Here’s another take, from the 1997 adaptation of Washington Square directed by Agnieszka Holland and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ben Chaplin. Just as Clift was, Chaplin seems too handsome in the final scene: I want to see Morris fat and bald. I don’t remember much else about this adaptation — it’s been years since I’ve seen it — except for my impression that it seemed to get the provincialism of 1850s Washington Square North dead on. The parties seemed so small town. In any case, its final scene:

And here’s how the novel ends:

“You treated me badly,” said Catherine.

“Not if you think of it rightly. You had your quiet life with your father–which was just what I could not make up my mind to rob you of.”

“Yes; I had that.”

Morris felt it to be a considerable damage to his cause that he could not add that she had had something more besides; for it is needless to say that he had learnt the contents of Dr. Sloper’s will. He was nevertheless not at a loss. “There are worse fates than that!” he exclaimed, with expression; and he might have been supposed to refer to his own unprotected situation. Then he added, with a deeper tenderness, “Catherine, have you never forgiven me?”

“I forgave you years ago, but it is useless for us to attempt to be friends.”

“Not if we forget the past. We have still a future, thank God!”

“I can’t forget–I don’t forget,” said Catherine. “You treated me too badly. I felt it very much; I felt it for years.” And then she went on, with her wish to show him that he must not come to her this way, “I can’t begin again–I can’t take it up. Everything is dead and buried. It was too serious; it made a great change in my life. I never expected to see you here.”

“Ah, you are angry!” cried Morris, who wished immensely that he could extort some flash of passion from her mildness. In that case he might hope.

“No, I am not angry. Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong. But I can’t talk.”

Morris stood stroking his beard, with a clouded eye. “Why have you never married?” he asked abruptly. “You have had opportunities.”

“I didn’t wish to marry.”

“Yes, you are rich, you are free; you had nothing to gain.”

“I had nothing to gain,” said Catherine.

Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. “Well, I was in hopes that we might still have been friends.”

“I meant to tell you, by my aunt, in answer to your message–if you had waited for an answer–that it was unnecessary for you to come in that hope.”

“Good-bye, then,” said Morris. “Excuse my indiscretion.”

He bowed, and she turned away–standing there, averted, with her eyes on the ground, for some moments after she had heard him close the door of the room.

In the hall he found Mrs. Penniman, fluttered and eager; she appeared to have been hovering there under the irreconcilable promptings of her curiosity and her dignity.

“That was a precious plan of yours!” said Morris, clapping on his hat.

“Is she so hard?” asked Mrs. Penniman.

“She doesn’t care a button for me–with her confounded little dry manner.”

“Was it very dry?” pursued Mrs. Penniman, with solicitude.

Morris took no notice of her question; he stood musing an instant, with his hat on. “But why the deuce, then, would she never marry?”

“Yes–why indeed?” sighed Mrs. Penniman. And then, as if from a sense of the inadequacy of this explanation, “But you will not despair–you will come back?”

“Come back? Damnation!” And Morris Townsend strode out of the house, leaving Mrs. Penniman staring.

Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again–for life, as it were.

I plan to write a little bit about that last line for Wednesday. In the meantime, what do you make of the contrasts between these wrap-ups? Which one do you prefer?

Previously on PWHNY.

Our Writing New York class is currently reading James’s novel Washington Square. In all the years we’ve read and talked about this book, we’ve never managed to do much with James’s later piece of writing about his childhood home, “New York Revisited,” which he published in Harpers in 1906 and included the following year in his travel volume The American Scene.

In this piece James recounts a trip to the Eastern United States he undertook in 1904-05. Here’s the passage most relevant to Washington Square as a neighborhood, which follows his observation that “society” has long since made its way northward up Fifth Avenue:

