"Washington Square" by Henry James, the Most Mysterious of Writers - Article by Lavinia Capogna

"Washington Square" by Henry James, the Most Mysterious of Writers 

Article by Lavinia Capogna 

On the surface, the plot of Henry James’s novel “Washington Square” (1880) seems very simple: the only daughter of a renowned New York

physician in the 1840s is targeted by a young man who wants to marry her and take possession of her vast fortune. Her father opposes the match.

On this plot, James builds a splendid novel in 35 chapters, a novel in which there is not a single superfluous line, featuring exquisitely refined psychological portrayals. At the time, it was not only met with condescension by critics but virtually ignored by readers, causing his author no small amount of understandable disappointment, only to become a classic starting in the second half of the 20th century.

We are in New England, on the East Coast of the United States, where the city that had been the most important until then, the aristocratic Boston, is giving way to the more dynamic and diverse New York, which is expanding thanks to countless immigrants.

Dr. Austin Sloper is a quintessentially American self-made man, a man who, despite not coming from a wealthy family, studied medicine with passion. Ambitious and determined, he has become one of the city’s most respected and sought-after doctors.

At twenty, he had married Catherine, a charming and extremely wealthy young woman, solely for love. However, his family life had been cruel: he had lost his firstborn son at a young age and his wife in childbirth.

He was left alone with his daughter, Catherine, who had already disappointed him simply because she was a girl (Dr. Sloper is a misogynist) and then, as she grew up, because she was neither as beautiful nor as intelligent as her mother.

To care for her, he had taken in his sister, the widow of a Protestant minister, Lavinia Penninton, one of the most beautiful characters created by James.

At the beginning of the novel, Catherine is 22 years old; she is a quiet, submissive soul. She sings but has no particular talent; she devotes herself to embroidery and attends mass. She is neither beautiful nor ugly; no one notices her in public, and she has never received marriage proposals, as was customary. 

Although she is very shy, she loves lavish clothes (which her father finds ironic), perhaps because she is invisible. No one holds a grudge against her; on the contrary, she is likable but colorless, faded.

Her first secret detractor is her own father, whom she adores, and who sees her only quality as being extremely wealthy.

By marrying, she will inherit $10,000 from her mother and a further $30,000 as an inheritance from her father—a sum that Henry James described at the time as “immense.”

Aunt Lavinia is an eccentric character who is fond of her niece; she imagines romantic stories as a contrast to her own monotonous life and is thrilled when Catherine, at a reception, catches the eye of a handsome, elegant, distinguished young man: Morris Townsend.

With the aunt of Catherine help, Morris becomes a regular at Dr. Sloper’s grand, classic 19th-century American-style home with its colonnade at the entrance on Washington Square.

And here begins a ruthless battle: while Catherine falls in love with the charming Morris—thoughtful, persuasive, never intrusive, and, last but not least, handsome—her father, who believes he can read people at a glance, begins to detest him and opposes him in every way.

Morris, too, feels an immediate and intense dislike for Dr. Sloper, who is not charmed by his smooth manner.

Sloper calls him a fortune hunter, gathers information about him, and goes to speak with Morris’s sister—a dignified widow with five children who supports him—in her humble little cottage.

Morris had a small fortune that he had squandered in Europe; he does not work and has nothing but his dandyish ways.

In the struggle between the two men, neither takes Catherine’s feelings into account: the father puts on a mask, claiming he wants to prevent the marriage for his daughter’s sake, but in reality he does so to assert his power. 

And Morris does the same. He, too, is unconcerned with Catherine’s feelings—a woman he has easily and chastely won over in just a couple of weeks—but he disguises himself as a lover whose honor has been offended. 

He sees in her the ideal solution to his financial woes: through Catherine, he will be able to get his hands on a vast fortune, have the doors of New York’s exclusive high society thrown wide open to him, and do as he pleases.

For the gentle Catherine, however, Morris is the love, the dreams of her youth coming true, the life knocking at her door, marriage, the longed-for motherhood, the future.

Lavinia immediately takes Morris’s side, developing a motherly affection for him; she meets him secretly in unlikely little shops in working-class neighborhoods so as not to be caught by the doctor or others, becoming an accomplice to the thirty-year-old who grows increasingly neurotic the more obstacles he faces.

Of course, James captures all the nuances of this ruthless war unfolding within the upper-middle-class milieu: dominance, money, pride, stubbornness, and harsh words couched in impeccable grammar.

The father and the fiancé do not change over the course of the novel, which spans several years, but it is Catherine who undergoes an inner transformation when she realizes two things.

How and in what way cannot be revealed, so as not to spoil the reading of the novel, about which I have perhaps already said too much.

In 1949, director William Wyler directed a film based on the novel (though with a significantly altered screenplay in the final part), which became a cult classic of Hollywood’s golden age: "The Heiress," masterfully performed by Olivia de Havilland as Catherine, Montgomery Clift as Morris, Ralph Richardson as Sloper, and Miriam Hopkins as the aunt.

Henry James was the most refined of the American writers of the 1800s, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Born in 1843 in New York to a wealthy family of Irish descent, he had two notable siblings: William James, one of the founders of psychology and a literary critic, and Alice James, author of a remarkable “Diary.”

