the electric possibilities of direct connection. When Winterbourne questions the wisdom of her intention to speak to her Italian suitor, Giovanelli, in a public park, she immediately replies, Do I mean to speak to him? Why, you don’t suppose I mean to communicate by signs? (p. 39). For Daisy, communicating by signs would be the equivalent of trailing a curator around a museum: Both would frustrate her desire for immediate participation in the unpredictable possibilities of the real. She thus rejects Winterbourne’s abstract devotion to honor and gallantry, insisting instead on the candor and volatility of original, local experience. To Winterbourne’s lurid insinuation that she has been walk[ing] about the streets with her Roman beau, Daisy responds with vibrant literalism: About the streets? ... Where then would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio is not the streets, either (p. 48).

In insisting on a little fuss, Daisy rejects Winterbourne’s empty iconoclasm. Whereas Mrs. Costello’s nephew plans his most spontaneous gestures and daydreams in set pieces, Daisy relies on the capricious dynamics of flirtation. In this respect, James’s heroine exposes what Chris Castiglia has called a skeptical space within conventional commitments (Castiglia, The Genealogy of a Democratic Crush, p. 210). By challenging those customs that demand the sacrifice of local loyalties to the seemingly greater good of abstract national allegiance, flirtation opens ... a realm of practical democracy (Castiglia, p. 209). It contests the conservative true democrat’s allegiance to contractual institutions like religion, law, social etiquette, and representational politics, and instead requires the operation of trust on a local and contingent basis (Castiglia, p. 211 ).

Winterbourne himself acknowledges that flirtation is a loaded and potentially subversive activity. Little American flirts, he silently observes, are the queerest creatures in the world (p. 49). He had known, here in Europe, two or three women—persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands—who were great coquettes—dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations were liable to take a serious turn (p. 14). Yet despite this amusing hyperbole, Winterbourne’s observations only partly account for the fearful, frightful potential of the flirt (p. 48). Daisy’s playful, narrative-defying prattle and her circular, coquettish habit of going round undermine the linear link between cause and effect. Refusing to speculate on the future, she focuses instead on the inchoate pleasures of the here and now.

Daisy’s insistence on seeing the Colosseum by moonlight draws its dramatic force precisely from such participative urges. The Roman ruin, the scene of an ancient culture’s violent sport, grounds the narrative in the rough-and-ready world of visceral engagement. Despite his exhilarated discovery of Daisy’s compromised state—she is, after all, alone with a man near midnight—Winterbourne cannot renounce his habit of cautious criticism (p. 58). Turning to Giovanelli, he remonstrates, I wonder ... that you, a native Roman, should countenance such a terrible indiscretion. The Italian’s reply, Ah, ... for myself, I am not afraid, highlights the difference between the two men. Whereas Giovanelli has imbibed Daisy’s radical ethic of personal agency (when was the Signorina ever prudent? he asks), Winterbourne relies on the true democrat’s system of political substitutions: I am speaking for this young lady. Daisy, however, insists on her own embodied self-determination: I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be! ... I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! (p. 59). Unlike Mrs. Walker and her taxonomic collection of diversely-born fellow-mortals, Daisy treats herself and her friends as living, breathing human beings. Rejecting her country-woman’s bookish sensibilities, she focuses instead on the Roman’s physical charm: He is the handsomest man in the world (p. 36), the beautiful Giovanelli (p. 37).

Daisy’s insistence on Giovanelli’s tangible embodiment stands at odds with Winterbourne’s canned depictions of Daisy herself: She is either a delicate young girl lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria (p. 58) or a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect (p. 58). From this perspective, Winterbourne’s desire to know whether Daisy and Giovanelli are engaged takes on a great deal of significance. In glibly dismissing the matter—it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not! (p. 59)—he implies that Daisy’s intimacy with the Italian has little to do with conventional professions of marital intent. For all of Winterbourne’s flippancy, however, the very fact that Daisy, on her deathbed, insists that she never was engaged to that handsome Italian (p. 60), underscores the importance of the question to the story’s outcome. Had she been formally engaged, Daisy would have put an end to the indeterminate and fundamentally playful dynamics that animated her status as a radical democrat. Instead of ceding her political options to a man—the ultimate chaperone for the nineteenth-century middle-class woman—Daisy embraces the flirtatious limbo that postpones the static certainty of marriage. I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do, she insists (p. 39). Indeed, inasmuch as Daisy uses her parasol to transform public spaces into furtively private enclaves, so she equally converts abstract issues into material matters. After knowing Winterbourne for only a few days in Vevey, she [made] it a personal matter that [he] should have left the place—much to Mrs. Walker’s astonishment (p. 44). To borrow Castiglia’s formulation, Daisy shift[s] the balance of power, making public spaces private, abstract functionaries familiar, powerful men needy, and abject citizens possessed of the power to satisfy a national hunger (p. 211). While she is not engaged in a marital sense, she is deeply engaged in a political one.

