The Immortal Villain of Washington Squareby Uriel Wittenberg (uw@urielw.com)June 20, 2001
ContentsEssay Endnotes Works Cited Links
EssayIn Washington Square, Henry James confronts us with an exceptionally hopeless kind of tragedy. The oppressive circumstances of protagonists usually arise from failures of individual or social enlightenment. Such stories are optimistic to the extent that they suggest that progress might eventually lift mankind beyond the scope of the type of situations depicted. In Washington Square, however, truth itself is the oppressor -- a universal truth of human nature which, a century after publication, we are still loath to recognize. Catherine’s tragedy is our universal susceptibility to the superficial: the chasm between the qualities that our reflective sensibilities recognize as good and admirable, and those that possess us with passionate longing for another. As Catherine resignedly observes (in connection with her father’s frigidity): “we can’t govern our affections” (p. 141). Thus, evil can seduce us, and virtue leave us cold.When this is the driving element in a tragic tale, a reader’s search for the enlightened perspective is vain. There is no improving lesson; there will be no progress; and reiterations of the tragic pattern will never cease. The malign force behind the hero’s sufferings is intrinsic to human nature. In most works of fiction, by contrast, truth, or enlightenment, is an ally. In Billy Budd, Billy’s goodness exculpates him (although the military code, impervious to natural justice, prevails). The Red Badge of Courage, as a rejection of the glorification of war, implicitly invites the hope that wars may end. In The Awakening, it is social prejudice that chafes at the heroine. In Sister Carrie, although material want is the initial challenge, Carrie (whose trajectory incidentally demonstrates the potency of superficial appeal) ultimately fails to emancipate herself because of her uncritical, imitative adaptation to a culture that is blind to all that is substantial and truly worthwhile. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, following a role comparable to Morris Townsend’s, has been conditioned since infancy in a way that has left her incapable of unlocking from a track that leads only to deplorable destinations. (At the same time, this genius of sympathetic perception remains insensible to Selden’s potentially redeeming love.) Catherine Sloper’s timeless plight is of a more dismal tincture. She is, in her father’s words, “absolutely unattractive” (p. 35). She is twenty(1), yet has never before, as the doctor points out to Mrs. Almond, received suitors in the house. Mrs. Almond’s protestations that Catherine is not unappealing are little more than a matter of form:
“Is he in earnest about Catherine, then?” [Dr. Sloper asked.]Mrs. Penniman, for her part, readily perceives that without Catherine’s full inheritance, Morris would have “nothing to enjoy” (p. 126), while for Morris himself, Catherine’s “inferior characteristics” (p. 84) are a matter of course. Everyone understands that unfeigned love for Catherine is an impossibility. James demonstrates that, with a shifting of the light, the reader too can be tempted by the urgings of scorn:
[S]he sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume. But if she expressed herself in her clothes it is certain that people were not to blame for not thinking her a witty person. (P. 11.)Most cruelly of all, it is suggested that Catherine herself is subject to the same human flaw -- susceptibility to the superficial -- that renders her unattractive to others; and that this flaw might be the source of her deepest longing:
To Catherine he appeared resplendent; it was some time before she could believe again that this beautiful young man was her own exclusive property. They had a great deal of characteristic lovers’ talk -- a soft exchange of inquiries and assurances. In these matters Morris had an excellent grace. (P. 139.)There is no doubt of Catherine’s goodness; certainly not before the point, late in the story, at which the narrator can point to an overt lie she tells Mrs. Penniman as proof that “not only our faults, but our most involuntary misfortunes, tend to corrupt our morals” (p. 162). While the narrator openly raises doubts about his impartiality, opining (with reference to his account of “her younger years”) that “a critical attitude would be inconsistent with a candid reference to the early annals of any biographer” (p. 8), the context of this remark suggests it is no more than a complacent declaration of adherence to imagined norms of biographical respectability, and that the reader is in little danger of being swayed by undue enthusiasm on the part of the narrator for his “heroine”: “she was something of a glutton [....] Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed, with anything else” (p. 8). The narrator, indeed, grieves over the dilemma Morris faces in pursuing his treacherous designs on Catherine -- and this feeling seems to him so inevitable it does not occur that the reader’s sympathies might lie elsewhere:
