Relationship of Washington Square to Henry Jamess Other Novels :: Washington Square Henry James

Relationship of Washington Square to Henry Jamess Other NovelsAccording to Bette Howland in Washington Square, the Family Plot, the whim that Henry James should leave Washington Square out of his New York Edition, is a fitting irony in that like Dr. Sloper in the novel, James deprive his heroine and cut her out of his will (1). Although James might have wished us to treat Washington Square as an orphan, an outcast, a black sheep as compared with its erupt relatives, Howlands essay quite clearly establishes a familial link between this and Jamess other, more famous works. As Howland says, Not only is Washington Square, though disowned, a member of the family--it is the original, the mother lode (1). Howland begins her analysis by looking at how James took an anecdote given to him one night at a dinner party and made the tale purely American. To Howland, the very location of Washington Square stands for James perception of the stifling provincial life of America in that it is the physical object of Morris aspirations the prison of Catherines confinement the seat of the Doctors power (sic) (16). By confining the characters to the small world of Washington Square, says Howland, James created a closed system in which he could work his irony most effectively (5). She also notes how James changed the simple anecdote into an ironic contest of wills. He made the father the heavy preferably than the fortune-hunter, and he made the father a scientist, a scholarly doctor so that he fit in with the American values of earning an income (or seeming to), and appreciating wisdom (Howland 3). Howland also does an apt comparison of Washington Square in relationship to Jamess other novels by pointing out how he frequently talked about love in terms of the financial. As Howland says, With James, theres never enough love to go around one persons gain is always anothers loss (7), and money is quite commonly involved in the equation. In addition, James has another system of eco nomy that is always at work in his novels. As Howland says, at the beginning, the good heroines are all in the dark, but by the end, they are the only ones who see (15).