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“This Exchange of Epigrams”: Commodity and Style in Washington Square

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Ian F. A. Bell
Ian F. A. Bell
Affiliation:
Ian F. A. Bell is Lecturer in the Department of American Studies, University of Keele, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to seminars at the Universities of York and Reading. The author wishes to thank the students and faculty of those institutions and, in particular, his colleagues Martin Crawford and Robert Garson, and Nicola Bradbury of Reading for their assistance.
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Extract

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.

Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , April 1985 , pp. 49 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 The opening three chapters of the novel, prior to the beginning of the story's action in Chapter Four, stress the period in which the novel is set to a degree that is unusual for James. Chapter One contains nine references to specific dates and to the ages of the characters, and Chapters Two and Three each contain eight of such references. The time-scale in general of the novel has a distorting office, to which I shall return later.

2 Sloper's first “edifice of red brick,” within five minutes' walk of City Hall just north of Wall Street, “saw its best days” about 1820, after which “the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.” He moves north to Washington Square in 1835 when “the murmur of trade had become a mighty uproar” and when the neighbouring houses became converted into “offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce” (pp. 16–17. Page references are to the first book edition of Washington Square (along with two shorter tales, The Pension Beaurepas and A Bundle of Letters), reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine by Macmillan & Co., London, 1881. All subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the main text).

3 Douglas T. Miller tells us: “The city was compact, extending from the southernmost point at the Battery north along the Hudson for about two miles and along the East River for approximately two and a half miles. Canal Street marked the northern limit in the late 1820s; beyond that were several separate villages – Greenwich, Chelsea, Bloomingdale, Manhattanville, and Harlem – and scattered farms and elegant country seats.” At this time, “All was hustle and bustle in the metropolis; everything was given over to business and speculation” as New York became “the indisputed commercial centre of the New World.” (Jacksonian Aristocracy. Class and Democracy in New York 1830–1860, New York, 1967, pp. 70–71)Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 113.

5 North, Douglas C., The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860 (1961; New York, 1966), p. 205Google Scholar.

6 See Miller, pp. 114–15.

7 Ibid., pp. 116, 118.

8 Pessen, Edward, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality and Politics (1969, rev. ed. Homewood, Illinois, 1978), pp. 102–03Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 114.

10 Miller, op. cit., p. 107.

11 Ibid., p. 120.

12 Ibid., p. 80.

13 Peter Conrad's recent reading of the novel's geography unproblematically views James's tactic as an “occlusion of the city and the sanctification of an interior to shelter the private life” (The Art of the City. Views and Versions of New York, Oxford and New York, 1984, p. 26)Google Scholar. Such a reading is clearly accurate so far as it goes, but it makes no attempt to discern the imperatives for James's “occlusion.” Grievances aginst industrialization, the shifts to the factory system, the diminished value of labour and the exploitative tactics of the corporate structure sought their inevitable expressions in the form of social disorder (see the accurately entitled Feldberg, Michael, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, and Richards, Leonard L., “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Two years prior to James's departure for Europe, and six years prior to the composition of Washington Square, Joel Tyler Headley attempted an historical explanation of the Draft Riots of 1863 and the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871 which included substantial discussions of the unrest during the 1830s and 1840s in The Great Riots of New York 1712–1873 (1873; New York, 1971)Google Scholar. The prevailing fear of disorder was summarized by the Commercial Advertiser in August 1840: “Destructive rascality stalks at large in our streets and public places, at all times of the day and night, with none to make it afraid; mobs assemble deliberately…in a word, lawless violence and fury have full dominion over us whenever it pleases them to rage…” (quoted in Richardson, James F., The New York Police. Colonial Times to 1901, New York, 1970, p. 26Google Scholar). In 1834, the year before Sloper's move to Washington Square, civil disturbances were so frequent that the year “was long remembered in New York history as the year of the riots” (Richardson, p. 27).

14 It is a view strongly informed by a fascination with domestic versions of the technology which creates the ground whereby economic and social transformations are effected: “So you see we'll always have a new house; it's a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again about every five years, and it's a great thing to keep up with the new things. I always try and keep up with the new things of every kind” (p. 32). Townsend's abbreviated syntax and limited vocabulary are a telling Jamesian indictment. The reiteration of “things” suggests both an abstractive imagination and a reliance upon the static world of reification.

