Travel to Washington Dc

Washington Square (Modern Library Classics)

Format: Paperback
Author: Henry James
ReleaseDate: 08 October, 2002
Publisher: Modern Library
Rating:

A pleasure
Best of all is Henry James' lush prose; his ethereal descriptions of characters and their emotional states and feelings towards others is peerless - and beautiful, and often funny in a stylistic sense. Washington Square is a pleasure to read. The novel itself functions as an expostition of human greed and the need for control, physically and emotionally. The four focal characters are all well drawn, and because of that their more despicable natures come forward. The naive Catherine; her father, the overbearing Dr. Sloper; his sister, the officious Mrs. Penniman; and the greedy, and lazy, Morris Townsend, ostensibly interested in Catherine only for her, and her father's, money. There is plenty of scheming and posturing by all four of them, and any more words from me will spoil the novel. Also amusing, is the dated sensibilities of the characters; but it all adds up to an enjoyable novel by an American master.

Early James At His Best

Its theme is an intriguing one that raises the following question: Is it better to be clever or good? Even here, for James, the answer is not all that simple, his conclusion being it's probably best to be some subtle combination of both. Though James rejected this tale for inclusion in the New York Edition of his works, presumably because it was too simple and straightforward, many readers have not shared his judgment, insisting instead the work has great merit.
Dr. Sloper and Morris Townsend, the central male figures, are clever men, but each is deficient in his own way. The caustically witty Doctor wants to be just, but his pride in being right about Morris as a fortune hunter ultimately overrides his fatherly concerns. For this reason, he becomes a sort of Hawthorne-like villain, a scientific, detached, almost gleeful observer of his own daughter's plight, rather than a suitably caring parent. He suffers, finally, not from an excess of cleverness, but from a defect of generous felt emotion. Morris, too, is a definitely clever character, but at the same time he's the spoiled creation of enabling women, a boy-man who's more a self-interested player at life than a vital participant in it, an early version of the fatherless "It's all about me" youth of later modern fiction.
The heroine Catherine is a sorely beset young woman, pulled this way and that, now by her right-at-all-costs father, then by her fortune hunting suitor. She is a good, dutiful daughter throughout, though the novel details her growth in intelligent personhood. She finally gains the independence needed to tell her manipulative father where his parental rights end and her own moral self begins. Similarly, once her education in life is complete, she is able to avoid a final romantic capitulation, telling the shameless Morris in the novel's last scene what her mature self now requires he hear from her. Naturally, he's too self-involved to accurately understand her real character.
This short novel, finally, is rich in witty literary parody. It's closing chapters read like an inverted "Odyssey," with the patiently waiting Catherine weaving embroidery in Penelope-like fashion, until the surprise return of the long wandering Morris. All in all, despite the masterly author's doubts, this is a work of considerable distinction.

'94 Blackstone Audio is AWFUL
Mr. The 1994 Blackstone Audio Book version of "Turn of the Screw" is read by Pat Bottino. Bottino's uninspired presentation destroyed the story.
Perhaps Mr. Bottino got better in later ventures, I don't know, but he mangled "Turn".
Avoid this version at all costs.

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