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The Doctor's Order: Eugenic Anxiety in Henry James's Washington Square
- Literature and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 15, Number 2, Fall 1996
- pp. 244-262
- 10.1353/lm.1996.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
The world of Washington Square is shaped by representations absorbed from the evolutionary biology of James's era. Through the relationship between Austin Sloper and his daughter Catherine James dramatizes and critiques these representations, suggesting how the novelist is plagued by the same epistemological and ethical problems as nineteenth-century science.