Washington Square: Styles of Money (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 221 The focus on private homes (and the traveler's donnée to them) is sharply extended in "Casa Alvisi," James's final essay on Venice, written as a preface to Katherine Bronson's memoirs. Here the emphasis is no longer on "discovering" the city, but on the human connections that the city enables. Bronson's virtue was to enable the traveler and the expatriate to meet on the grounds of a "perfect tenderness for Venice " ( 105 ). This "true principle of fusion " enabled Bronson and her associations to create in her home the sense "of a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show" (103). A similar progression from spectacle to private theater marks the Rome cycle, and James's ethics of vision evolve in these essays from a tourist's view from nowhere to an engaged intersubjectivity in which the traveler's "practiced groping gaze" no longer aims at discovering the city, but at forging relations with his friends in "odd happy passages of communication and response" (95). Fred Kaplan's edition organizes James's Italian essays in a fashion useful to the scholar and pleasant for the general reader. The inclusion of excerpts from James's correspondence makes the volume invaluable: the reader's only complaint of this rich resource is the wish to have yet more. Ian F. A. Bell. Washington Square: Styles of Money. New York: Twayne, 1993. 165 pp. $22.95; pb $7.95. By Janet Gabler-Hover, Georgia State University Ian F. A. Bell's Washington Square: Styles of Money proves the "complex ordinariness" of Washington Square to be far from ordinary (13). I would add that only James could mute his style and subdue his characterization to such an effect of intensity and purposiveness. Such ordinariness, according to Bell, is the appropriate medium for James's inquiry into American nineteenth-century bourgeois politics. Bell contends for the social historicity of James's Washington Square (1880) and, for point of comparison, of its companion-piece The Europeans (1878): "Washington Square is about history, about the ways in which economics and commercial practices structure human relationships, and about the ways in which history may be represented in fictional forms" (23). Bell argues his points gracefully with a masterful use of the traditional Twayne format. Bell argues that the 1840s setting of Washington Square in the nascence of commercial expansion obliquely implicates the fully industrialized American marketplace of the 1870s. This fluidity of boundary reveals the process, glossed by Roland Barthes, Thorstein Veblin, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, by which bourgeois capitalism seeks to mystify and disguise "its production, the memory of its 222 The Henry James Review own manufacture" (51-52) so as to foreclose "the imagining of alternatives" (31) to its own structure of economic policy and social relation. Bell further argues early in his "Reading" that James found in Balzacian realism and Hawthornian Romance like imprints of stasis and fluidity, respectively, that he recomposed in his own work as a paradoxical interaction between oppositional necessities: Balzacian reification of "fact" and Hawthornian imaginative "latitude." Professor Bell explains that aesthetics and economics share the same ability to disguise the process of their making. In "Time, Place, and Balance" (chapter five), Bell shows how Sloper resists change; the physical solidity of Sloper's house parallels his choice of Washington Square as the last geographical bastion from New York's commercial district. He also employs a "balance" that represses opposition; even his elitist yet practical profession—physician—neutralizes the increasing division between manual and intellectual labor occurring in nineteenth -century corporate practice. Scientific rhetoric complements the "fixed" nature of the marketplace and the alienation of people/things from their usefulness , whether that "thing" is an item in a shop window or Sloper's daughter Catherine. Bell argues additionally that the fallacy of marketplace value is represented by the controversy between soft and hard money during the Jacksonian and Reconstruction eras. Bell's discussion (53-65) inevitably brings to mind Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987). Both Michaels and Bell expose the fallacy in the argument that one form of money, gold...