Bit by Bit…

Strangers are interesting, right? Sure. You can see how Albert Camus titled his novel L’etranger or The Stranger. Something mysterious is always interesting. It’s been the nature of man to question the unclear the unknown. But there’s a writer who writes a lot about strangers in his works. You might not notice–well, I didn’t either. Well, let’s see what I can get from the library of Twain. You will find a stranger in the Carnaval of Crime, a stranger in The Jumping Frog, and another ‘comprehensive’ stranger in The Mysterious Stranger.

Thanks to Prof. Adams who suggested ‘Twain’s strangers’ as a paper topic, I will try now to figure out who are those strangers? If I cannot identify who the strangers are–what will likely happen–at least I can figure out how Twain came up with those strangers, those prevalent strangers.

So far, I can’t guess a thing. I just have some blind guesses concerning Twain’s strictness with details and facts and the unity of his work. It might be that those strangers come up because Twain does not want to feature a ‘named’ character if this very character does not have a very strong significance to be known by people. If he thinks that this certain character is worth reader’s recognition only for his/her action, not name, not characterization, not even origin, then the very character should not be named, his origin should not be told, and his characterization should be explained…

So far so…

After a couple of meetings with Daisy Miller in Prof. Adams class, we finally got to Washington Square, another novella by Henry James, inspired by his childhood experience staying for some time in Washington Square, New York. The first close reading discussion about the novella was fine, with students proposing their views after their own reading.

Now, we gotta be prepared to take a dip into Dr. Sloper’s characters. By the way, this Dr. Sloper is a very–I bet!–dislikable personality who, almost perfect as he is as a physician, insists on applying his personal values to his innocent daughter, Catherine.

I can say that Dr. Sloper is an almost perfect person in the sense that he is very committed to his profession. He is the kind of worker who works NOT ONLY for money–or, should I say that money is not the most important drive for him to work. He is driven by his ‘indulgence’ to work and study symptoms. We can also call him an ‘ascetic’ doctor, since he still commits himself to his job although he’s married to a very rich lady–which, for most of us, might lead us to idleness, or might lessen our seriousness in improving our quality as a worker. He doesn’t seem to care whether his profession will give him income or not. The point is: work! work! work! In this part, his obstinacy finds a sympathetic expression.

However, when it comes to values in life, he is, so to say, authoritarian, or authoritatively stiff. He insists that his sister, Lavinia, teach Catherine, his motherless sole-daughter, in such a way as to make her a ‘clever’ girl–while ironically he considers Lavinia a goose. When Lavinia argues that Catherine should also be made a ‘good’ girl, he sarcastically states that ‘[someone is] good for nothing unless [he/she is] clever.’ We can even infer that he ‘hates’ Lavinia and his late husband, a person with ‘flowers of speech’ or ‘flowery style of eloquence’ (which can also mean ‘good’ in the sense that all his sayings don’t hurt people’s feeling) but leaving her as a widow without fortune at the age of thirty three. This tendency appears again later in the novel when Morris Townsend, who is comparably flowery in speech and of no particular fortune-making profession, appears for the first time on the page.

He obstinately, yet probably unconsciously, yields to ‘the spirit of American society’ of his time (thanks to Dylan who pointed out in the first discussion, ‘In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it’). A very polite and nice person as Morris Townsend is, Dr. Sloper decides from the first sight that he likes Morris ONLY as a person, and not as a father whose daughter might fall in love with this Morris guy. At first, he doesn’t exactly state that it’s Morris joblessness that makes him judge Morris as a good kind of husband for his daughter Catherine. But we can almost positively tell that joblessness is his main reason for disliking Morris. Look at how, at the end of Chapter VI, he questions about Morris’s ‘means of subsistence’ despite his sister Mrs. Almond’s argument that Morris, who is still ‘at the age of innocence’, might have a pure reason to love Catherine–well, she’s quiet wrong here, because although still young Morris has traveled to Europe and has once, as he confess to Catherine, taken a wrong turn in his life. Dr. Sloper even wants to investigate Morris by visiting his sister to have a clear idea whether or not he ‘lives upon’ his five-childrened sister.

It’s here that I presume his dislike of the late Mr. Penniman echoes. While he (and the narrator) never again touches on this, we can say that it’s already in his blood to dislike to that kind of persons. He argues that this sentiment is the fruit of a ‘thirty years of observations’. And surely what happened to his poor sister Lavinia he ‘observed’ as well. A perfectionist and self-esteemed person as he is, he surely doesn’t want what happened to his poor sister happen to his own daughter.

That’s all now, we’ll talk a bit more on another ‘likable’ characteristic of Dr. Sloperr, that is, his ‘hidden’ charitableness. Sorry I can’t go on with it now. Just wait a minute or two or three until I continue this ‘blogcussion’ ….

Henry James wrote Daisy Miller more than a century ago. I just read it like two weeks ago. Henry did it in Europe, and I did it in the US (of course with my Indonesian sense of readership :D). So, there’s a quite a huge gap between us. But, let’s see how it influences (or doesn’t influece, too bad if it doesn’t) the way I read it.

Well, to me, the first character that attracts my attention is Daisy Miller itself. Well, she gets the strongest spotlight, man! She has the privilege to be the title of the novella. She was also introduced by the narrator with the help of co-main character Winterbourne minutely in the first pages of the novella. Yeah. She’s quite a cool character as a character and as an “imitation” of a person as well.

She’s a carefree kind of girl who doesn’t want to be alienated by social norms that don’t comply with what her heart says. She’s the kind of girl who utterly says “no” if she doesn’t like or agree with things. She loves freedom and, of course, hates being dictated. However, she appears to be someone who doesn’t want to hurt other people’s feelings when those certain people don’t hurt her feeling. Well, I would take the scene when she doesn’t want to leave Giovanelli with Mrs. Walker as an example. In this part, she doesn’t want to leave Giovanelli because he has planned to take a walk in the garden with her since ten days ago. However, when she hears Winterbourne forbids her from doing something (and being dictated is something she really hates), she makes a harsh remark about his being “stiff” and everything. Well, that’s what I have observed so far about Daisy.

Now, what I really want to point out is Winterbourne, the main-character-of-whose-name-the-novel-is-not-named-after of the novel. Well, he is very important to me. It is true to Henry James might have stood on Winterbourne’s shoes and might have used Winterbourne as a kind of mediator that story-tells us about how the American expatriates in Europe looked like. That might have been true. But to me, Winterbourne is the kind of character that has to be found in great, long-lasting literary works. It’s his brooding and pensive manners that make us spend a longer time to be with him, to think with him, to unconsciously follow his way of thinking. This observing kind character makes us see deeper to other characters in the novella.

Besides, we will most probably like his quality (as a fictional character) and hate him (as a reflection of certain people) once we realize what a of character he is. Well, he is very indecisive. He stands between young American who has the spirit to be free and old Europanized (or should I say not-so-American-in-terms-of-norm) American who stick to Christian values very tightly. He is so in love with Daisy Miller that she really finds sticking with old people’s way of thinking irritating but still he can’t completely flee from them. He ends up disliked by older generation but not openly loved by Daisy Miller.

This ambiguous character captivates us all the time with his being caught in dilemma. At most times we really want to kill this guy for his being hypocritical, but at other times we will think that what he thinks or says could be right and we feel sorry for his being made jealous by Daisy’s behavior.

Well, maybe I should start looking for more information about the characters of this all-American must-read novella. Until then, I will not start my serious articles, papers, or everything about it.