One could talk of “quietness” now, for the shrinkage of life so marked, in the higher latitudes of the town, after Easter, the visible early flight of that “society” which, by the old custom, used never to budge before June or July, had almost the effect of clearing some of the streets, and indeed of suggesting that a truly clear New York might have an unsuspected charm or two to put forth. An approach to peace and harmony might have been, in a manner, promised, and the sense of other days took advantage of it to steal abroad with a ghostly tread. It kept meeting, half the time, to its discomfiture, the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square — lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state. With this melancholy monument it could make no terms at all, but turned its back to the strange sight as often as possible, helping itself thereby, moreover, to do a little of the pretending required, no doubt, by the fond theory that nothing hereabouts was changed. Nothing was, it could occasionally appear to me — there was no new note in the picture, not one, for instance, when I paused before a low house in a small row on the south side of Waverley Place and lived again into the queer medieval costume (preserved by the daguerreotypist’s art) of the very little boy for whom the scene had once embodied the pangs and pleasures of a dame’s small school. The dame must have been Irish, by her name, and the Irish tradition, only intensified and coarsened, seemed still to possess the place, the fact of survival, the sturdy sameness, of which arrested me, again and again, to fascination. The shabby red house, with its mere two storeys, its lowly “stoop,” its dislocated ironwork of the forties, the early fifties, the record, in its face, of blistering summers and of the long stages of the loss of self-respect, made it as consummate a morsel of the old liquor-scented, heated-looking city, the city of no pavements, but of such a plenty of politics, as I could have desired. And neighbouring Sixth Avenue, overstraddled though it might be with feats of engineering unknown to the primitive age that otherwise so persisted, wanted only, to carry off the illusion, the warm smell of the bakery on the corner of Eighth Street, a blessed repository of doughnuts, cookies, cream-cakes and pies, the slow passing by which, on returns from school, must have had much in common with the experience of the shipmen of old who came, in long voyages, while they tacked and hung back, upon those belts of ocean that are haunted with the balm and spice of tropic islands.

These were the felicities of the backward reach, which, however, had also its melancholy checks and snubs; nowhere quite so sharp as in presence, so to speak, of the rudely, the ruthlessly suppressed birth-house on the other side of the Square. That was where the pretence that nearly nothing was changed had most to come in; for a high, square, impersonal structure, proclaiming its lack of interest with a crudity all its own, so blocks, at the right moment for its own success, the view of the past, that the effect for me, in Washington Place, was of having been amputated of half my history. The grey and more or less “hallowed” University building — wasn’t it somehow, with a desperate bravery, both castellated and gabled? — has vanished from the earth, and vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the birthplace was one. This was the snub, for the complacency of retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable. And I have had indeed to permit myself this free fantasy of the hypothetic rescued identity of a given house — taking the vanished number in Washington Place as most pertinent — in order to invite the reader to gasp properly with me before the fact that we not only fail to remember, in the whole length of the city, one of these frontal records of birth, sojourn, or death, under a celebrated name, but that we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent. The form is cultivated, to the greatly quickened interest of street-scenery, in many of the cities of Europe; and is it not verily bitter, for those who feel a poetry in the noted passage, longer or shorter, here and there, of great lost spirits, that the institution, the profit, the glory of any such association is denied in advance to communities tending, as the phrase is, to “run” preponderantly to the sky-scraper? Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet, at any legible height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room for a sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a facade of fifty floors, does one “see” the pious plate recording the honour attached to one of the apartments look down on a responsive people? We have but to ask the question to recognize our necessary failure to answer it as a supremely characteristic local note — a note in the light of which the great city is projected into its future as, practically, a huge, continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient graces, those that strike us as having flourished just in proportion as the parts of life and the signs of character have not been lumped together, not been indistinguishably sunk in the common fund of mere economic convenience. So interesting, as object-lessons, may the developments of the American gregarious ideal become; so traceable, at every turn, to the restless analyst at least, are the heavy footprints, in the finer texture of life, of a great commercial democracy seeking to abound supremely in its own sense and having none to gainsay it.

This passage can be productively read against the “topographical parenthesis” the narrator of Washington Square provides in chapter 3 of that novel.

You’ll find the rest of The American Scene here.

For a round-up of our previous posts on James’s Washington Square, start here.

My initial impulse in teaching James’s novel has always been to take the title and setting seriously, to take what we know about the actual history of the development of Washington Square — its origins as a Potter’s Field, the history of class conflict surrounding its development and renovation over time — and read it against the narrator’s account, early in the novel, of the Square’s development and the Slopers’ place on it. (In taking the setting seriously I’m following Marcus Klein’s excellent treatment in Arizona Quarterly many moons ago, which is worth digging up if you have access to the print run in your library.) Last year Cyrus posted an overview of the approach we’ve taken and I offered up the timeline I use in lecture to contrast the novel’s admittedly partial memory with a more verifiable set of events.

