Word: sloper
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...When I am here with Father, it seems that no one would want to listen to me." This painful admission slips from the lips of Catherine Sloper, the almost preternaturally shy heroine of The Heiress, currently playing at Boston's Lyric Stage. Catherine feels this way for good reason. Her father, Dr. Austin Sloper, is your basic 19th-century Frigidaire, almost biologically incapable of emotion except when criticizing his daughter or remembering the wife who died giving birth...
...Sloper aside, though, over a century of readers and viewers have wanted to listen to Catherine. Washington Square, the Henry James novella from which the story derives, was one of the author's earliest successes, and Agnieszka Holland's recent film adaptation, still playing at Kendall Square Cinema, opened last month to much critical acclaim...
Take, for example, Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance as Catherine Sloper, the shy and awkward young woman whose wealth Townsend is stalking. Does she really have to keep dropping objects and walking into walls to prove her social and physical ineptitude? And what about Albert Finney as her father, at once contemptuous and overprotective of her? He's a constantly rumbling volcano ever on the verge of eruption. One keeps recalling, much to Finney's disadvantage, the icier malevolence of Ralph Richardson in the earlier movie. On the other hand, Maggie Smith's Aunt Penny, more in love with Morris...
...incongruities between her persona and the period, however, serve to reinforce the essential awkwardness Catherine Sloper feels in her own environment. The skittish, chameleon-like quality that has kept Leigh from being a star is perfectly suited to Catherine. She almost disappears inside her own scenes until her misery and confusion are quietly compelling and almost uncomfortable to behold...
Washington Square centers around Catherine Sloper, a young woman whose individual identity is constantly undermined by her relations to the men around her. Her father sees in Catherine the ghost of his wife, who died in childbirth, and thus continually perceives her as a disappointment, a symbol of his own loss. "At the beginning of the film," says Holland, "Catherine seems 'stupid' because the father and the aunt see her that...