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She has evolved in the sense that she developed some heroic qualities towards the end of the novel. Although she is wronged by both her father and Morris Townsend, she forgives them both, which in itself is admirable and telling of great character. We also admire her strength for refusing Morris Townsend near the story’s end, as well as the courage it must have taken for her not to back down from her oppressive father. However, Dr. Sloper and Morris Townsend's attitudes remain the same in the end of the novel.

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The novel is about the cultivation of an identity, and finding oneself—even though one has been buried for so long. Catherine lives a half-life. She is burdened with her mother’s name and cannot hope to live up to her brilliance. By the time she is 18, she is “quiet and irresponsive,” because “she was shy, uncomfortably, painfully shy.” Catherine undergoes significant change upon her meeting with Morris Townsend. She, who is "much addicted to speaking the truth",  lies to her father, whom she fears and respects, for the first time. Part of Catherine’s development also marks her slowly becoming “clever.”

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I believe that Catherine has evolved in the sense that she is no longer deceived by Morris and blinded by her father--she is able to perceive Morris’ unscrupulous nature through his abandonment of her, and she successfully frees herself from being controlled by her father. Previously, Catherine stated that her “greatest desire was to please” her father, suggesting that her attitude towards her father consisted mostly of reverence and fear, but after the events of the novel, she is able to view her father and Morris in a more critical light. Towards the end of the novel, Sloper remains concerned that Catherine will marry Morris even after his death, Morris is defeated after his confrontation with Catherine after Sloper's death. Instead, it is Catherine who is able to endure and take control of her own life, unlike Sloper and Morris, whose intentions are ultimately foiled (

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One idea that is discussed in the New Yorker article is the notion that the characters are 'all soul', the opposite of cardboard. From this perspective, we can interpret Mrs. Penniman, Dr Sloper, and Morris Townsend as representations of ideals and desires rather than characters that develop throughout the story like Catherine.

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In this final chapter, we see the manifestations of Catherine's development in character. She is finally able to understand Morris' ulterior motives by detaching herself from Dr. Sloper and Mrs. Penniman's views, by rejecting Morris. However, Morris and Dr. Sloper attitudes remain constant throughout ("lives unlived").

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Catherine is the only character who has evolved.

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Catherine is the only character who has evolved.

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Catherine changes from being an idealistic girl who desires love to a bitter, jaded woman who refuses to enter marriage, as she believes that men would only want her for her money. Dr. Sloper remains stubborn and patriarchal throughout the novel, while Mrs. Penniman is still a romantic who vicariously lives through Catherine and Morris's relationship, and still urges Morris to pursue a relationship with Catherine at the end of the novel. Morris does not evolve either, as he persists in his greed and spendthrift behaviour, as demonstrated by how he claims to have run out of passage money to return to Washington Square, and how he goes back to Catherine in hopes that she would agree to marry him after the death of her father.

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Is Catherine the only one of the main characters who has evolved at all?

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Is Catherine the only one of the main characters who has evolved at all?

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Yes, as even in Dr. Sloper’s death, his view of Catherine does not change, (still that simple, dull, and unintelligent girl that disappoints him with her choices in her own life), and his alteration of his will cements the idea that he still is unsatisfied with his daughter, untrusting of her intelligence to make the decisions he deems correct, and wishes to control his daughter’s life even when he is dead.

On the other hand, Morris Townsend approaches Catherine after learning of the doctor’s death, and after his desertion of her, carrying the same expectations of her character, that she will continue to love him despite how he had treated her previously, and that she will continue to remain naive and ignorant to his true motives. This foolishness is met with shock towards his rejection as he has not once considered Catherine’s growth in cruelty, and her ability to comprehend the main motivations of wooing her.

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Is Catherine the only character that has evolved?

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Is Catherine the only character that has evolved?

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Clever in his profesional life, not clever in his personal life
She doesn't want his money > he won't be ruling her life, even in death > she controls her own life
Who's life is unlived: Sloper obsesses over money, Morris is a leech, Catherine chooses her own life
The main conflict of the novel is that Catherine in her submissiveness is surrounded by people who want to make decisions for her. All of these characters have their own agenda in doing so, whether that be Morris and Dr Sloper's obsession with her assets, or Ms Penniman's desire to feel love vicariously through Catherine. The struggle for Catherine is to make a decision that is her own, and not allow her will to be bent by those around her. In this, Catherine is forced to change, and her evolution allows her to overcome this difficulty, and take control of her life. In contrast to this, the characters around her are unable to change.

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Today Catherine ought rightly be called an independent woman, one who decides against having not to be defined as a victim. Suffer she does, but not to the point that it bends her spirit. (foreword page xxiii Washington Square Henry James Penguin Classics.)