Daisy’s death by malaria exposes the perils of this visceral type of democratic participation. In a story peppered with petty somatic complaints (Mrs. Miller’s dyspepsia, Randolph’s tooth loss, Mrs. Costello’s headaches), Daisy alone falls victim to a genuine contagion so fierce that it withstands the palliations of Eugenio’s splendid pills (p. 59). Although she is dying to be exclusive, it is Daisy’s flesh-and-blood genericism that ultimately seals her fate. Transformed from a cause célèbre into a terrible case (p. 61), she experiences the inevitable mortality of the embodied subject. Despite her nine-year-old brother’s childish insistence on American exceptionalism (in America there’s always a moon! [p. 60]), Daisy’s death transforms national identity into a matter of clinical epidemiology. The dusky circle of the Colosseum (p. 57) mocks that self-enclosed exception alist circle wherein Americans consider themselves of paramount importance (Giles, Transnationalism and Classic American Literature, p. 72). As mosquitoes trump manifest destiny, so the body seals Daisy’s radically democratic fate: The poor girl died (p. 61).

Ever the conventional true democrat, Winterbourne balks at the material historicity crudely evinced by the raw protuberance of Daisy’s grave (p. 62). Seizing upon Giovanelli’s assertion that Daisy was the most innocent (p. 61), he tries instead to embalm his fair young compatriot in the sublime rhetoric of transcendence and purity, abstracting her virginal body beyond the touch of history (Castronovo, Necro Citizenship, p. 122). For Winterbourne, Daisy’s metaphysical innocence annuls malaria’s ghastly effects. Her death becomes less a bodily phenomenon than a singular act of Christian martyrdom, a beatific sacrifice in a realm of latter-day Roman tyrants. Unlike the notoriously misnamed Pope Innocent X, a pontiff whose duplicity was presciently captured in the superb portrait ... by Velasquez (p. 53), Daisy is, in Winterbourne’s eyes, genuinely, epiphenomenally pure. Armed with this conviction, he all but exonerates himself from his own political inaction. Noting that it was on his conscience that he had done her injustice, he mildly confides to his aunt that Daisy would have appreciated one’s esteem (p. 62). Yet Winterbourne’s passive retreat from first-person accountability and his withdrawal into the anonymity of the pronoun one speak more loudly than words. Content with the idealized identifications of symbolic citizenship, and repelled by the messy responsibilities of actual intervention, Winterbourne can only acknowledge that he was booked to make a mistake (p. 62). As with everything else in his life, his errors are literally and figuratively made with reservations.

Two years after Daisy Miller appeared in book form, James brought out a novel entitled Washington Square. Like its predecessor, the 1881 publication would stage a conflict between two kinds of democracy—the calculating abstraction of a man and the spontaneous empiricism of a woman. The geometric precision of the novel’s title is significant, for Washington Square charts the subtle machinations of a mathematically minded doctor, Austin Sloper, as he systematically prevents his lovelorn daughter, Catherine, from marrying a handsome fortune hunter, Morris Townsend. A physician, Sloper has made a career of calculation: He had passed his life in estimating people (it was part of the medical trade), and in nineteen cases out of twenty he was right (p. 124). From his quantifying perspective, the lavish red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe (p. 75) that Catherine wears to her cousin’s engagement party makes her look as though she had eighty thousand a year (p. 83). When his embarrassed daughter illogically denies the charge, Sloper’s rejoinder gives brutal testimony to his own relentless logic of equivalency: So long as you haven’t you shouldn’t look as if you had (p. 83). Like other such ironic barbs, Sloper’s comments are perfectly calculated to dumbfound the deferential child. As a student boggled by the complexities of life’s long division, Catherine must make sense of the world’s messy remainders. To extract the least scrap of happiness from her father’s mordant remarks, she must perform a kind of linguistic surgery, cutting her pleasure out of the piece, as it were and ignoring the portions left over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never knew what to do with, which seemed too delicate for her own use (p. 83).

For his part, Sloper is fascinated by a different mathematical concept : that of a limit. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, limit is a finite quantity to which the sum of a converging series progressively approximates, but to which it cannot become equal. Although Catherine acknowledges that her deepest desire was to please her father, she has in fact never succeeded beyond a certain point, and to go beyond the point in question seemed to her really something to live for (p. 72). When Catherine’s Aunt Almond accuses the doctor of toying with his daughter’s filial devotion, Sloper coolly responds that he is merely interested in locating the limit of Catherine’s affection: It is the point where the adoration stops that I find it interesting to fix (p. 164).

