Charlie Rose

REMant  11/12/2012 09:50 PM Report

Filmed in 1949 from a Broadway play adaptation of Henry James' Washigton Square, it won a bunch of Oscars and is considered a Hollywood classic. Based on this trailer, and the initial comments, I'm afraid these ppl haven't got the slightest idea what it is about, and I'm in no mode to listen to nonsense. Suffice to say it was typical serial magazine fare the expatriate and probably homosexual James is said to have worked up from a true story, tho almost all his works concern young women, governesses and suitors. He later omitted it from his collected oeuvre, not only perhaps because he considered it too lightweight - most of his work being labored and incomprehensible - but also because it appears a good deal autobiographical. Unlike most of what he wrote, however, this book has remained popular, perhaps, because it is somewhat similar to Austen tho not because it deals with the feminization of the young woman, but rather with her stupid obstinacy, the theme of all Austen's work, tho I'm afraid the feminists don't get that either. Fortune-hunting was, even so, a quite respectable business in centuries past, Willoughby's aside - George Washington was one - and tho the girl's father's overbearing, like James' own, the fact remains she's no better than he. It's Austen without the happy ending, indeed with no possibility of one. And I would guess the reason the adaptation won attention due to the postwar preoccupation with childrearing by writers like Gesell, Spock, Horney, Fromm, Adorno et al, Mead and Kinsey.