thout love, but her life is a poor enough thing without it (Auchincloss 5).
The image of the male head of the household in the last century in this novel is a harsh one. Dr. Sloper lives with his widowed sister and his daughter and never lets them forget that he would rather be with his dead wife and dead son. His wife was beautiful, and he says his daughter is not. His son was promising, and he says his daughter is not. His cruelty is constant, including direct verbal assaults on both women, but he has much more power than they in the patriarchal society in which they live:
If his daughter and sister do not do as he wishes, he can disinherit them. Homelessness and poverty are very real possibilities for both Lavinia and Catherine in the world they inhabit, the Washington Square home governed by a domineering father whose idea of child-rearing is shaped by the idea of obedience (Goldfarb 44).
Catherine changes in the course of the novel, becoming more self-aware, more willing to challenge the power of the males ruling her life. The changes are gradual--this is not a world of action but a world of the slow interaction of characters:
Everything [in the novel] is ordered, polite, still: the charming old square in the pre-brownstone city, the small, innocent, decorous social gatherings, the formal good manners, the quaint reasonableness of the dialogues (Auchincloss 50).
Catherine's role in this world is determined from birth by the disappointment of her father, for Catherine "was 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" (James 5). Of course, his definition of an admirable man would continue the same prejudices against women--in some ways, Dr. Sloper is not that different from Townsend except in the pride he takes in his own accomplishment.
Townsend represents a man w...