Sloper meets his mathematical match in Morris Townsend—a good-looking scoundrel whose name itself postulates a limit—a town’s end. Like his would-be father-in-law, Morris reckons his relationship with Catherine in mathematical terms. Dr. Sloper’s opposition, he observes, was the unknown quantity in the problem he had to work out. The natural way to work it out was by marrying Catherine; but in mathematics there are many short cuts, and Morris was not without a hope that he should yet discover one (p. 169). Nonetheless, when Catherine returns from Europe, the young man’s confidence begins to flag. He will never give us a penny; I regard that as mathematically proved, he impatiently tells Catherine’s Aunt Penniman (p. 197). Like Sloper, Townsend subscribes to a rigid logic of quid pro quo. When Catherine pleads with him to stay—Think of what I have done! ... Morris, I have given up everything!—Townsend replies with a sort of calculated brutality, You shall have everything back! (p. 206). Despite the mathematical tidiness of this response, and the geometric precision of Townsend’s farewell note—a letter of some five large square pages—Catherine again confronts the shabby remainders of a broken heart.

As its title would suggest, geometry is Washington Square’s mathematical discipline of choice. The story itself takes place on a square, itself the geographic border between Manhattan’s irregular network of roads snaking across the island’s southern tip, and its neat grid of avenues and streets that was then beginning to extend northward (see Bell, ‘This Exchange of Epigrams,’ p. 53). Like the square in which he dwells, Sloper adheres to the systematic principles of Euclidean geometry. When Mrs. Almond, testing his resolve, asks whether he plans to yield to Catherine’s importunities, Sloper icily replies, Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial. Hearing his sister’s clever rejoinder, Doesn’t geometry treat of surfaces? Sloper only reaffirms the tenets of his mathematical faith: Yes; but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are my surfaces; I have taken their measure (p. 164).

Sloper’s confidence in the incontrovertibility of Euclid’s time-honored axioms reveals and fortifies his low opinion of women. Like the majority of nineteenth-century educators, Sloper believes that geometry [is] impossible for women to understand due to the latter’s insufficient abstract reasoning power (Cohen, A Calculating People, p. 8). Indeed, the doctor finds his "idea of the beauty of reason ... on the whole meagrely gratified by what he observed in his female patients (p. 70). To this axiom, Catherine is no exception. From her father’s pitiless perspective, she is about as intelligent as the bundle of shawls (p. 178). In Sloper’s binary world, boys are sent to college or placed in counting-rooms, and girls are married very punctually" (p. 78). In such a world, the gendered discourse of geometry admits no exceptions.

Yet when Sloper asks, Shall a geometrical proposition relent? (p. 164), James invites us to take a critical, rather than merely rhetorical, view of the matter. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, geometrical propositions were relenting. In the mid-1870s, mathematicians in England, where James lived while writing Washington Square, were learning of the first fundamental challenge to the gold standard of mathematical thought in nearly two thousand years. Based on the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Georg Rie mann, both German geometers, the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, a Hungarian named Janós Bolyai, and their English-language spokesmen—Hermann von Helmholtz, William Clifford and, ultimately, Albert Einstein himself—Euclidean geometry underwent a major revolution. At the base of this transformation was a startling mathematical premise: that Euclid had not exhausted the possibilities of spatial knowledge, and that other spaces were equally possible—including curved spaces. These so-called hyperbolic spaces, though difficult to imagine, yielded a radically new insight: that, in the words of Leonard Mlodinow, Euclidean form is approachable but not attainable, like the speed of light, or your ideal weight (Euclid’s Window, p. 121 ). In these new, non-Euclidean spaces, brave new worlds were possible. The sum of a triangle’s angles, for example, was always less or more than 180 degrees; similar triangles did not exist, and parallel lines intersected (Mlodinow, p. 121). The curved space revolution challenged the most fundamental tenets of nineteenth-century thought, among them, the concepts of absolute space, absolute time, and Immanuel Kant’s moral imperative (Mlodinow, p. 95). As the British geometer William Clifford declared in 1875, the idea of the Universe, the Macrocosm, the All, as subject of human knowledge, and therefore of human interest, has fallen to pieces (quoted in Richards, Mathematical Visions, p. 112). A new spirit of empiricism had raised doubts about Euclid’s formerly absolute truths. In Clifford’s words, Immensity and Eternity [are] replaced by knowledge of Here and Now.

In christening his doctor Sloper, James puts the physician’s cherished Euclidean certainties in doubt. The trigonometric concept of a slope—the rate at which a curve rises or falls per horizontal unit—connects Sloper to the new, curved notions of space that, by the 1870s, were rendering the doctor’s axiomatic metaphors out of date (Kline, Geometry). Inasmuch as the new, non-Euclidean universe was governed by dynamic, empirical forces like gravity, so notions of space and time changed accordingly. When Einstein later observed that space-time assumed the form of a curvature when confronted with a massive body, he was working from a set of assumptions in which the propositions of Euclidean geometry cannot hold exactly, and the very idea of a straight line also loses its meaning (Einstein, quoted in Dimock, Rethinking Space, Rethinking Rights, p. 256). In Washington Square, such curvature necessarily undermines not only Dr. Sloper’s sanguine view of surface geometry, but also the moral satisfaction that such mathematical assumptions produce (p. 133).