Between the fear of losing Catherine and her possible fortune altogether, and the fear of taking her too soon and finding this possible fortune as void of actuality as a collection of emptied bottles, it was not comfortable for Morris Townsend to choose; a fact that should be remembered by readers disposed to judge harshly of a young man who may have struck them as making but an indifferently successful use of fine natural parts. (P. 117.)It is this same brutal narrator, however, from whose account emerges a character of heart-rending innocence. “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,” he writes (p. 8). This may have a perfunctory ring, considering the narrator’s apparent sense of an obligation to treat his subject positively; but the description is borne out by events. One of the ways Catherine’s innocence is manifest is in her inability to imagine villainy, even as we observe her abuse at the hands of those she loves and trusts:
Dr. Sloper had usually a little smile, never a very big one, and with his little smile playing in his clear eyes and on his neatly-shaved lips, he looked at his daughter’s crimson gown.The unwarranted devotion Catherine feels for this tormentor is the basis of her life’s greatest dilemma: how to reconcile it with her (equally unwarranted) love for Morris. Only Catherine is not worldly enough to understand that the “purest love and truth” (p. 82) she sees in her lover’s eyes are false -- until the need to imagine villainy is past, and Morris has abandoned her:
[Morris’s] letter was beautifully written, and Catherine, who kept it for many years after this, was able, when her sense of the bitterness of its meaning and the hollowness of its tone had grown less acute, to admire its grace of expression. (Pp. 172-173.)Catherine’s goodness is also emphasized in the contrast between her sincerity and the conventional social hypocrisy of her successful father, reflected in his speech to Morris’s sister:
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 [... h]e strikes me as selfish and shallow. (P. 75.)Mrs. Almond’s perspective also suggests that worldliness involves a greatly reduced sense of human relations:
I don’t believe in lovely husbands [...]; I only believe in good ones. If he marries her, and she comes into Austin’s money, they may get on. He will be an idle, amiable, selfish, and doubtless tolerably good-natured fellow. (P. 126.)Catherine’s simple goodness is repeatedly seen to confound her interlocutors’ attempts to manipulate her. When Mrs. Penniman declares of Morris, “I was so sorry for him -- it seemed to me some one ought to see him,” and Catherine replies, “No one but I,” Mrs. Penniman pounces with the seemingly effective rejoinder: “But you wouldn’t, my dear.” But the underlying truth of the situation supplies the most effective rejoinder: “ ‘I have not seen him, because my father has forbidden it,’ Catherine said, very simply.” (P. 91.) Similarly, in one of Catherine’s interviews with her brilliant and terrible father, her innocent quest to go beyond the fact of his antagonism and understand his reasons pushes the doctor to retreat into falsehoods and sophistry:
“[Y]ou will want me to hear your reasons,” [said Catherine.]Again, in a later interview, Catherine poses the unanswerable question that penetrates her father’s worldly certitudes and centers on the basic vulnerability of his case against her lover: “What has he done -- what do you know?” (P. 98.) Further in this interview, Catherine’s father imputes to her his own monstrous view of her angelic willingness to wait “a long time” for his approval of Morris:
The Doctor answered [...] quietly enough: “Of course; you can wait till I die, if you like.”As her pitiless parent continues to press, the shaken Catherine reveals a stroke of sheer brilliance: “If I don’t marry before your death, I will not after” (p. 99). Imbued with the potency of simple goodness, brilliant, despised by all, Catherine is a provocative protagonist. The conventionally romantic forces arrayed against her are perhaps most aptly portrayed by Mrs. Penniman who, just as we would be, is “lost in wonderment at the oddity -- almost the perversity” of Catherine’s unromantic preference for “an interview in a chintz-covered parlour” over “a sentimental tryst beside a fountain sheeted with dead leaves” (p. 52) when her lover has something significant to discuss. Mrs. Almond, reflecting the reader’s discomfort with Dr. Sloper’s ruthless incisiveness, asks: “Doesn’t geometry treat of surfaces?” (P. 112.) The answer from Dr. Sloper, the man viewed by society and by the narrator as “never [having] been wrong in his life” (p. 184), professor of the bunk doctrine of physiognomy, expresses our immortal delusion: “Yes; but it treats of them profoundly.” (P. 112.)
Endnotes(Use your browser’s “Back” function to return to the endnote reference in the text -- see Websurfing Tips.)
Works CitedChopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Random House, Inc., 2000.Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. London: Penguin Group, 1994. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Random House, Inc., 1999. James, Henry. Washington Square. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Tales. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1993.
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