Worth Sharing This Week: Washington Square

A few years ago I stumbled upon several movies, all based upon novelist Henry James works.  I knew nothing of James, but I was intrigued enough by the movies to purchase several of his books.  It was the way James portrayed the complex and often frustrating societal guidelines single women faced that captured my attention.

Henry James is considered by many to be one of the greatest English language novelists of the 19th century.  He was born in 1843 in America but moved to Europe as a young man before settling in England and becoming an English citizen in 1915.  He died in 1916. 



Henry James was a key figure in the move from literary realism to literary modernism, or so says Wikipedia.  For my part, I know he had a fine understanding of the mores of a society that was often contradictory in its treatment of women,  perhaps because of having a wealthy background that allowed him the opportunity to see firsthand the vast differences in what was expected of a lady born and bred and the price it exacted upon the women born into the same culture he grew up in.    He had a method of overlaying emotions in his work that portrayed a character's deepest psyche.  He had a brother who became a well-known philosopher and psychologist and a sister who was by his own admission brilliant yet suffered psychosis.  I wonder how much his siblings influenced his works of fiction?

James wrote prolifically publishing novels, travel books, criticisms, plays, biography and autobiography through out his career.  As many did in his time, his first works were published anonymously.  His first paying work was an article on Sir Walter Scott's works.  He wrote extensively all through the years of his life.

This month I picked  Washington Square for my February reading.   I had  'seen' the book via the movie starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, made in 1949, called "The Heiress", but it was the 1997 remake of the movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh that brought me to James' written work.   "The Heiress" is a good film, however the real complexities of the novelist's portrayal of  fierce emotions of love and hate comes alive almost brutally in the film with Jennifer Jason-Leigh.  This movie portrays the novel very well, I think.




I ordered this film this week for my personal collection.

Music is  central to Washington Square.  It is the thing which Catherine Sloper truly does do well and is her emotional outlet.   The song "Tu chima una vita" was a piece that haunted me for years.  The lyrics are based on a poem written by Salvatore Quasimodo and set to music by the Polish composer Jan A. P. Kaczmarek.

I am surprised to discover that "Tu chima una vita" was written in the 20th century...Kaczmarek certainly did a wonderful job in making one imagine it might have been written  in the early part of the 19th century!  Quasimodo's words are haunting in English as well as in his native Italian.
Titled "You Invoke a Life" the poem continues:

Labour of love, sadness,
You invoke a life,
That within, deep inside, has names
of skies and gardens.
And were it my flesh
Which the gift of sorrow transforms.


Another lovely piece is "Catherine's Nocturne" also by Kaczmarek.


Of interest to me is the history of Washington Square Park which is located in Greenwich Village.   It's such a fitting setting for the story James' tells in his book of the same name.

                                                      The Square in about 1880


Originally the 'Square' was about 6 and 1/2 acre plot of land that was given to freed slaves by the Dutch West Indies Trading Company for the purpose of raising their own foods and supplying their livelihood.  The ground was taken away when British rule came to the U.S.  Eventually, the land wlay between two churches and included a potter's field or burial grounds for the indigent and poor.

In 1827 it became a military training field and coffins splintered under the heavy wagon wheels of artillery.   The city determined to beautify the spot by removing the top layer of bodies (! gracious!  How many deep were they buried?) and leveled and sodded the whole park.  This drew the attention of the wealthier men who saw the field as a thing of beauty and began to build fine houses in the area and by 1840's was synonymous with genteel wealth.   It is here, in this time frame that the story takes place.   And the house James' describes was in fact his grandmother's home which he visited frequently during his childhood.

                          supposedly the row which contained the author's grandmother's home

If you have time to watch either one or both of the movies, by all means do so.  And do take time to read James' novel, as well.