Indeed, the rejection of Euclidean absolutism had a seismic impact on Western political philosophy. To challenge Euclid was to challenge the presumption of pure reason that his axioms had inspired. Within the Kantian world of categorical imperatives, moreover, democracy existed as a vaunted if speculative set of civic promises. In the hyperbolic world of empirical events and sensate bodies, however, democracy became a matter of concrete, practical choices (see Dimock, p. 249). In such a new, relativistic space, as Wai Chee Dimock observes, compromises and concessions, rather than absolute victories, mark the endpoint ... of democracy (p. 263).

James’s vision of non-Euclidean democracy is evident in his representation of Catherine Sloper, the character he modestly regarded as the only good thing in the story (Henry James: Letters, p. 316). Catherine’s robustly corporeal embodiment—her clear, fresh complexion, her physical resilience, and her status as someone strong and solid and dense, indeed someone who would live to a great age—longer than might be generally convenient—all highlight her physical immediacy. Hers is a somatic sturdiness that belies the abstract postulates deployed by those around her. Unlike her fellow characters, for example, Catherine can distinguish form from content. She can appreciate the aesthetics of a given representational strategy, that is, without losing track of the underlying import. Thus, despite the fact that her father speaks ill of Morris, she nonetheless admires the neatness and nobleness of the Doctor’s expression—even while she felt that what he said went so terribly against her (p. 117). Later, after reading Townsend’s devastating farewell letter and letting her sense of the bitterness of its meaning and the hollowness of its tone ... [grow] less acute, Catherine admire [s] its grace of expression (p. 217). This skill arms her with the ability to distinguish radical democracy from its more conventional counterpart, true democracy, and real participation from mere political show. Although she fails to recognize Townsend’s duplicity, Catherine’s myopia is less a testament to her foolhardiness than it is a mark of her fundamental trustfulness. Whereas her father dis misses Townsend as a generic rogue, Catherine appreciates the embodied presence of the beautiful young man. Indeed, we are mistaken if we see the rightness of Sloper’s verdict as vindication of his jaded approach. While Catherine’s naive devotion to Morris is misguided, it is also genuine. By refusing to marry anyone else (even, as it turns out, an older but none the wiser Townsend), Catherine demonstrates the authenticity of her trust. Refusing to marry, she rejects formal commitments, and instead remains faithful to the contingent and radically

Reviews for Daisy Miller and Washington Square (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first Henry James work I've read, a good introduction, and I am glad I have seen it. The text is clearly written, very cinematic in the way it describes each characters thoughts and words, but written in the nineteenth- century American sort of what now seems over-formal and stilted style. I've read more from his brother William James, the philosopher, and see how they are both talented writers. The first sentence of chapter one is 55 words long, but still clear. The work was written as a serial, published in parts in a magazine, but doesn't have the feel that it was paid for by the word, maybe since James already had money and could write for himself without worrying about income. The story is well told. I care for the characters. This kindle edition (Cambridge World Classics) is 99 cents, does have some critical contents, which are not at all curent, which explains the low price. There is no x-ray feature and there are location numbers in place of page numbers, but I can search the book and use the kindle dictionary.

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[technodiabla · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very dense slow read for me. I thought the character development was genius. But the plot just didn't warrant the density. It could be summarized in 3-5 sentences.

[boredgames · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a rather tedious drama of manners, centred on the marriage plot. i found the doctor insufferable, catherine tedious; but the perceptiveness and Jamesian interiorities and flights of thought are worth admiring but god, it was a struggle.

[rdra1962 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book, but I did not like any of the characters. It holds up well as a snapshot of another time, a different society. Prefer Jane Austim et al.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

“Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.”This novel centres around Catherine Sloper, the daughter of respected physician Dr. Austin Sloper. When Catherine's mother dies when she is only three years old Catherine is raised up by her father,who never remarries, and a few years later by her widowed fraternal aunt Mrs Lavinia Penniman. Mrs Penniman has been left financially impoverished but almost as compensation has a surfeit for romantic melodrama and unrealistic imagination. Dr. Sloper is almost immediately disappointed in his daughter, firstly because she is not a boy but when she becomes an adolescent because she is neither beautiful like her mother nor clever like himself. He expects nothing much to come of his daughter and whilst he never actually voices his disappointment his attitude ends up stunting her emotional growth. So when Catherine meets charming smooth talking Morris Townsend and he begins to court her she is instantly smitten.Aunt Lavinia plays the role of a middleman between the couple but her father is immediately suspicious of the young man's true motives because Catherine is a wealthy heiress in her own right who can expect to inherit much more on her father's death.The doctor views Morris as a lazy charmer who has identified Catherine as the source of his fortune whilst in contrast Lavinia does what she can to stoke the coals of romance.Catherine is old enough to make it impossible for Dr. Sloper to simply ban the romance or withhold the inheritance left to her by her mother but he informs Catherine that if she marries against his will he will disown her. In contrast whilst Morris's primary motivation is undoubtedly financial he ends up treating Catherine with far more consideration than her own father. However, when he realises that she will not inherit her father's wealth Catherine becomes a far less attractive prospect and after a fairly tortuous courtship he decides to finish it. Even after her father's death Catherine never marries preferring to follow her own personal hobbies and interests.Deception and betrayal are the obvious themes of this book with each of the main characters believing that they were either deceived or betrayed by the others. However, truth and imagination also feature heavily. This is rumoured to be one of the author's least favourite pieces of work because unlike many of his other works he never tried to revise it. Personally I cannot say that I am at all surprised. I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed it. However, I did finish it which gained it an extra point.

