As I have gotten older, and read more classic literature, I've learned to trust my first impressions more. When I was young and got lost or annoyed by a serious literary text, I figured that it was just slowness or confusion on my part. But now, when I get a feeling from a text, I follow it and believe it.
Washington Square is an example. A little bit less than halfway through the text of this book, I realized that while I could follow the plot easily enough, I could not relate to any of the characters. In the past, I would have just assumed that the social customs of 19th Century New York City were just too impenetrable for me to follow. But the truth is, the characters in Washington Square are hard to relate to because they are unlikable characters. This is a book about bad people ruining their own lives, and once I realized that, I decided to read it as a comedy.
There are four characters in Washington Square: Catherine Sloper, the heiress to a good-sized fortune, who lives with her father, Doctor Sloper, a successful doctor, in a mansion in Washington Square. Doctor Sloper's sister, a widow named Mrs. Penniman, and Morris Townsend, a young man who courts Catherine Sloper. The plot of the book revolves around the fact that Morris Townsend's main motivation in pursuing Catherine is probably her money. Doctor Sloper wants to protect his daughter from a mercenary marriage, while her aunt, Miss Penniman, like the intrigue of playing matchmaker. This is a fairly basic plot, but what interested me about the story was how much I didn't like the characters, who spent the book making each other miserable. Catherine Sloper is easily flattered and fixated on the attention she gets from Townsend, but seems to have no other interests, and seems to take no notice of the world around her, being comfortable in her sheltered existence. Her father, seemingly trying to "protect" her, is self-righteous, inflexible, and denigrates her constantly. Her aunt treats the entire situation as a literary romance, and seems to view the people around her as characters, rather than people, enjoying the intrigue that comes from her niece's romance, without thinking of her feelings. And Townsend is a glib, manipulative and greedy man. Each of the characters stumbles about with short-sighted motivations, and never seem to learn or grow in any way. They make each other miserable and then fade away without learning anything.
There is a question of authorial intent here, as with any book. And my view might not be universal: apparently there are people who view Catherine as the heroine of the story, because...by the end of the book, she is happy living off her inheritance and doing embroidery, which represents character growth. I don't know specifically what Henry James intended when he wrote this book: was it a psychological study? Was it an analysis of a social milieu? Was it "just" an attempt to tell a story? Henry James himself didn't think much of the book, so maybe he, like Townsend, was merely inspired by the money. Whatever his intent, my own reading is that is an almost comical story about what happens when people are dishonest with each other, and with themselves.
And as a final note, while the book has been adopted into a movie several times, it has been as a serious drama. Reading the book, I wondered what a comedic interpretation of the book would be like: Townsend played by an annoying actor like Adam Sandler, oozing with smarminess, Doctor Sloper as a self-righteous martinet, Miss Penniman as a soap opera-obsessed gossip, and Catherine Sloper as a dully oblivious girl.