Class, Wealth, and Social Status Theme Analysis

At the beginning of Washington Square, James describes the young United States as “a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it.” One of the novel’s central problems emerges around the fact that Catherine Sloper’s suitor, Morris Townsend, doesn’t even pretend that he earns his income—a fact that contributes to the ultimate unraveling of their romance. Through Morris’s ongoing conflict with Catherine’s father, Dr. Sloper, over the implication that Morris is an unemployed fortune-hunter, James suggests that early American society more broadly was also navigating its own identity crisis with regard to class and the proper accumulation and use of wealth.

Catherine’s father is an upper-class man of some degree of leisure, even though he has a profession. Sloper has earned his living as a doctor of considerable skill, but his wife’s fortune enabled him to set himself up in practice, and he doesn’t really need the money he makes: “This purpose [of practicing medicine] had not been preponderantly to make money—it had been rather to learn something and to do something.” Class markers are a sticking point for Dr. Sloper—that is, in particular, he hates “vulgarity,” or ostentatious excess. This comes up with regard to Catherine’s showy wardrobe: “It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed.” Sloper regards it as fine to enjoy the fruits of wealth (as he does his own cigars and wine cellar, and his ability to spend an entire year traveling Europe), as long as one doesn’t appear to do so too obviously. Thus Dr. Sloper’s attitude toward his own wealth is a conflicted one. His position arguably owes as much to unearned wealth as to his own hard work and skill, and he enjoys the rewards of wealth while scorning the open display of such.

In Dr. Sloper’s view, Morris Townsend’s lack of an earned income makes him problematic. When Morris comes to call at Washington Square, Morris’s cousin, Arthur, explains that Morris is searching for a profession. Catherine is puzzled by this; she “had never heard of a young man—of the upper class—in this situation.” Catherine interprets Morris’s professional rootlessness as regrettable and out of the ordinary—a problem to be solved. He is a prime example of someone who neither “earns [his] income” nor “makes believe that [he] earns it.” Dr. Sloper imagines that he’s comfortable with the possibility of Catherine marrying a relatively poor man, and he tries to convince himself that it’s wrong to accuse such men of being mercenaries. “[I]f a penniless swain who could give a good account of himself should enter the lists, he should be judged quite upon his personal merits.” When such a “swain” actually comes knocking, however, Dr. Sloper is dissatisfied with the “account” he gives of himself. He tells Aunt Penniman: “[Townsend] is not what I call a gentleman. […] He is a plausible coxcomb.” Townsend, in other words, doesn’t act like a gentleman, but he nonetheless has pretensions of being one. Yet Dr. Sloper struggles to articulate his objections to Townsend, beyond these fumbling impressions. When Morris approaches Sloper to say that he and Catherine are engaged, Dr. Sloper finds it “vulgar” to say what he really thinks, telling Morris: “I don’t say that [you are mercenary]. […] I say simply that you belong to the wrong category.’” He declines to elaborate on what that wrong category is, however. Perhaps this is because his own conflicted category—that is, the fact that he enjoys both professional distinction and leisured privilege—complicates his critique of Morris’s position.

Washington Square is set against a backdrop of a young city seething with constant economic growth and population change—something its main characters must struggle to keep up with. New York City as a whole is struggling with its identity as a place of both restrained leisure and commercial striving. The Slopers move to Washington Square precisely because their previous downtown neighborhood is becoming dominated by “offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies”; those who desire to live among “quiet and genteel retirement” must move uptown, to places of “established repose” like Washington Square. Those who want to keep up with New York’s explosive growth must have a restless, pioneering spirit, ready to uproot themselves every few years if they want to be in the liveliest neighborhoods and have “all the latest improvements.” As Morris’s cousin Arthur Townsend explains to Catherine, “That’s the way to live in New York—to move every three or four years […] it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things.” The demographic face of New York is changing, too, as evidenced by the fact that Aunt Penniman avoids the Battery because of the “[exposure] to intrusion from the Irish emigrants,” and she remembers a certain restaurant because of its black proprietor, a relative novelty. In all these ways, the ever-changing shape, size, and makeup of New York City reflects, on a broader scale, Dr. Sloper’s own discomfort with the uncategorizable Morris Townsend.

Catherine’s engagement to Morris finally collapses under a combination of pressures—especially her father’s disdain for Morris’s social status, and the fact that Morris really does desire Catherine’s fortune. The latter fact doesn’t discount the possibility that Morris has at least some genuine affection for Catherine. However, the novel never makes Morris’s romantic sentiments clear, suggesting that in the world of New York’s upper class in the 1840s, “mercenary” concerns were coming to dominate all else.