[mrsdanaalbasha · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I preferred the movie by Jennifer J.L. it is amazing, and the soundtrack makes the tears in my eyes fall.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Catherine Sloper is a not-so-young woman who really hasn’t much to recommend her or to attract a husband. She is somewhat plain, not terribly intelligent, not accomplished in music, dance, conversation or art. However, she does have a significant income (from her mother’s estate) and expectations of inheriting far more from her father, a brilliant physician in mid-19th-century New York City. At her cousin’s engagement party she meets a handsome gentleman, who, encouraged by her widowed Aunt Lavinia Penniman, begins to pay her particular attention.

The focus of this entire novel is money. But James manages to craft a tale that explores not only wealth, how it is used and what it means, but social class, family structure, filial obedience, parental responsibility, and strength of character. Catherine may be described by everyone as “sweet, but simple,” but she has a will of steel, and will show her father that he has grossly underestimated her.

Honestly, I don’t know why I waited so long to read a Henry James novel. For some reason I thought he would be “difficult,” with long, complicated sentence structure and archaic language. If you have the same notion, get over it. This is a very approachable story. I was engaged and interested from the beginning. Of course, now I’ve added more Henry James to my tbr mountain … but I think that’s a good thing.

[sandra.k.heinzman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After learning that one of my favorite movies, "The Heiress" was based on this book by Henry James, I knew I had to read it someday. I ended up listening to it on Audible and loved it! I just love the formal language, the setting (time and place), and the story. I didn't like the characters, though, as they were either cruel, manipulative, annoying, or stupid. I don't understand why Catherine never married anyone else and why she couldn't see Morris for who he really was. And why did her father insist on being so cruel to his daughter and change his will, years after Morris left? In retrospect, the storyline was pretty well drawn out and kind of weird - dwelling on the Catherine/Morris ill-fated romance for over 20 years. But I still loved the book and the narration was spot on. Now I want to see the movie again, as well as a later version of the movie that I have not seen before.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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, 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.

[mreed61 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While I did not find it exactly amazing, I did really like Washington Square. Henry James has a way with words that is all his own. One can almost tell immediately when they're reading one of his works. Washington Square actually took me to a place I had been once a couple of decades ago, and I just couldn't help but appreciate the social anthropology found within its pages. In a great many ways, one becomes involved with the lives there. More to come in the blog.

[y2ash · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I cannot believe how much I loved Washington Square! It was great! It actually borders on fantastic! Washington Square is about Dr. Austin Sloper, a very prominent doctor, his daugther Catherine Sloper, a very unassuming girl, and Lavinia Penniman, Dr. Sloper's meddlesome sister and Catherine's aunt. Now, Dr. Sloper is a very smart but calculating and clinical man. It seems he grew colder when his first child died and then his wife during childbirth with Catherine.

Dr. Sloper doesn't care for Catherine. He might love her but he doesn't think well of her appearance or her limited intelligence. When, at a big party, Catherine meets and is smitten with Morris Townsend, Dr. Sloper immediately thinks he's after her money since Catherine already has her 10,000 inheritance from her mother and will get 35,000 after Sloper's death and Townsend blew all of his money coasting through Europe.

It doesn't help matters when Lavinia gets involved acting as a conduit for Catherine and Morris. Things sort of snowball from getting very intricate but simply constructed. I believe in a less gifted author than James (I'm looking at you Nicholas Sparks!) this could have been ridiculous, corny, complicated, and plain stupid.

However, James knows how to write straightforward prose. Events were always quick and just the facts would suffice. A 12-month vacation abroad was about a chapter or so. It was fantastic. Not to say it was scanty. Quite the contrary, it was incredibly verbose. The last few chapters were great. It could have ended happily and been one big cliche instead it ended like it would have in real life.

[nadinec.keels · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I pitied every principal character for their having to eat the fruit of who they were; I never grew to like them. Strangely, I pitied John Ludlow the most--for his passion being given no chance.

[advakramer-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The happening is quite an ordinary one, nothing too grand, or incredible. The female protagonist, Catherine, is one of the dullest creatures I've ever encountered in literature (and real life, for that matter). The book is not riddled with melodramatic expressions, or epic gestures.
Despite all that (or because, I've yet to decide), it is one of the more compelling books I have ever read.