With this quote in mind re-read the final chapter, XXV. What is your view?

Is Catherine the only one of the main characters who has evolved at all?

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Finish reading The New Yorker article. Do you believe that the underlying issue in Washington Square is that the characters do not know how to love? Why is this so?

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While both Dr Sloper and Morris Townsend are described as very intelligent, they both underestimate Catherine’s potential as a heroine – as James wants them and the reader to, too, it seems. Catherine may not be the most blessed with abilities that heroines usually have but she has endurance and strength and it seems that these wear down the patience of both men. She is, in the end, the one who endures, the one who does not regret and lives her life – a very small and insignificant one – on her own terms. Her father has died, trapped in his own illusion that his daughter might still marry Townsend after his death and unable to prevent it. Townsend stands as a complete fool, urged by Catherine’s aunt, as he tries to reconnect with the woman twenty years after their broken engagement.

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Henry James's "Washington Square" wasn't a particular favorite of its author. James called the short novel "poorish" and, in a letter to his daunting older brother, William, wrote, "The only good thing in the story is the girl." Near the end of his life, when he selected work to revise for his culminating New York Edition, he didn't pick "Washington Square," dismissing it as one of his "unhappy accidents."

But we pick it, again and again. Among posthumous readers, "Washington Square" is a pronounced favorite, both with James connoisseurs, (who don't often return to "Daisy Miller," James's most popular book during his lifetime) and the wider public. "Washington Square" has inspired many adaptations. (The playbill of the recent "The Heiress" attributed the play to Ruth and Augustus Goetz, with no mention of "Washington Square." There's a Jamesian irony to this omission: in the eighteen-nineties, the writer had hoped to revive his reputation and replenish his income by writing for the theatre, but was hissed off the stage, and shortly thereafter left London for Rye, which was cheaper.)

James wrote "Washington Square" to complete a trilogy, for Cornhill Magazine, which began with "Daisy Miller," and its blithe accessibility no doubt partially explains why the book is so often assigned in courses. But I'd venture that it's the passion of James's excavation that sustains our interest. Reading this hundred-and-thirty-year-old book, we still feel the intensity of James circling an obsession. His great subject, beneath, between, and everywhere around his characters' complicated tricks and liaisons is the terrible condition of being unable to love.

We don't read James for his stories. Despite their formal symmetries, they feel jerry-rigged. He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre's gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.

We don't return to James for his characters, either. It's not quite possible to love them the way one may love Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway or even Lily Briscoe. They don't feel real, exactly, though they're the opposite of cardboard-a term suggesting characters made of appearances. James's characters are all soul; they're closer to ideas than to bodies. We know their sensibilities but not their details. One would have a hard time describing what any of the central characters in "Washington Square" look like, despite how much is made of Catherine's clumsy lack of beauty. James has already strayed from classical realism, which depends on a belief in an ordered and materially stable world. In a narrative about attraction, looks, and charm, those qualities are never definite. They waver. As internal as the narratives of "Ulysses" and "To the Lighthouse" feel, there's no doubt as to the vibrancy of the characters in those modernist masterpieces of the generation that followed James. We believe in their characters more than we believe in real people. In James, we believe in the characters a little less. While you could venture a guess as to what Mrs. Ramsay would eat for breakfast, (a jam sandwich, standing up) one can hardly imagine John Marcher eating at all.

We read James not for his stories or for his characters but for the one thing that can't be adapted: his mind. We know it, in its arguments with itself, its endlessly refining discernment, its flickering shifts and glints of wisdom. We know those details the way we know Bloom's love of organ meats and Mrs. Ramsay's tendency to slough off her beauty with haphazard clothes.

No one else has given such fine attention to personal life as it's thought, that wave and flutter in consciousness. Our stray wishes, our abiding hopes, our shame and constant fears-James attends to all the component parts of what we loosely call love, if only to show his characters coming up against their limitations.

"Washington Square" began for James with an anecdote told by the actress Fanny Kemble (who also published an anti-slavery memoir about her years married to a tobacco grower, "Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation"), recounted in his journal:

Mrs. Kemble told me last evening the history of her brother H.' s engagement to Miss T. H.K. was a young ensign in a marching regiment, very handsome ("beautiful") said Mrs K., but very luxurious and selfish, and without a penny to his name. Miss T. was a dull, plain, common-place girl, only daughter of the Master of King's Coll., Cambridge, who had a handsome private fortune (£ 4000 a year). She was very much in love with H.K., and was of that slow, sober, dutiful nature that an impression once made upon her, was made for ever. Her father disapproved strongly (and justly) of the engagement and informed her that if she married young K. he would not leave her a penny of his money. It was only in her money that H. was interested; he wanted a rich wife who would enable him to live at his ease and pursue his pleasures. Miss T. was in much tribulation and she asked Mrs K. what she would advise her to do- Henry K. having taken the ground that if she would hold on and marry him the old Doctor would after a while relent and they should get the money. (It was in this belief that he was holding on to her.) Mrs K. advised the young girl by no means to marry her brother. ("If your father does relent and you are well off, he will make you a kindly enough husband, so long as all goes well. But if he should not, and you were to be poor, your lot would be miserable. Then my brother would be a very uncomfortable companion- then he would visit upon you his disappointment and discontent." )