15 It embodies “the last results of architectural science” (p. 17) and is built in 1835 at the very time when Washington Square became a fashionable address with its new neo-classic houses.

16 This part of New York “appears to many persons the most delectable” because of its “established repose” and its “riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare” (pp. 17–18).

17 Washington Square is familiarized as the place where “your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude,” dispensing hospitality to “the infant imagination and the infant palate,” where “you took your first walks abroad” and “your first school” was kept by “a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferrule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn't match” (p. 18).

18 Mrs. Almond's house is, loosely, “much farther up town, in an embryonic street, with a high number,” in a region where “the city began to assume a theoretic air” and which is characterised by a long vanished “rural picturesqueness” (pp. 18–19). Mrs. Montgomery's “little red house,” out on the eastern edge of Manhattan, at least has the limited specificity of being somewhere on Second Avenue, but it “looked like a magnified baby-house” which “might have been taken down from a shelf in a toy-shop” (p. 94).

19 The American Scene (London, 1907), pp. 100–01Google Scholar.

20 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; London, 1970), p. 75Google Scholar.

21 Barthes, Roland, “Myth Today,” Mythologies (1957; trans. Lavers, Annette, St. Albans, 1973), pp. 152–53Google Scholar. It is entirely appropriate that Sloper's feelings for his wife were determined above all by his sense that she was a “reasonable” woman (p. 8).

22 See, for example, pp. 43, 50, 53, 54, 63, 64, 85, 91, 101, 202, 237.

23 Two familiar examples make the point to cover the span of James's career: in a letter of 1883, he urged Norton, Grace to “content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own [life]” (Henry Jame Letters, ed. Edel, Leon, Cambridge, Mass., 1975, 2, 424)Google Scholar, and in the Preface to Roderick Hudson he stressed the importance for the artist to have a “geometry of his own” (The Art of the Novel, ed. Blackmur, R. P. (1934; New York, 1962), p. 5)Google Scholar. ‘Surface’ has a crucial role in both The Europeans (published two years prior to Washington Square and the only other of James's major works to be set in the 1840s) and The Portrait of a Lady (which so preoccupied James during his composition of Washington Square).

24 Barthes, pp. 155, 141–42.

25 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of Epistemology (1970; trans. Sohn-Rethel, Martin, London, 1978), pp. 132–33, 112–13, 125Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., p. 132.

27 Ibid., p. 25.

28 Ibid., pp. 48–49. The defeat of history and difference by assumptions of timelessness and universality involves, of course, a denial of possibilities for human intervention, for materially altering the world conceived in terms of fixed objects which are authorized by custom, organization or institution. The abstraction of commodities is part of their fixed status, visibly refusing their potential for use in the interests of exchange.

29 Ibid., p. 49. Hence Sohn-Rethel finds the emergence of mathematical reasoning at “the historical stage at which commodity exchange becomes the agent of social synthesis, a point in time marked by the introduction and circulation of coined money” (p. 47).

30 “Their classical form is the maxim. Here the statement is no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity” Barthes, pp. 154–55.

31 It is a characteristic of the maxim, even in clever hands, that it refuses to acknowledge its own form. In Sloper's case, this refusal is often expressed by his irony: Catherine, for all her simplicity, recognizes an “exchange of epigrams” between Sloper and Mrs. Penniman (p. 39), and Sloper himself is certainly prepared to read epigrammatic form into Catherine's pressurized prose of that dreadful evening in the library when she tells him of her wish to see Townsend again. Against Sloper's “logical axiom” and “scientific truth” during this conversation, Catherine can only repeat herself as her words are forced into frozen blocks. Her moment of logical triumph, “inspiration” as she terms it to herself, “If I don't marry before your death, I will not after,” is easily defused by Sloper's alertness for epigrammatic expression: “To her father, it must be admitted, this seemed only another epigram; and as obstinacy, in unaccomplished minds, does not usually select such a mode of expression, he was the more surprised at this wanton play of a fixed idea” (pp. 133–34).