I adore Henry James' irony, that is most apparent in this book. I love his hopelessly flawed characters. I love his writing style.

I also find it interesting that while compiling his work, Henry James excluded the book because he didn't like it. I have an affinity to the works the artists themselves despised.

As of the time of writing this review, I've yet to read any other of Henry James' works, so I cannot draw any kind of comparison or general opinion non him as an author (other than adoring what he did with Washington Square). I have also yet to read the afterward by Michael Cunningham, will do so after I've read the book a second time.

[amelish · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So frustrating--I kept waiting for Catherine to DTMFA but unfortunately she predates Dan Savage by about a century.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Catherine is a young woman living in New York City with her father in the 19th century. She is a plain sweet girl who has had a cold upbringing. After her mother died in childbirth her father never recovered. He married out of love and her death broke his spirit forever. The result was a distant parent who treated Catherine with a mild objective interest at best. As Catherine grows older she begins to attend parties and at one she meets the charming Morris Townsend. His immediate interest in her and his passionate attitude sweeps her off her feet. Her father, Dr. Sloper, forbids the match, believing Morris to be interested in her only for her money.The novel is an opera of subtlety. In the first half we aren’t sure of Morris’ true intentions. We aren’t sure of the depth of Catherine’s feelings and we aren’t sure if her father’s suspicions are justified or if they’re a product of his controlling nature. There’s never a big reveal, just a series of quiet scenes that reveal the individuals’ true character. Dr. Sloper’s sister, Mrs. Lavinia Penniman (a widow), lives with them and creates a strange dynamic. She thrives on drama and she pushes her own romantic notions on both Morris and Catherine, tainting Catherine’s judgment and unnecessarily pushing herself into the middle of their courtship.SPOILERSFor me, the most interesting aspect of the book is Catherine’s nature and her evolution throughout the story. She kept her emotions tucked deep inside her, showing little of how she truly felt. As she matures and the plot unfolds she continues to stand strong. The suspense comes from inaction, a slow burn towards two potential outcomes. Catherine changes slowly; she begins to take pride in her obstinacy and finds the courage to stand up to her father. By the end of the book she may be living a lonely life, but she has found the strength to resist Morris. The moment when Morris’ sister tells Catherine’s father not to let her marry her brother is a turning point. That’s the moment we truly begin to suspect Morris for being the shallow selfish man he is. As we get to know her father, even if he is dismissive and condescending to her, I felt like he really did have her best interests at heart. He became so callous towards the world after his wife died that he didn’t understand how to be compassionate anymore. He whisks her off to tour Europe for months in a vain effort to make her forget him. BOTTOM LINE: I liked this one more than I thought I would. There’s no major action, but watching Catherine slowly grow strong under the circumstances was beautifully done. “He walked under the weight of this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore forever the scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated him on the night that followed his wife's death.”“…it seemed to her that a mask had suddenly fallen from his face.” 

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was actually assigned me in high school--but amazingly, unlike what is so often the case, I didn't hold it against it. I find this a heartbreaking book--but oh so well worth reading. It's been compared to Jane Austen in its focus on family dynamics, courtship and social satire, but unlike Austen this is really an anti-romance. Catherine Sloper is not cut out of the cloth of which romantic heroines are made. A "good" girl but plain, socially awkward, and none too bright--and her clever father can't forgive her for it. The heart of this book is the battle between father and daughter over a man wooing Catherine. And the hell of it, is her father is right about Morris Townsend, but so badly misjudges and mistreats his daughter that I couldn't quite root for him to succeed. Catherine does change through the course of the book, and some might read the last paragraphs as triumphant--but I found it a Pyrrhic victory. I haven't (yet) gone on to read more of Henry James--I understand this is one of his more readable books--he's known in his later works for very ... er... complex sentences, but that's not the case here in this short novel that falls early in his output. The book was the basis for two films, The Heiress with Olivia de Haviland and Washington Square with Jenifer Jason Leigh. Both are worthy and faithful adaptations.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I decided to listen to this book after listening to The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields which is about Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton and Henry James were good friends and I became curious about this writer. Apparently this book is often compared to Jane Austen's work but I'm not a big fan of Jane Austen and it is therefor no surprise that I didn't particularly like this book.In a nutshell this is the story of a plain but rich girl (Catherine Sloper) who falls in love with a handsome but poor man (Morris Townsend). Catherine's father suspects Townsend's motives and refuses permission for them to marry. He takes Catherine on an extensive tour of Europe hoping that she will give up on Townsend or vice versa. When that doesn't work he makes it plain that Catherine will inherit none of his wealth. Townsend calls off the engagement because he doesn't want to deprive Catherine of her inheritance or so he says. It's pretty clear that Townsend was only interested in Catherine for her money and when he realized that he wouldn't get it he dumps her.Maybe this was a new storyline when it was written but it certainly isn't now. I found it hard to care about Catherine even though I felt I should. She just seemed so insipid. At any rate I was not impressed and I won't be running out to find other books by Henry James.

