Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Washington Square by Henry James. The writer explores the importance of Mrs. Penniman in the novel with a focus on her role's impact on the character of Catherine. There was one source used to complete this paper.
From the beginning of writing fiction authors have built their stories around the protagonist. Usually there is one person who is closely involved with the protagonist as well. This is what draws the reader into the story and helps define the boundaries and the structure of the plot. Every once in awhile the world is treated to an author who can provide an important non-protagonist character who contributes as much to the story as the protagonists do. This is the case in the classic tale of Washington Square by Henry James. In this story James works to present a story of love, defiance, obedience, greed and heartache. While this is being developed James provides the reader with the character of Mrs. Penniman who plays a crucial part in the entire story. Mrs. Penniman impacts the life of Catherine in an almost constant manner, in both positive and negative ways. She is the one who causes Catherine to make many of the choices she makes regarding her handling of her love of Morris, and the hatred her father feels for Morris. Mrs. Penniman is a central figure to the entire plot of the story though she is not by most definitions a protagonist.
To fully understand the impact and influence that Mrs. Penniman (Catherine's aunt) has in the story it is important to have a grasp of the story itself. This is a story of a plain girl named Catherine who falls in love with a pauper named Morris Townsend. Her father is furious because he believes Townsend is really only interested in the fortune Catherine's mother left her when she died. Catherine has been raised to not defy her father, and in that upbringing she has not developed a self-confidence that initially allows her to do so. Mrs. Penniman is the sister to Catherine's...
She plays a most crucial part in the entire story because if it was not for her direction, meddling and interference the story would stop at the first objection by Catherine's dad to stop the lovers from being together (James, 1990).
Mrs. Penniman has a streak of imagination that in the era the story is set in would be considered wild by any standards. She is a widow and she is lonely and she has a bit of a chip n her shoulder when it comes to the bossy and controlling attitude of her brother, Catherine's father. Because she is a bored old woman she decides to turn the relationship of Morris and Catherine into an amusing hobby and she spends the entire book going between the two of them and playing them like a puppeteer who is charge of the puppet strings.
In addition to her meddlesome attitude she becomes completely taken by Townsend. Perhaps this is because she is lonely herself, or she believes if she were a bit younger she could catch the eye of someone like him as well. Whatever the reason she spends the book manipulating Catherine to please Morris (James, 1990). If Morris wants Catherine to love him Lavina works her niece to do so. If Morris feels the time has come to let her go, which happens several times in the book, the aunt works to help keep him in their lives through their own contact. She gives him whatever he wants and she works to maintain his contact in Catherine's life so that she can continue to have him in her life as well.
Mrs. Penniman encourages Catherine to continue a relationship with Morris regardless of her father's objections. Where she wavers and waffles however is in her advice about openly defying her father (James, 1990). She starts out by telling her niece that she should just love and marry Morris with or without her father's approval, but at later times she encourages the niece to continue to correspond with Morris but work…
Catherine, meanwhile, is drawn to warmth, symbolized by the fire in the room at the time she is telling her father of Mr. Townsend. She (or perhaps the narrator; it is left ambiguous) even notes that the fire is warmer than her father's eyes and fixed smile, and finds the relief, comfort, and perhaps even the familiarity in the fire that she cannot find in her father or in his
William Shakespeare was born into a world of words that took him from cold, stone castles in Scotland to the bustling cities of Italy and the high seas of colonial change. An emblem of the Renaissance, the Bard of Avon was not only the conqueror of his own mind and pen, but also of the language of his own social, political, and religious reality. His theatre, the epic Globe, mirrors
(In his master's voice) But, since this is totally a novel regarding memory and return, the narrative keeps recoiling, as if going after James's thought processes, into the vital episodes of his bygone life. In this astute manner we are able to inch into James's strange family life which gives an account of his father's horrendous pursuit of spiritual perfection, his mother's shielding care of her writer son, the ailment
Foreign Policy Nixon's Detente Description Detente was a cooling down, or thaw, among America, Russia and China's arms' race (Detente). The United States and Russia could either slow their weapons production or continue the arms race, which, people feared could end in a devastating war (Detente, CNN). Nixon and Henry Kissinger worked secretly on Detente at summit meetings in Beijing and Moscow. President Gerald Ford signed on to Detente in Helsinki in 1975.
Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where
American Way of War The history of the American Way of War is a transitional one, as Weigley shows in his landmark work of the same name. The strategy of war went from, under Washington, a small scale, elude and survive set of tactics practiced by what seem today to be relatively "quaint" militias, to -- in the 20th century -- a full-scale operation known as "total war." True, "total war"