I’ve been reading Henry James’s novel, Washington Square, and this passage from the first chapter is so
prescient. The novel is about a woman,
Catherine, and her father, Dr. Austin Sloper, who refuses to give his blessing—and
therefore his inheritance—to his daughter to marry a particular young man of
limited means, Morris Townsend.
Catherine is his only child; her mother died shortly after birth, and
Dr. Sloper has an austere character.
His first child, a
little boy of extraordinary promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to
easy enthusiasms, firmly believed, died at three years of age, in spite of
everything that the mother's tenderness and the father's science could invent
to save him. Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a second infant--an
infant of a sex which rendered the poor child, to the Doctor's sense, an
inadequate substitute for his lamented first- born, of whom he had promised
himself to make an admirable man. The little girl was a disappointment; but
this was not the worst. A week after her birth the young mother, who, as the
phrase is, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and before
another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower.
For a man whose trade
was to keep people alive, he had certainly done poorly in his own family; and a
bright doctor who within three years loses his wife and his little boy should
perhaps be prepared to see either his skill or his affection impugned. Our
friend, however, escaped criticism: that is, he escaped all criticism but his
own, which was much the most competent and most formidable. He walked under the
weight of this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore for ever
the scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated him
on the night that followed his wife's death. The world, which, as I have said,
appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical; his misfortune made him
more interesting, and even helped him to be the fashion. It was observed that
even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease, and
that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost other patients beside the two I have
mentioned; which constituted an honourable precedent. His little girl remained
to him, and though she was not what he had desired, he proposed to himself to
make the best of her. He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which
the child, in its early years, profited largely. She had been named, as a
matter of course, after her poor mother, and even in her most diminutive
babyhood the Doctor never called her anything but Catherine. She grew up a very
robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said to
himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing her. I
say "such as she was," because, to tell the truth--But this is a truth
of which I will defer the telling.
-From Chapter 1
So much of the novel is in germ form in that
passage. Dr. Sloper’s love for his
daughter, and yet she wasn’t his son. We
see a bitterness which he never overcame over the deaths of his son and wife,
tied together with his sense of failure as a doctor.
Let me connect this passage with a description of
Catherine from the next chapter. Mrs.
Penniman is Dr. Sloper’s sister who helps raise 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 cream-cakes. As
regards this, however, a critical attitude would be inconsistent with a candid
reference to the early annals of any biographer. Catherine was decidedly not
clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed, with anything else. She
was not abnormally deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit
herself respectably in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must
be avowed, however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well known that
in New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one. Catherine,
who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most social occasions,
as they are called, you would have found her lurking in the background. She was
extremely fond of her father, and very much afraid of him; she thought him the
cleverest and handsomest and most celebrated of men. The poor girl found her
account so completely in the exercise of her affections that the little tremor
of fear that mixed itself with her filial passion gave the thing an extra
relish rather than blunted its edge. Her deepest desire was to please him, and
her conception of happiness was to know that she had succeeded in pleasing him.
She had never succeeded beyond a certain point. Though, on the whole, he was
very kind to her, she was perfectly aware of this, and to go beyond the point
in question seemed to her really something to live for. What she could not
know, of course, was that she disappointed him, though on three or four
occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about it. She grew up peacefully and
prosperously, but at the age of eighteen Mrs. Penniman had not made a clever
woman of her. Dr. Sloper would have liked to be proud of his daughter; but
there was nothing to be proud of in poor Catherine. There was nothing, of
course, to be ashamed of; but this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a
proud man and would have enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an
unusual girl. There would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful,
intelligent and distinguished; for her mother had been the most charming woman
of her little day, and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value.
He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and he
even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the thought that
his wife had not lived to find her out. He was naturally slow in making this
discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had become a young lady grown
that he regarded the matter as settled. He gave her the benefit of a great many
doubts; he was in no haste to conclude. Mrs. Penniman frequently assured him
that his daughter had a delightful nature; but he knew how to interpret this
assurance. It meant, to his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to
discover that her aunt was a goose--a limitation of mind that could not fail to
be agreeable to Mrs. Penniman. Both she and her brother, however, exaggerated
the young girl's limitations; for Catherine, though she was very fond of her
aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed her, regarded her without a
particle of that gentle dread which gave its stamp to her admiration of her
father. To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman;
Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the
apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched
away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not
that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.
-From Chapter 2
Add now to the mix that Dr. Sloper thinks of his
daughter as limited, both in beauty, which apparently might be true, and in intelligence,
which is not true. But as you can surmise,
Dr. Sloper questions Morris Townsend’s intentions. He concludes that Townsend is only after her
money.
One final note.
The novel is set in New York City in late 19th century. It was published in 1880. Washington Square of the book's title is a park in Manhattan. In the 19th century it probably
was considered uptown, since what is today uptown was undeveloped then. I was surprised to find out that the notable arch that is there in Washington Square Park was
built in 1892, after the novel’s publication.
I was imagining it as part of the setting, but it’s not there. Here's a picture that might have been taken before automobiles. The surrounding area is much more metropolitan now.
