Discursive Formations and Authority in Henry James’s Washington Square

Using a Foucauldian-Lacanian framework, this paper examines how the father figure in Henry James's Washington Square ([1880] 1881) deploys nineteenth-century legal and medical discursive formations to justify patriarchal authority. The father figure, American physician Doctor Austin Sloper, bars his daughter Catherine's marriage to suitor Morris Townsend, claiming both patriarchal right and privileged diagnostic knowledge about human personality. This essay argues that Sloper's circumscription of his daughter's freedom and judgments about personality result from a system of rationalization based on popular discursive formations derived from the burgeoning urban landscape of nineteenth-century America, and that these discourses permit Sloper as scientist and patriarch to justify his prejudices and extend power over his daughter as the subject supposed to know.