I love this book so much I can't bear it. As someone who adores just about every last word that Henry James (over-) wrote, it has never gotten any more deliciously (un-)satisfying than this -- a slim, tart little novel about plain, socially unpromising Catherine Sloper, whose wealthy father refuses to allow her to marry Morris Townsend, whom he believes to be mercenary. No matter how many times I read this book, the question still nags at me: "Does Morris have any feeling at all for Catherine, or is he really just after her fortune?" But why is this even a question?

It's usually taken for granted that Morris is sketchily-drawn, the standard handsome and callow fortune-hunter of melodrama, and his own remarks to other characters in the novel seem to provide ample evidence. I'm not fully convinced of this, which isn't to say that he's fully-drawn; rather, I wonder if Morris Townsend might be a kind of failed stereotype, a failure *of* the novel to keep him in his appointed place. If he's so successfully sketchy, then wouldn't the novel be redundant, and its central ambiguity unambiguous? If that were so, then "Washington Square" would do little more than encourage the reader's contemptuous pity for its heroine, whose tragedy would be utterly generic: her inability to recognize her beloved's venal motives. That would be straight-up melodrama, or mean-spirited satire. That wouldn't be Henry James.

The tragedy of the novel depends, though, on Catherine's father, Dr. Sloper, one of James's most stunning and indelible creations. The man despises his daughter, yet wants to protect her; he sees through Morris's dandyish charm, yet is most offended by the idea that his awkward, unlovely daughter would win herself such a handsome, charming husband. His opposition to the match may be, on the one hand, patriarchal duty, but it is no less an act of cold-blooded cruelty, and it is through his refusal to allow that the young man may like the money and yet be a fine husband that the real drama of "Washington Square" emerges. In fact, the pressure of this character produces the novel's greatest and least predictable achievement: the transformation of Catherine Sloper from a non-character -- the pathetic, jilted heiress -- into a character, and the reader's tormented resistance to Dr. Sloper not only keeps the door of "Morris Townsend" ajar, but keeps the novel on a wonderfully shaky course, morally and aesthetically.

In later years, James himself commented that he started "Washington Square" with great disdain for Catherine, which metamorphosed into something much more complicated (similar, maybe, to Tolstoy's creation of Anna Karenina). Maybe it's possible, then, to read Morris Townsend (to whose consciousness we only have access in scant, sharp shards of observation) as the most reflexively novelistic in the book, in the sense that his own ambivalent heartlessness may well mirror the novel's own confused motives. James ultimately disavowed "Washington Square" -- he even omitted it from his "Collected Works" -- but it marks the first appearance of the central conflict that governs his later, greatest novels: the predation of love upon money, and vice versa. The moral puzzle of the passionate mercenary haunts his major work, and "Washington Square" may well mark the death of the non-characters (villain and victim) that started it all. A strange, beautiful, perfectly unsatisfying book.