Catherine in "Washington Square"

Henry James's short novel Washington Square presents the story of Catherine, a young woman who lives with her father, a doctor, and who is dependent on him for her livelihood. Her story represents the plight of women in the nineteenth century, dependent on men and able to escape from one situation only if they find another man to take care of them. The woman has less choice in this matter in the nineteenth century than we are accustomed to seeing today. Her choices are limited first by social standing and economic realities, and second by decisions made by the paternal figure watching over her before she is betrothed. In the novel, the man who courts Catherine is an opportunist. She may suspect this, but she also may be willing to overlook it if marriage to him gets her out of her father's house, which itself suggests how limited her choices really are, for otherwise she would choose more carefully. However, her father rejects the man as a fortune hunter. After her father dies, the man tries again, but now she rejects him, this time out of her own sense of self-respect. Thereafter, she remains in the house in Washington Square alone. Catherine becomes stronger in the course of the novel, and though she remains alone, she has made a moral choice that is entirely her own.

Catherine is another of James's female characters with a circumscribed experience. Catherine is a very placid character, and we learn little about what she thinks of the events taking place around

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might adapt to it more completely if she did not see through Townsend and if it were not for her growing resentment of the control her father exerts over her. In the beginning, Catherine is a particularly caring and accepting type of person: Catherine, with her innocence, happiness and softness in her first love affair, but her deep sense of filial loyalty, duty and respect for the father whom she knows to scorn her, is very different form the spoiled American maiden-princesses of the later age of the great fortunes (Geismar 37). Catherine's love never rises to the level of a great passion. Instead, she encases her broken heart in the external form of a cheerful, benevolent, charitable old maid. Life in Washington Square is as placid as Catherine's demeanor, and both are ruffled by the coming of Morris Townsend. From the first we are made to feel that Townsend does not belong to the society of Washington Square: He looks, at first glance, as if he did, but at a second he is a bit too handsome, a bit too soft, a bit too glib. And then he is mercenary and poor in a world where it is only permissible to be mercenary and rich (Auchincloss 51). Catherine, of course, does belong to Washington Square, which is why in the

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