One of the more interesting disjunctions between the novel and the Square’s actual history is the fact that the Slopers arrive on the Square — ostensibly to escape the clamor of commerce farther downtown — right on the heels of the Stonecutters’ Riots, in which laborers and masons resisted the city’s and University’s decision to use convict labor to build what would be NYU’s gothic University Building (pictured). I wrote a little bit about this issue last year — as well as about the contemporaneous development of another ritzy neighborhood, Colonnade Row, on the newly cut Lafayette Place, which bisected a mixed-class leisure space, Vauxhall Gardens, and undoubtedly helped pave the way for the Astor Place Riots there only a few years later. All of this unrest the novel would push to its symbolic margins. The Washington Square of James’s novel exists blissfully unaware of class conflict pushing right up against its borders.

Yesterday morning in lecture I took this contextualization so far as to suggest a parallel between the lawyer in Melville’s Bartleby and Dr. Sloper: each is subject to a certain blindness, to borrow a phrase from Henry’s older brother, William. Certainly the lawyer’s cozy kissing up to John Jacob Astor in Bartleby anticipates Dr. Sloper’s complicity in a market economy he thinks he has risen above. (We talked earlier in the semester about ways to read Bartleby in the context of the class conflicts that culminated in the Astor Place Riots.) And just maybe, I suggested, Catherine Sloper has a little bit of Bartleby himself in her. When it comes time to get married at the novel’s end, as good heroines are supposed to do, she simply prefers not to.

As Cyrus noted yesterday, and as Meg indicated in her lecture to our students on Monday, we take the setting for James’s Washington Square to be anything but incidental. To push that point a little harder I want to offer a chronology of the Square’s history, adapted from Emily Kies Folpe’s It Happened on Washington Square (Hopkins, 2002). One of the things I’m hoping to suggest here is that Dr. Sloper’s preoccupation with surfaces — both as a physiognomist and in his attention to the exterior details of his houses — is related to the efforts of urban planners to make over the Square, to give it a pretty surface. But, as recent construction efforts in the Square have reminded us, the spot has a rather spotty history, one that belies Sloper’s confidence in surface appearance.

The chronology:

1797-1822: New York suffers recurring yellow fever epidemics, with particularly bad years in 1798, 1805, and 1822. Washington Square, as Meg noted, is used in this period as a “Potter’s Field,” a place to bury the poor, slaves, criminals, the unknown dead, and undesirables generally. Public hangings take place at the northwest corner of the Square. During the 1822 epidemic, residents flee deeper into what is now the West Village, where new homes and businesses quickly spring up.

1825: Nearly full, Potter’s Field is officially closed and no more burials are permitted. As the growing city fills in the gap between lower Manhattan and the Village, city officials look to develop Potter’s Field.
 
1826: The Common Council votes to turn the Potter’s Field into a military parade ground, then a public park. This attracts the attention of wealthy businessmen, who soon fill up the houses in the surrounding area.

1831: The state legislature grants a charter to the University of the City of New York (later NYU). The first group of students begins classes the following year.
 
1829-1833: “The Row” built at the North side of the square, numbers 1-13. Numbers 18-26 (1829-1839) are also red brick, Greek Revival style. (The 1830s witnessed a burst of Greek Revival architecture in New York; the style can be taken as a statement of republican civic virtue, of the sort Dr. Sloper fancies himself to possess.) Number 18, demolished to accommodate 2 Fifth Ave., was James’s grandmother’s home. Through much of the 19th century, the north side continued to attract rich and leading citizens, while the south side was populated with immigrants living in tenements.

1834: Stonecutters’ Riot breaks out in response to tensions over free labor versus convict labor (see my previous notes on marble quarried by Sing Sing convicts). Dispute arises out of the University’s decision to rely on convict labor in erecting new school buildings. As our colleague Daniel Walkowitz writes: “The events surrounding the [riot] make it clear that both military authority and the economic achievement of the mercantile class were real, but that the enduring order they attempted to project and defend was only that — an image.”