[lakesidemusing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After seeing The Heiress on Broadway (starring Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame!), I felt compelled to read the novel behind the play. I'm not sure how long the book has been on my shelf, but the measure is in years rather than months.

My love of the show certainly influenced my reaction to the book, and it often felt like I was watching the play again as I read. As far as Henry James novels go, this seems to be among the most readable. He is famous for long, convoluted sentences, especially in later works, but there was very little of that here. Washington Square is relatively straight-forward and easy to follow.

A description of Catherine:
"She was a healthy, well-grown child, without a trace of her mother's beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a "nice" face; and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of regarding her as a belle. Her father's opinion of her moral purity was abundantly justified; she was excellently, imperturbably good; affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry, but she devoted her pocket money to the purchase of creme cakes..." p. 12

and on her character awakening:
"Catherine meanwhile had made a discovery of a very different sort; it had become vivid to her that there was a great excitement in trying to be a good daughter. She had an entirely new feeling, which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions." p. 104

My rating:
3.5/5 stars

Bottom line:
Overall, a very readable and enjoyable Henry James novel, but The Portrait of a Lady is still my favorite. The play is highly recommended!

[msgumby · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have read this book several times before, and it still reveals new things to me. This is a masterful novel, full of intriguing characters and a great plot. And although it's rather sad, James says so much about human nature. It's one of his more accessible books, and a good place to start for someone interested in getting to know his work.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Washington Square was my true introduction to the art of Henry James. I say this because I first encountered James in dramatic form by attending a production of "The Heiress" by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. They had adapted James's short novel in 1947. By the late 1960s the play had become a popular vehicle for High School students and that is where I encountered it, and indirectly Henry James. James originally published his novel in 1880 as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. The plot of the novel is based upon a true story told to James by his close friend, British actress Fanny Kemble.The book is sometimes compared to Jane Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. James was hardly a great admirer of Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as flattering. In fact, James was not a great fan of Washington Square itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition of his fiction (1907–1909) but found that he could not, and the novel was not included. Other readers, though, have sufficiently enjoyed the book to make it one of the more popular works of the Jamesian canon. It's popularity may have been enhanced by the stage adaptation "The Heiress" by Ruth and Augustus Goetz.

[kasthu_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1880, Washington Square looks back to an earlier period of New York City’s history, when upper-crust society lived at or adjacent to Washington Square, before society eventually migrated uptown. Set in the first half of the nineteenth century and based on a story that was once told to Henry James, this novel tells the story of Catherine Sloper the daughter of a respected physician and the heiress to a fortune of $10,000. One evening she meets Morris Townsend, a young man of whom Dr. Sloper is immediately suspicious, for wanting to marry Catherine for her money. Although Dr. Sloper forbids his daughter to marry or even see Mr. Townsend, as the risk of her losing her fortune, she does so anyways, with the help of her aunt, Mrs. Penniman.Washington Square in the early nineteenth century wasn’t so much a location as it was an address, a way of life. The heyday of Washington Square was in the 1840s, although many people were starting to move further uptown. Henry James’s perspective is from the later part of that century, when New York’s high society had already moved northwards in Manhattan, so this novel highlights the differences that 50 years or so have wrought. There are often comparisons between the way things are now (in the 1880s) and the way things were before the advent of the Civil War. The house in Washington Square represents a comfortable, consistent way of life valued by nearly everyone in the novel but Catherine, who seeks a way out through marriage.Washington Square is based upon a story that was told to Henry James by the actress Fanny Kemble. James is rather cruel to Catherine; she is described as a plain, unintelligent girl. We are never given a clear picture of her thought process. We get much more from the tyrannical Dr. Sloper, a man who can deliver “a terribly incisive look—a look so like a surgeon’s lancet.” He is never afraid to say exactly what he thinks, which makes him an easier character to understand and empathize with. Henry James doesn’t describe his characters or their actions in simple adjectives; rather, he uses similes and analogies to describe how his characters think and feel.Morris Townsend is harder to understand; seen though the eyes of Catherine, our idea of him is hardly objective. We don’t get any kind of inner monologue from him at first, so it’s hard to judge him exactly. But the more the book goes on and the more we are allowed to view his thoughts, the more we start to see Townsend from Dr. Sloper’s point of view. It’s very interesting to see how Henry James reveals nuances of character the way he does. In all, all of the characters are portrayed very well.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Washington Square is the story of Catherine Sloper, the only child of a widowed doctor and a bit of a disappointment at that for she is neither a boy nor particularly clever or otherwise remarkable. She is rather shy, which makes her appear as cold to some who don't know better, and while not homely, she is plain and often passed over by those around her. At age 22, Catherine has never had a suitor, despite the fact that she is an heiress and in spite of the romantic imagination of her Aunt Lavninia (Mrs. Penniman). That changes when Catherine meets Mr. Morris Townsend at the home of her other aunt, Mrs. Almond. It's here where the story begins in earnest.To be clear, Washington Square is not necessarily a romance, even though the courtship is at the heart of it. It’s more akin to a social satire in the style of Jane Austen. This is a book about characters more than plot as the plot is very thin. As such, Henry James invests a lot in each character, but I find that the end result is more of a caricature or stereotype than a fleshed out person. Morris Townsend is a thorough cad; Mrs. Almond is the kindly matron; Dr. Sloper is harsh always, even in the face of his daughter's disappointments; Aunt Lavinia is so ridiculously absurd as to be comical; and Catherine is so dull and completely lacking in backbone that you really can't root for her much. (For anyone who thinks Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is insipid, Catherine is a thousand times worse … and possibly then some.) Furthermore, from the beginning of the novel until the end, none of these characters grow and/or change. Arguably, Catherine gains the tiniest modicum of respect for herself by the end, but even that could depend on who you ask.Overall, my feeling on this book was “eh.” It’s not a bad book per se, but it’s just not great. It certainly wasn’t one of those classics that makes you say, ah, yes, I see why this is a classic! While I liked James’s style, particularly when he employed a sly kind of funny or broke down the fourth wall by referring to Catherine as “my heroine” and so forth, sometimes style alone isn’t enough to carry a book.Also, for the audio book listener, the audio reader on this one was similar to the book itself – good but not great.