Such is the subtlety of James's critique of balance that commentators of a liberal persuasion read the novel as “written in a clear classical novelistic prose, an English unchanged since the time of Jane Austen, a prose in which wit and precision are simply two names for one and the same endeavour” (Le Fanu, Mark, “Introduction” to Washington Square published in “The World's Classics” series, Oxford, 1982, p. viiiGoogle Scholar). Le Fanu thus admires its “elegance,” “deftness of epigram” and “balance or equilibrium of tone” (p. ix). Nothing could be further from the truth: not only do we have here a misunderstanding of James's entire enterprise (which is exactly to liberate fiction from such conventions), but also, I suspect, of Jane Austen's own irony.

32 See, for example, his deployment of her words “kindness,” “gently” and “position” (pp. 58–60).

33 A good example occurs in Chapter Eleven when Catherine informs Sloper of Townsend's proposal (pp. 78–79).

34 See, for example, the conversations with Catherine (pp. 80–81) and with Morris (pp. 88–90).

35 He claims of Mrs. Montgomery, prior to meeting her: “If she stands up for him [Townsend] on account of the money, she will be a humbug. If she is a humbug, I shall see it. If I see it, I won't waste time with her” (p. 92). Needless to say, the dominance of Sloper's style is effected with its greatest nastiness during his interview with Mrs. Montgomery in Chapter Fourteen. Here, even the ironic veneer of that style is dispensed with. His presence alone seems to inflict a state of hypnosis on Townsend's sister as she is virtually mesmerized into acquiescing to his power.

36 The field has been well defined by V. N. Volosinov as “abstract objectism”: “What interests the mathematically minded rationalists is not the relationship of the sign to the actual reality it reflects nor to the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized. In other words, they are interested only in the inner logic of the system of signs itself, taken, as in algebra, completely independently of the ideological meanings that give the signs their content.” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1930), trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R., New York and London, 1973, pp. 57–58Google Scholar.) The particular incapacity suggested by “abstract obectism” is given a more complex reading in the paradox (distinctly germane to the Jamesian exercise) noted by Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max: “As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature, and must discard the claim to be like her. As image, it is required to resign itself to mirror imagery in order to be nature entire, and must discard the claim to know her.” (Dialect of Enlightenment (1947), trans. Cumming, John, London, 1979, p. 18.)Google Scholar

37 Knights, L. C., “Henry James and Human Liberty,” Sewanee Review, 83 (Winter 1975), 17Google Scholar.

38 See, for example, pp. 27, 29, 45, 151, 156, 158. Inevitably, Catherine herself is not free from such vocabulary: she has a sense of breaking a “contract” with her father (p. 160), and she views Townsend as “her own exclusive property” (p. 190).

39 Lucas, John, “Washington Square,” The Air of Reality, ed. Goode, John, London, 1972, P. 58Google Scholar.

40 Bell, Millicent, “Style as Subject. Washington Square,” Sewanee Review, 83 (Winter 1975), 19Google Scholar.

41 Against the “philological type of passive understanding which excludes response in advance,” Volosinov argues: “Any genuine kind of understanding will be active and will constitute the germ of a response… To understand another person's utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context… Any true understanding is dialogic in nature… Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding.” (Op. cit., pp. 101–02.) Catherine certainly attempts such orientation, but (because of her father's interlocution and her own immobilized referentiality that issues from the breach between exchange and use) she cannot effect its office, since Sloper permits no dialogical context to which it may correspond. I should say that, in general, Volosinov's concern with this issue seems to me to be extremely useful in any consideration of a writer whose main interest is always in the ways in which his characters talk to each other.

42 Lucas, 58.

43 “The nexus of society is established by the network of exchange and by nothing else. It is my buying my coat, not my wearing it, which forms part of the social nexus, just as it is the selling, not the making of it…In enforcing the separation from use, or more precisely, from the actions of use, the activities of exchange presuppose the market as a time-and-space-bound vacuum devoid of all interchange of man with nature.” (Sohn-Rethel, p. 29.)

