Aloha, Serial Readers!
I'm reading James in Hawai'i, a setting that accentuates my reading of place in this first installment in Old New York. WASHINGTON SQUARE appeared transatlantically a month apart (with the first installment, these six chapters, in The Cornhill in June, and in Harper's in July 1880), a traveling experience of a different kind.
I also just finished Jeffrey Eugenides' THE MARRIAGE PLOT, an ideal post-sequel to this story about Catherine Sloper's marriage plot. What struck me about the description of Catherine in this debut installment is her sensuality. Her accentuated plainness, which I take to mean she possesses no conventional feminine beauty, and her strong appetite for food and for clothes (that red dress with the gold trim--what Lauren Berlant considers an allusion to Hester Prynne's Scarlet) imply to me a kind of sexual presence perhaps more common with male Victorian characters. She's "somewhat of a glutton" who "devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of cream-cakes"! Her response to Morris Townsend seems rather more embodied than otherwise--how else to read why dancing with him makes her dizzy?
At the same time she has the power of a fortune, or at least a prospective fortune as an heiress, which is where this marriage plot is headed. Apparently James began working on THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY just after finishing this story, so Catherine as a precursor to Isabel Archer and to Pansy Gilbert. While it's clear that Catherine's aunt likes the idea of Morris as a suitor with a proposal up his sleeve, and that Dr. Sloper is approaching this prospect as a business arrangement (he needs to check out the goods by visiting Morris's sister on Second Avenue), that Catherine imagines telling her father that she refused the proposal, and that she starts lying to him, throws some seasoning into this marriage plot. What other power does Catherine have besides refusing and dissembling? We shall see.
For next week, chapters 7-12.
Serial Seasons,
Susan
2 comments:
In these first chapters, Dr. Sloper’s unlovely view of his daughter seems MORE than a “little way of alluding to her as an unmarriageable girl,” as his sister describes. That she was without a trace of her mother’s beauty, that she was an inadequate substitute for his first-born, that he would make the best of her. I’m interested in the questions Lavinia raises. Appearances aside, since Catherine has nothing working for her on that count, is it better to be clever than good? Dr. Sloper says that, though she is “absolutely unattractive,” she is not unmarriageable. She has wealth. Still, the Doctor is sure no man, “with or without a mustache” will be in love with her. In these early chapters, beauty seems skin deep.
I was watching for what made Catherine attractive to me as a reader, and not finding it, since I am (no doubt all too predictably!) attracted to the plain women who are clever (or intelligent--which of course may not be the same thing), and by their intelligence become attractive. But not Catherine, we're told. I therefore appreciate Susan's framing of Catherine's gluttony, love of sumptuous dress, and enjoyment of dancing, as sensuality. It makes great sense. I also dislike Dr. Sloper's constant critiques of his daughter, who does seem to be also quite a congenial housemate. It was intriguing to note how he altered Aunt Lavinia's "good" to "good for," a radically different value system!
I have also been struck repeatedly by the setting, and keep having to remind myself it is not Britain, and therefore social dynamics are different from our previous serials. It also made me gleeful to see that the doctor and family moved "up town, as they say in New York." It's amusing the Washington Square was "uptown" and that the phrase was not yet applied more generally.
I distrust Morris intensely, so I worry about Catherine now, too.
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