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ABSTRACT
Henry James’s novel Washington Square demonstrates original ontological insights about the power of slow thinking and represents, along with later trends in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy, the need for stories about hard-won maturity. James’s “jilted heiress” is too slow to realize that the man she loves is a trickster, even though her father warns her against him. Yet by validating his heroine’s slowness over her authoritarian father’s quick judgment, James makes a case that slow thinking expresses genuine self-development. I argue James’s narrative ontology presents us with an underanalyzed form of communication—the relative speed of human reasoning—that must be interpreted alongside other indirect communication strategies in James’s oeuvre, such as silence and lying. I also argue that James associates his heroine’s slow thinking with her developing empathy.
KEYWORDS:
Notes
1 Henry James, “Notebook Entry,” in Washington Square: An Authoritative Text with Selected Criticism, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), 172. Subsequent references to this edition of the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.
2 Donald Hall, afterword to Washington Square, by Henry James (New York: New American Library, 1964), 189–90.
3 Hall notes Catherine’s transformation at the end of the novel: “She grows from the dull girl of the beginning and [becomes] rather magnificent, finally” (Ibid., 190).
4 Karl Nixon, “‘A Speculative Idea’: The Parallel Trajectories of Financial Speculation, Obstetrical Science, and Fiscal Management of Female Bodies in Henry James’s Washington Square,” Journal of Medical Humanities 38, no. 3 (2017): 233.
5 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 8–10. Ronell argues women are more likely to be targets of the stupidity police’s reification: “[W]e may think we could identify stupidity if it were in a lineup and we were called to identify the culprit. ‘Yes, that’s it, there’s stupidity—I would recognize him (but more often, alas her) anywhere’” (71).
6 Ibid., 2.
7 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 3.
8 Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Weinstein argues that the modernist novel favored “unmastered moments” over the realist novel’s presentation of a subject coming to know a “rational” link between self and world (2–3).
9 Ronell, Stupidity, 5–10.
10 Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, eds., Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The essays in this book present an overview of empathy as a concept, including recent developments in cognitive neuroscience.
11 James, “Notebook Entry,” 171–72.
12 Ibid., 172.
13 Leon Edel, Henry James, The Conquest of London: 1870–1881 (New York: Avon Books, 1962), 398–99. Edel argues that James invested the unlikely heroine of Washington Square with his own “kind of dogged persistence” (399).
14 Darshan Singh Maini, “Washington Square: A Centennial Essay,” Henry James Review 1, no. 1 (1979): 83.
15 Ibid.
16 James, Washington Square, 4.
17 Nixon, “‘A Speculative Idea,’” 234–35.
18 Ibid. Nixon argues that Dr. Sloper was probably an obstetrician and that his wife perished in childbirth by his hands (if not, his wife would surely have had a male obstetrician chosen by him). Nixon presents evidence that obstetrics was highly lucrative in 1830s America, especially among wealthier families, since midwives were being replaced by male doctors.
19 Ibid., 232; Ian F. A. Bell, Washington Square: Styles of Money (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 146–47.
20 Millicent Bell, “Style as Subject in Washington Square,” Sewanee Review 83, no. 1 (1975): 19.
21 Ronell also discusses Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Musil, and Thomas Pynchon.
22 Ronell, Stupidity, 5.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 Ibid., 6.
26 Ibid., 3–29.
27 Ibid., 69.
28 Ronell briefly discusses Washington Square, remarking on the difficulty of interpreting Catherine’s loyalty to Morris (Stupidity, 38). Although she does not use her own categories to analyze the novel’s relationship between father and daughter, which I see as the most significant relationship in the novel, her two definitions of stupidity draw from the history of literature as well as philosophy. Thus, I am following out a dialectic that appears in both fields, even though Ronell did not develop it herself in relation to this novel.
29 Ibid., 70.
30 Mona Simpson, introduction to Washington Square (New York: Penguin, 2013), x, xiii.
31 Ronell, Stupidity, 83.
32 Ibid., 84–85.
33 Ibid., 84.
34 Ibid.
35 Henry James, Henry James: Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1287.
36 Lacan, Transference 1960–1961: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Cormac Gallagher, session IV (n.p., December 7, 1960). This is an unofficial translation from unedited manuscripts; no official translation is available.
37 Leo Gurko, “The Dehumanizing Mind in Washington Square,” in Washington Square: An Authoritative Text with Selected Criticism, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), 241.
38 Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1991). Lacan compares the existential stances of both love and hate: “[H]ate is not satisfied with the disappearance of the adversary. If love aspires to the unfolding of the being of the other, hate wishes the opposite, namely its abasement, its deranging, its deviation … its detailed denial. That is what makes hate a career without limit, just as love is” (277). I interpret this comparison to mean hatred kills twice—not just the body but the life narrative too, compared to love as a wish for another’s “unfolding.”
39 Ibid., 33.
40 Ibid., 277. Lacan seems to make a superficial stab at science, but Charles Shepherdson develops this argument in Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2000). He applies Lacan’s point that a demand for change is not real change by arguing scientists and medical professionals should not perform surgery on demand for transsexuals; science does not understand the “narrative” dimension of the problem of sexual difference (101). Shepherdson uses the term transsexual in the medical context of men and women seeking sexual reassignment surgery, so I reproduce his term rather than the one in current usage, transgender persons.
41 Charles Shepherdson, “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,” in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Thomas R. Flynn and Dalia Judovitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 282.
42 Ibid., 293.
43 Martin Heidegger, qtd. in Shepherdson, “On Fate,” 271.
44 Shepherdson, “On Fate,” 297.
45 Ibid., 287.
46 The meaning of sympathy in the 19th century was not clearly distinguished from our contemporary meaning of empathy (as a form of perspective-taking, not just pity). This confusion comes out in the conversation between Mrs. Almond and her brother, since she urges him toward a more capacious understanding of Catherine, while he insists that sympathy is just “pathetic,” a way of “handling bruises” (152).
47 Ronell discusses the link between judging and “finishing with” someone or “terminating,” tropes for violence that she associates with the know-it-all form of stupidity (Stupidity, 70).
48 M. M. Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3.
49 John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986); Daniel Brudney, “Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry, 16, no. 2 (1990): 397–437.
50 In Janina Levin, “Breaking with Kairos in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl” (paper, Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association annual conference, Portland, OR, November 2015), I explain Maggie’s strategies for defending herself against the “other woman” and her husband.
51 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (London: Penguin, 1987), 463.