One final feature of Washington Square, which according to Quilligan is characteristic of allegory as a genre, is the presence of a “threshold text.” A threshold text is an opening narrative that is commented and investigated in the rest of the text; it signals the reader to read morally (i.e., allegorically) (53).
The opening pages of Washington Square present a physician, a man of the medical profession, whose trade is to keep people alive; he is a practical man, touched by the light of science, a learned man, a scholarly doctor, a rational man. Then, Chapter 1 closes with something “that signals the reader to begin looking for a moral” (Quilligan 52). The little girl that remained with him after the death of his wife and son “was not what he had desired” (5). When he looked at her, he “often said to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing her” (5). Then James’ narrator makes the following comment: “I say ‘such as she was’, because, to tell the truth—But this is a truth of which I will defer the telling” (5). So, from the beginning, the narrator …show more content…
Furthermore, the personifications are made literal through a set of puns on the names of the cast. In addition, the novel opens with a “threshold text” that introduces a central abstraction (the practical physician touched by the light of science) and sets the stage for the central moral idea of the story: that “insensible rationalism is cruel.” Finally, Dr. Sloper’s trajectory exemplifies and prescribes —as allegories do— in a sequence of episodes, what should not be done by people who cultivate rational
The opening pages of Washington Square present a physician, a man of the medical profession, whose trade is to keep people alive; he is a practical man, touched by the light of science, a learned man, a scholarly doctor, a rational man. Then, Chapter 1 closes with something “that signals the reader to begin looking for a moral” (Quilligan 52). The little girl that remained with him after the death of his wife and son “was not what he had desired” (5). When he looked at her, he “often said to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing her” (5). Then James’ narrator makes the following comment: “I say ‘such as she was’, because, to tell the truth—But this is a truth of which I will defer the telling” (5). So, from the beginning, the narrator …show more content…
Furthermore, the personifications are made literal through a set of puns on the names of the cast. In addition, the novel opens with a “threshold text” that introduces a central abstraction (the practical physician touched by the light of science) and sets the stage for the central moral idea of the story: that “insensible rationalism is cruel.” Finally, Dr. Sloper’s trajectory exemplifies and prescribes —as allegories do— in a sequence of episodes, what should not be done by people who cultivate rational