[motherofthree_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the first Henry James book I have read. It's somewhat depressing and painful on the part of the heroine, and ends with an equally depressing but correct ending. The themes are wealth, matrimony, honesty and integrity.

[robinamelia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to the Librivox recording of this. The reader's mispronunciation of numerous words was distracting, but otherwise I enjoyed the story, probably one of the few by James simple enough to manage in an audio version.

[dorritt_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a surprisingly ambiguous story with a deceptively simple plot. Set in New York in the early 1900s, the story tells the tale of Catherine Sloper, the rather plain, rather dull daughter of a wealthy, domineering father who becomes the target of a charming gold-digger of a suitor. Will she marry him over the objections of her father? See how simple that is? But this is Henry James, after all, so the plot extends – like the proverbial iceberg - several layers below the surface.Catherine isn’t a terribly sympathetic heroine – her dullness, her lack of intelligence, and her refusal to stick up for herself will almost certainly grate with self-actualized women of the 20th century. However, she’s much more sympathetic than the uniformly unpleasant cast of characters with whom she interacts in this tale, all of whom see her as little more than a tool to be manipulated for their own purposes. Her aunt uses her as the means by which to fulfill her own melodramatic fantasies of secret trysts and the tragedy of doomed love. Her lover sees her as the path to ready fortune and a life of indolence and ease. Even her own father demonstrates heartbreakingly few signs of genuine affection, viewing his daughter alternatively as an interesting scientific experiment (“how will she react if I apply *this* stressor?”) and as a ready affirmation of his own cleverness. The fundamental principle of sarcasm is making the wielder feel superior by belittling another, and in this tale Dr. Sloper wields sarcasm with the same brutal precision he brings to his surgeries.This is no pat morality tale, however, in which the wicked are punished and virtue is rewarded. Nor is it a thematically simplistic novel, characterized by a resolution in which the main characters change or grow in wisdom. The world isn’t as simple as that, and James does us the favor of positing that we know this as well as he does – and that, therefore, we can cope with an ending that is both morally and thematically ambiguous. The novel raises many provoking questions, some of which include: to what extent is a parent justified in preventing their children from making their own mistakes? At what point does principled defiance become merely obstinacy … or, worse, cruelty? To what extent do we (knowingly and unknowingly) justify meddling in the affairs of others to achieve our own ends? Can harm and humiliation caused by the betrayal of others be mitigated by a steadfast refusal never to betray oneself? And is this steadfast determination never to betray one’s own principles an acceptable substitute for living a life devoid of happiness? In other words, despite the relative simplicity of plot, this definitely isn’t the kind of book you take with you to the beach. However, the novel’s moral complexity makes it a worthy read and probably great fodder for book club discussions.

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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

[savaran_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a love story.The cool man and the very shy women are main characters. They fall in love.But,her father against it. I think this story is very typical,so Iwas not surprised the end.I could imagine the last easily.I couldn't understandher feeling.

[clara53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Henry James has a talent of getting to the essence of not only typical personages, but quite surprising and unexpected characters. Page by page he slowly unfolds their true nature. His narrative runs with such fluidity and is worded so exquisitely that upon reading it you get this quiet kind of satisfaction, of gaining something very beautiful and worth knowing. That's what I felt. At first the plot might not seem anything out of the ordinary - an idle dashing young man calculating a marriage to a wealthy, yet not apparently popular young woman. But it's much more than that, as we discover...