Let's consider what James made of this grim scrap. As if unsatisfied with the flimsy H.K., James invented a more powerful villain-a father-and thus provided a more primal tragedy.

When the heroine of "Washington Square" is still a child, her father, Dr. Sloper, imagines her future.

"When Catherine is about seventeen," he said to himself, "Lavinia [her aunt] will try and persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will ever be in love with Catherine.&#8221

This idle prescience, on page eight, has the quality of a cast spell. In the story of Sleeping Beauty, the narrative that unfolds after the witch (who is also a fairy) dooms the heroine to prick herself with a thimble when she turns sixteen shows us how the curse of sleep does and does not come true. But the fairy was angry because she hadn't been invited to the baby's christening party. Why would Dr. Sloper conjure such a fate for his only living child?

Once upon a time, before our story began, Dr. Sloper had married for love. In his lucky case, this came with "ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan." He lived in happiness for five years. Then he lost everything: his son died at the age of three, and his wife died two years later, while giving birth to a daughter. Though still young, the doctor never considered remarriage, idealizing his late wife as "a bright exception" to the benighted women who surrounded him. Not only did this conviction curtail his romantic viability but, most crucially, it left him unable to love his daughter. Not "graceful," "accomplished," or "elegant," as he remembered her mother, he found her "commonplace" and drew "satisfaction in the thought that his wife had not lived to find her out." Dr. Sloper's is a morbid loyalty. "Washington Square" presents a case for the warping qualities of great love.

James turns the two sisters from the actress's anecdote into two aunts. Lavinia Penniman lives in Washington Square with her brother, to help raise Catherine. Though only thirty-three when her husband died, she never considered dating, either. Instead, she wore black for twenty years. So both the parental figures in "Washington Square" are bereaved. Dr. Sloper becomes a bitter cynic, rearing Catherine with duty, not love, while Lavinia assuages her own cravings for melodramatic romance by meddling dangerously in Catherine's first relationship. (She thinks of Catherine's suitor, "That's the sort of husband I should have had!") Catherine's other, married, less romantic aunt loves her whole-heartedly, but she lives further uptown and has nine children of her own.

Fanny Kemble comes off well in James's diary; she sounds not only virtuous but also all-knowing, dispensing adjectives with a nineteenth-century omniscience. Most of us still sound this way in casual conversation.

But James's narrator approaches Catherine ("the only good thing in the story") more gingerly, as a good modernist should, first telling us what the community says about the girl, in a kind of chorus:

The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a "nice" face.

A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics-a quiet, ladylike girl, by those of the more imaginative sort....

People who expressed themselves roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortable, painfully shy.

James uses the actress's modifiers ("dull," "plain," "slow," "dutiful," "commonplace") but adds alternate interpretations: Catherine may have been quiet rather than dull, ladylike instead of plain, not stolid or irresponsive, only painfully shy.

In a bid for the reader's sympathy, he tells us that Catherine loves cream cakes and that she spends too much money on clothes. (For a long time, she admired, and then finally bought, a red gown with gold fringe.) Catherine's father was her harshest critic. (When he saw the dress, "it made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed.")

James's narrator eventually reveals that, though Catherine "sometimes produced an impression of insensibility," she was "she was the softest creature in the world."

The softest creature in the world!

Fanny Kemble told a plain story about a woman without the usual attractions, entranced by a man who wanted her money. From that, James wrought a starker problem: What are the possibilities for a girl raised by people who can't love her?

Can someone else?

This tragedy is in motion even before Morris Townsend meets Catherine, wearing that red dress with the gold fringe.

James lifts another of the actress's adjectives for Morris. Like Miss T., Catherine finds her first love "beautiful." James slips in the adverb "so," and with two letters increases the hush of ardor.

*

James plots the romance in "Washington Square" as symmetrically as a dance. Morris asks, "Is it possible to offer more than the most tender affection and a lifelong devotion?" Dr. Sloper, suspecting the worst, answers, "A lifelong devotion is measured after the fact; and meanwhile it is usual in these cases to give a few material securities."