His life appears to have been that of a man devoted with great dedication to literature, a talented writer who defended his books against greedy publishers, insensitive critics, and inattentive readers (some twenty novels, numerous short stories, articles, travel memoirs, and plays).

During his lifetime, he was known and admired by a close friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, and by the young Virginia Woolf (1).

There was, however, no mutual affection between Henry James and Oscar Wilde. The former found the latter’s highly successful plays simplistic and sensationalist (2).

He was a passionate reader, an aesthete, and a connoisseur of art history who wrote in flawless French and German, but he was also a frequent traveler between the two continents, America and Europe, despite recurring back and stomach pains, with long stays in the unmissable Paris and his beloved Rome.

In 1876, at the age of 33, he moved to London, and in 1916, in protest against the United States’ initial neutrality in World War I, he became a British subject.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1911, 1912, and 1916, and died of two strokes on February 28, 1916, at the age of 72, at his home in Chelsea, London.

We will not delve here into the topic of Anglo-Saxon literary trends of the time, as that would be too specialized, but the “rediscovery” of Henry James’s works took place in the 1940s thanks to an intense debate among Anglo-American literary figures.

The social events of his time do not appear in his published correspondence: he seemed to “tend his garden” like Voltaire’s Candide.

And for James, “his garden” consisted of his social and worldly relationships, his walks through a splendid Florence bathed in soft colors, or across the gentle, verdant hills.

He had a keen interest in the transcendental, and it is no coincidence that his novel "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is one of his most masterful works, drawing on English ghost stories: the specter of the red-haired man staring impassively at the young, willing governess in the rain has unsettled more than a few readers.

Henry James was extremely private about his love life; his letters reveal nothing except for a few close male friendships (and one female friendship with a writer who committed suicide in Rome).

It should be noted that in the 1800s, the tone of letters between friends (both male and female) was more affectionate than it is today.

He had written ironically in a letter from 1880: "I shall not marry, all the same … I am too good a bachelor to spoil" (3).

Many scholars consider it highly likely that Henry James may have been gay. Personally, I would think of him more as an asexual gay.

In particular, his correspondence with the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen (not to be confused with the Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen), who lived in Rome, has sparked interest.

They met in 1899. James was 59, Andersen 27. They met only seven times, but their correspondence continued until the writer’s death in 1916.

Certainly, the correspondence reveals a deep affection (4).

Meanwhile, his sister Alice James lived for a long time with Katharine Loring, a prominent American educator, and both, according to a biographer, inspired James’s beautiful novel "The Bostonians" about the deep bond between Olive, an intelligent women’s rights activist, and the young, delicate Verena, a relationship undermined by the arrival of the ambitious and cynical lawyer Basil Ransom.

The 1885 book revisits the theme of two characters (Olive and Basil) vying for the affection of a third (Verena), thus presenting a situation—albeit different—that bears some resemblance to that of “Washington Square” (1880).

This novel was also adapted into a film directed by James Ivory in 1984, starring Vanessa Redgrave and the never forgotten Christopher Reeve.

Another of his great novels is "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881), considered by many to be his masterpiece. Partly set in Rome, it tells the story of the beautiful Isabel Archer, who turns down several marriage proposals but is then manipulated by a scheming woman from high society and ends up marrying a selfish, unloving man.

Director Jane Campion adapted the novel into a beautiful film in 1986, starring Nicole Kidman.

In his novels, which offer multiple layers of interpretation, there is nevertheless something that eludes the reader—an unspoken element that can surprise us—as if Henry James were not allowing us to enter his inner world. This reserve is also evident in his letters, where he speaks very little of himself. For this reason, he can be described as the most mysterious of writers.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “I have explored some literatures of the East and the West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy: I know of no work more singular than that of Henry James.”

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Notes:

1) Henry James personally knew many famous authors, including Charles Dickens, the writer George Eliot, Thackeray, the poet Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf,

the writer Edith Wharton (see “Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part IV, Volume 3: Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde by Their Contemporaries”).

But also Anthony Trollope, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Matthew Arnold, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the American painter John Singer Sargent.

2) See “A review of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture” by Michèle Mendelssohn (2007).

3) From "Henry James, A Life in Letters"

edited by Philip Horne (Penguin Classics)

4) See "Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men" by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe - 2001 and "Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen (1899–1915)" (Marsilio Editore 2000, Italy).

Notable on this topic is an article by the contemporary Irish writer Colm Tóibín: "How Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet" published in the prestigious British newspaper "The Guardian" (February 20, 2016). 

Tóibín is also the author of a novel about Henry James titled "The Master" (2004)

5) Among the writer’s works, we also mention the novels "The American (1877)," "The Europeans (1878)," "The Princess Casamassima (1886)," "What Maisie Knew" (1897), "The Awkward Age" (1899), "The Wings of the Dove" (1902), "The Ambassadors" (1903), "The Golden Bowl" (1904), and the famous short story "Daisy Miller" (1877).

For further reading, consult the works of two great scholars of English literature: Mario Praz, "Anglo-Saxon Literary Chronicles"

and Gabriele Baldini, "American Writers of the 19th Century".