Self-Worth: Washington Square by Henry James

Henry James’s novel Washington Square portrays a young introvert’s journey to self-awareness and self-respect.

Many of the introverted main characters we’ve discussed in the Introvert Book Club seem almost to have been born with a fierce, insistent sense of self-worth. Feisty Jane Eyre in the novel of that name never doubts that she deserves fair treatment and happiness, despite being an outcast orphan. Chess prodigy Beth Harmon, in The Queen’s Gambit, strategically and confidently pursues the development of her talents in her orphanage and beyond. Fourteen-year-old June Elbus, in Tell the Wolves I’m Home, easily tolerates and even deliberately exacerbates nonconformity with her classmates. And Mr. Darcy, the supposedly aloof love interest in Pride and Prejudice, likewise cares little about his image as being all too full of himself.

But we have quite a different dynamic for introvert Catherine Sloper in Henry James’s 1880 novel, Washington Square. The daughter of a wealthy New York City doctor whose mother died soon after giving birth to her, Catherine grows up lacking the deep-rooted self-regard of those other characters. Instead, her domineering, judgmental father serves as her morning and evening star, someone whose approval means everything to her. However, Dr. Sloper implicitly and sometimes explicitly disdains his daughter for being unattractive, boring, unassertive and inherently unmarriageable.