With the enthusiastic intercessions of Lavinia, the courtship proceeds (the young couple matching the doctor's interdictions). James teases the reader, who swings between skepticism and hope, between, one might say, Dr. Sloper and Mrs. Penniman, as Catherine's attachment grows.

"The girl was very happy... the present had suddenly grown rich and solemn." James writes about this tenderly, a flame protected by his cupping hand.

The love troubles in "Washington Square" feel modern because the threats are not external-even Dr. Sloper is no Shakespearean obstacle. Unlike the girl seduced by the actress's brother, James gives Catherine her own income, of ten thousand dollars a year. (Adrian Poole helpfully parsed inflation and cost of living increases; in current dollars, Catherine's money alone would allow the couple about two hundred thousand a year; with her inheritance from her father, they would have closer to six hundred thousand.)

So while Catherine agonizes about displeasing her father and Morris cogitates on the difference between a livable income and a luxurious future, the reader keeps trying to fit two halves together, their excrescences and indentations clashing. We have our at least partially tainted suitor and our heroine, who has not yet apprehended the central fact of her life, which is her father's contempt for her.

The situation raises many questions: Can one love and also seek to gain? If we doubt the existence of pure motives, what admixture tips into bad faith in such an overdetermined state as love? We all wish to be loved for only ourselves and nothing extrinsic, but what exactly is a self and is that entity sufficiently unalloyed to elicit love alone? Does the attraction to money differ from the awe a person feels in the presence of accomplishment, or the calm an orderly person can bestow upon someone who is congenitally anxious?

The most cogent attack on the Platonic ideal of romantic love arrived in Janet Malcolm's first book-length essay, "On Psychoanalysis." She claimed that "the most precious and inviolate of entities" is, in fact,

a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems... we cannot know each other.

Of the two centuries his life straddled, James belongs more to the atheistic era he died in than to the one in which he set "Washington Square," and so the question "Can she be loved?" inevitably twists out of its passive construction, to "Can she love?" For us, the tragedy of the girl Fanny Kemble describes is not that she fell in love with a cad but, rather, that her internal filament for attachment proved too fragile to recover and love someone else.

But nobody gets over anybody in "Washington Square." Not Dr. Sloper. Not Lavinia. And not getting over someone is a way of not having to love. As Adam Phillips once said, "The obstacle is a way of not letting something else happen." In the most predictable of turns, Catherine didn't listen to what her father said but instead imitated what he did, which was live in loyalty to a shrine; in her case, to a shrine not of an idealized dead spouse but of a mistake. (James once described an artist's career as "a sort of beautiful sacrifice to a noble mistake.")

In a surprising flourish, Henry James extends his story beyond Fanny Kemble's and gives Catherine two more suitors-one, a widower with children, the other an eligible younger lawyer who "could have his pick" of pretty girls but "fell seriously in love with her." Though both men are dispatched in one paragraph, this addendum reveals that Catherine's lures were not as impoverished as her father believed. The two suitors prove that beauty, charm, and attraction are not fixed but mutable and, as Janet Malcolm reading Freud would have it, matters of perception.

James provides one more surprise in this small masterpiece, giving his heroine a final chance for a sexual life. Morris returns, years later, alone and failed. Mrs. Penniman, now elderly but still given to assignations, arranges their encounter.

It is a meeting of middle age. Morris understands the contents of Dr. Sloper's will, which substantially disinherited Catherine. Catherine finally sees him plain.

If Catherine couldn't find feelings for the objectively better young lawyer, some readers think, then take Morris. He's flawed, but probably not dangerous, not at forty-five. Yet while Catherine's ending disappoints those readers, as it no doubt disappoints her aunt Lavinia, writers understand the beauties and consolation of a life in a chair doing "fancywork."

"Washington Square," a book about misprision, was itself undervalued by its contemporary critics, and even by its author. James believed that he deepened its themes and got them right in "Portrait of a Lady." But there's something homelier and more intimate about "Washington Square." As the widower and the young lawyer see more in Catherine than Dr. Sloper could, we find depths and pleasures in this book after more than a century. This is a kind of happy ending-though not one Lavinia Penniman could have loved. For James, who died feeling forgotten (when the first royalty statement for his "monument," the New York Editions, arrived, he asked, "Is there anything for me at all?") "Washington Square" 's lasting popularity, like Morris Townsend's midlife return, is a bittersweet vindication.
Mona Simpson has a new novel coming out next April. This essay is drawn from her introduction to the new Signet Classics edition of "Washington Square," which will be published this week. Photograph: Library of Congress.

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Can She Be Loved? On "Washington Square"

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Henry James's "Washington Square" wasn't a particular favorite of its author. James called the short novel "poorish" and, in a letter to his daunting older brother, William, wrote, "The only good thing in the story is the girl."