44 Money, of course, presents the dominating cipher of the exchange network, and as an equalizing factor it belongs to the quantitative differentiation of balance, type and geometry whereby the opening of Washington Square is organized. Both money and trade rely upon a uniformity which elides the differences of people, locality and date (see Sohn-Rethel, p. 30). Such uniformity may be matched with Volosinov's notion of non-dialogical intercourse and with Barthes' “figure of the scales” in its reliance on a ready-made world which discourages difference and the grounds for human intervention. Commodities are equated in this view solely by virtue of being exchanged and not because of any intrinsic equality they may possess. The equating effect of exchange is thus, for Sohn-Rethel, of a “non-dimensional quantity” which is directly comparable to the abstractions of mathematics (pp. 46–47).

45 Ibid., pp. 49, 56.

46 This conflict has been ably documented in Winter, J. L., “The Chronology of James's Washington Square,” Notes and Queries, NS 28 (10 1981), pp. 426–28Google Scholar. More recently, Brian Lee's “Introduction” to the Penguin English Library edition of the novel is content merely to set the time of the action in the 1850s (Harmondsworth, 1984, p. 16).

47 Additionally, the novel provides a domestic version of its wider chronological conflict, in those two scenes where, oddly, Catherine lies (p. 78) and Townsend is evasive (p. 84) about the time of their first meeting. Their obfuscation of so trivial a detail can only be read as symptomatic of the purposiveness of James's strategic defusing of temporal specificity.

48 With the fall of men like Fisk came the rise of figures such as E. H. Harriman and the elder J. P. Morgan, initiating a period of unbridled expansion, even larger fortunes and battles for personal financial dictatorship. It was a period in which the older Republican ideal of freedom (tainted at its inception, perhaps, by its close relation to Lockean notions of property) became transformed into a freedom to make money in the form of laissez-faire capitalism. (One of the most intelligent accounts remains McCloskey, Robert Green, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise 1865–1910, 1951; New York, 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar.)

49 Quoted in Le Clair, Robert C., Young Henry James: 1843–1870 (New York, 1955), p. 66Google Scholar.

50 Letters, 2, 145.

51 Ibid., p. 209. A year later, as part of his increasing disillusionment with the vacuousness of the social circuit, he notes: “The country is in a very dismal state – everyone poor” (p. 261).

52 Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology (London, 1976), p. 103Google Scholar.

53 “Both Democratic and transcendentalist agreed in asserting the rights of the free mind against the pretensions of precedents or institutions. Both shared a living faith in the integrity and perfectibility of man. Both proclaimed self-reliance. Both detested special groups claiming authority to mediate between the common man and the truth. Both aimed to plant the individual squarely on his instincts, responsible only to himself and to God.” (Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Age of Jackson (1945), Boston, 1950, p. 381Google Scholar.)

This conjunction was clearly part of the intellectual furniture in the household of Henry James Sr. with its weighty respect for the conditions of individual rights. In itself, the conjunction enabled a curious paradox in the viewing of the most radical of individual expressions – rioting. The period's most concentrated years of social disorder (see note 13 above) between 1834 and 1837 occurred at the moment of Sloper's move to Washington Square and became authorized by the prevailing political rhetoric. Dissent in America (always sanctioned by the wider traditions of European thought articulated in the Declaration of Independence) was freshly approved in the Jacksonian position. David Grimsted expresses the paradox well: “The psychological appeal of riot in democratic society is that the situation gives a sense of acting by a higher code, of pursuing justice and possessing power free from any structural restraint, and at the same time allowing a complete absorption in the mass so that the individual will and the social will appear to be one…this is a kind of apotheosis for democratic man, fulfilling the official doctrine that power belongs to him and allowing him to escape the real system that attempts to share influence by making everyone powerless.” (“Rioting In Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review, 77 (04 1972), p. 393Google Scholar.) It is tempting to suggest that this paradox might provide part of the ground whereby James ignores the riotous aspects of commercial lower Manhattan which Washington Square is designed to resist: in the fictional and historical spheres, the potential of dissent as an expression of social divisiveness is defused as a liberty of disagreement.

54 See Eagleton, 141–45.

55 Ibid., p. 142.

56 I have attempted to explore the relationship between the issues raised here and the practice of writing itself in Bell, Ian F. A. (ed.), “Money, History and Writing in Henry James: Assaying Washington Square,” Henry James: Fiction as History (London, Vision Press, and Totowa, New Jersey, Barnes and Noble, 1984), pp. 11–48Google Scholar.