1835: The Morning Herald declares: “The most fashionable end of town is now decidedly Washington Square and the surrounding neighborhood. … The elegance and beauty of this section cannot be surpassed in the country.”

1837: NYU’s original “University Building,” pictured at left, begins construction. (Demolished in 1894 and replaced by Main Building, now known as “Silver.”)

1843: April 15. Henry James is born at 21 Washington Place.

1849: May 10. Riot at Astor Place Opera House, which we’ve posted about before. James’s family lives on 14th Street at 6th Ave.

1850s: Immigrants begin filling up tenements on Bleecker Street, find work at nearby factories. Many aristocrats choose to move uptown to escape the industrialization, and the park slowly falls into disrepair.

1861-65: The Square deteriorates further from heavy use as a training ground for Union soldiers during the Civil War.
 
[Here's where we move beyond the novel's setting, but not yet its composition]

1870: Washington Square redesigned: strict symmetry of the old parade ground rejected in favor of curving pathways outlined by plantings and interrupted by small, round gathering places.

1873: Economic downturn throws the neighborhood around the Square into disrepair and increases class tensions.

1875: Unable to afford living in New York, James moves to Europe, where he will remain nearly all his life.

1880: Washington Square serialized simultaneously in American and England.

[Now we've moved slightly beyond the chronology that concerns the novel's plot or production]:

1889: Arch in Washington Square commemorates the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration as president.

How can this overview help us read James’s novel?

The chronology suggests, first of all, that the Square and its inhabitants are deeply bound up with commercial culture. The Square is enabled by mercantile interests, even as Dr. Sloper imagines that it serves as a shelter from the commercial culture found farther downtown.

If the Doctor sees Washington Square as representing a model of bourgeois privacy or domesticity, we need to think more carefully about what’s being kept out of his sanctuary. The answer is pretty much everything we’ve been talking about in class for the last several weeks: poverty, disorder, riots, immigrants, the whole Five Points shebang. 1834, the year before Sloper moves his family up to the Square, was known as the year of the riots, and yet, as Walkowitz notes, the merchant class labored mightily to create an image of containment and contentment in their newly renovated neighborhood.

In spite of the narrator’s efforts to make it seem otherwise, the Square, in the 1830s, doesn’t yet have a “social history,” at least not in the sense he and Sloper value; the new inhabitants invent the appearance of one and use it to cover a different kind of social history: one of class division, crime, slavery, disease.

We can also see again that Sloper’s genteel flight uptown isn’t much different than his nephew Arthur Townsend’s. Arthur “always tr[ies] to keep up with the new things of every kind” and wants to move uptown. (He also cites Longfellow inappropriately, suggesting he’s not too bright.) But we also read early in the novel that the houses on Washington Square North, when Sloper moved there, were supposed “to embody the last results of arch
itectural science.” They are the “new things of every kind” in 1835; they only have the “look” of a social history, although the novel, like the Square, works hard to make you forget this. Please ignore the bodies under the sidewalks and pretty bushes.

This little sleight of hand trick is crucial to understanding the novel and its characters. In spite of the fact that he works to create a safe, domestic, interior space, the Doctor is consumed with appearances, surfaces. The exteriors of his houses speak to this, especially the one in Washington Square, with a front balcony and drawing-room windows: his interiors and the house’s occupants and goods will be on display. We would call this, following the turn-of-the-century cultural theorist Thorstein Veblen, conspicuous consumption. He has a fondness (like the even wealthier tennants of nearby Colonnade Row) for marble–stone that’s susceptible, as are people, to polishing. His preoccupation with exteriors makes him believe he can see through false facades. He thinks he can read immutable aspects of personality–Morris’s “vulgar nature”–simply by scrutinizing his facial features.

But the park has taught us that surfaces can deceive even careful observors. Are people what they appear to be on the surface? (Morris may well be, in which case the Doctor needs to ask whether he knows what’s going on beneath Catherine’s rather simple appearance.) Sloper himself eventually admits to his daughter that he isn’t everything he has appeared to be: in that horrifying scene in the Alps he says to her: “I am not a very good man.” This confession unsettles her. Things may not be what they appear. “Men so clever as he,” she thinks, “might say anything and mean anything.” And neighborhoods as pretty as the Square might be covering up all sorts of meanings as well.