Catherine Sloper

The American writer Henry James wrote a great number of stories in which the role of the main character was a woman. He was very interested in the femenine world and this is the reason why he tried to explore what defines feminity in termes of genre. I have chosen two short stories about this author: Daisy Miller (1878) and Washington Square (1880).

Their main characters are both heroines and they also have a lot of points in common but I have analysed the different techniques that James used to design the female characters of Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper respectively because the different procedures meant inevitably different literary results.

In a first attempt to analyse Daisy and Catherine we realise that they can be defined by opposite adjectives: Daisy is spirited, independent, well meaning, young, beautiful, flirtatious but also ignorant, shallow and provincial; on the other hand, Catherine is bad-looking, shy, plain and painfully.

Consequently we could consider them highly distinct but, in fact, they are the one and the other women who have to face their reality by fighting against oppresive forces: Daisy against social conventions and Catherine against her tyrannical father.

However in a deeper analysis we can observe that what becomes tremendously fascinating is the different methods that James develop to create the characters of Daisy and Catherine. The narrator of Daisy Miller presents the events as “true”.

Daisy Miller Symbols

The method of the distant, first-person narrator who knows but is not knowledgeable, who is interested but not involved, has the effect of setting the whole story up within the framework of a piece of gossip.

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This scheme can be considered as ironic because the story itself is about gossip: the different things that one hears about people, the assumptions and prejudices one makes about them based on the things one hears and the difficulty of judging character based on the stories one hears.

It provides a narrator who acts as an observer to the events described in the story rather than an omniscient narrator who informs the reader of the thoughts of the characters. In other words, James focuses on the external details which offers the reader a realistic perspective of the characters and leaves moral judgement to the readers. After a brief description of setting the story of Daisy Miller begins with an “I”. The “I” refers to the unnamed character who acts as a first person limited omniscient narrator limited to the point of view of Winterbourne.

As a consequence, the reader cannot view all the descriptions as all-knowing and finite. In other words, the narrator is not an absolute authority. In order to reinforce this idea James uses intelligently verbs such as “seem”, or “imagine” to talk about Winterbourne’s opinions, to emphasize that we are provided all the information through his particular perspective. As Winterbourne, we as readers never know the real feelings of Daisy because James made an effort to provide only external elements. What is the opinion that the readers can have about the character of Daisy?

It really depends on the particular interpretations of the different readers because we never have evidences about her innocence or her guilty in the story. At the end Winterbourne neither is assured about Daisy’s personality. In this context, the character of Daisy emerges without any effort from the writer of analysing her thoughts or feelings. We are never told the story from Daisy’s perspective so we can only have a piece of the story. Therefore the portrait of the young American lady who is travelling around Europe with her mother and her little brother is completely drawn by the others, by society and most particularly, by Winterbourne.

When Daisy talks to Winterbourne or to Giovanelli her words do not seem especially relevant for the development of the story and it seems more important the way in which she is judged than the way in which she thinks about herself and her circumstances. As a conclusion it can be stated that in Daisy Miller the female character is designed by the others, that is, by comparison to the rest of people: the readers can not know what Daisy things or feels indeed because their perspective is limited to the people around Daisy and to their social prejudices.

Now that I have analysed the method that Henry James uses to describe and to develop the character of Daisy it is the turn of Catherine Sloper. Mark Le Fanu points out how Henry James draws a complex character in his main character, Catherine: Character, necessarily, is depicted from outside and inside. Outside, that is to say, the impression made by Catherine on the other personages in the story; and inside, the impression made on Catherine as the events take their resolute course. In this sense, we can roundly say that Daisy and Catherine are particularly different.

In Daisy the narrator emphasises a description from the outside, only taking into account the opinion and the thoughts of the rest of characters but not Daisy in itself. When faced with a problem, Catherine’s preference is to solve it internally, as illustrated in a conversation between her father and Aunt Almond: “And, meanwhile, how is Catherine taking it? ” “As she takes everything -as a matter of course”. “Doesn’t she make a noise? Hasn’t she made a scene? ” “She is not scenic”. Moreover, the readers are inevitably waiting for her to start standing up for herself.