Washington Square, like The Portrait of a Lady, is an open-ended Henry James novel that concludes ambiguously and unhappily, counter to the trend of many other Victorian novels. While many contemporary Victorian novels center on marriage and inheritance plots, concluding their protagonists' struggles with felicitous performative utterances of "I do" and "I bequeath," Catherine Sloper's future is less clear: at the conclusion of Washington Square, she remains both unmarried and disinherited. Both characters and readers alike seem stymied by Catherine's motivations at the end of the novel, as famously studied in Judith Butler's essay, "Values of Difficulty." Catherine seems calculable, submissive, and guileless at the beginning of the novel--both her father, Dr. Sloper, and her suitor, Morris Townsend, judge her to be good but "decidedly not clever." So what happens over the course of the novel to produce Catherine's infelicitous and incomprehensible outcome? This thesis's performative reading of Washington Square sheds light on the infelicitous and inscrutable conclusion to Catherine's story. At a critical moment in the novel, when her inheritance is at stake, Catherine refuses to be coerced into offering a promise that is demanded from her by her father. "I can't explain," says Catherine," "And I can't promise." This refusal to promise, or refusal to enact a felicitous performative--accompanied by an inability to explain her refusal--is a suspensive and powerful method of disinterpellation. Catherine unmakes herself as a subject in the capitalist ideology of the male antagonists in Washington Square--and thus, becomes incomprehensible to them--by insisting on infelicity. This powerful disinterpellation helps Catherine regain control over her future.

Master of Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Jason Brody / The use of partnerships between the public and private realm have become increasingly popular. This is due to today’s challenges of declining public resources to fulfill the social and physical needs of urban environments. This dilemma has placed a heightened emphasis on executing creative and collaborative redevelopment projects. Downtown Kansas City has an opportunity for such a project. Washington Square Park in downtown Kansas City, Missouri has a unique opportunity to stand as a catalyst project that would reconnect the urban fabric of the city, increase the population within downtown, and create an unsurpassed gateway into the greater downtown area. The public realm alone cannot accomplish this undertaking. Therefore, implementing the redevelopment of the park through public private partnerships is a natural choice. This study explores the intricacies of implementing the proposed Washington Square Park redevelopment project through the use of public private partnerships. It draws from a body of literature and precedents to provide background material, context and principles that are applied to the Washington Square Park project. The study employs site, market, and stakeholder analyses to assess the current economic environment, property ownership, power relationships and influences relating to the redevelopment project. These methods determined that as the value of Washington Square Park increases so will adjacent property; existing economic incentives are critical for project implementation; multi-family and retail real estate markets are strong while office trends are improving; current zoning allows for very high density with no height limitations; and several “key players” hold the attributes for establishing a conservancy for Washington Square Park. These findings reveal the symbiotic relationships between Washington Square Park and the surrounding context which provides the rational basis for project implementation through public private partnerships. Overall, this document informs the various stakeholders and decision-makers of pertinent information pertaining to the Washington Square Park redevelopment project and propositions a scenario for project implementation through the use of public private partnerships.

The works of Henry James are renowned for their dense sub-text and the manner in which he leaves his reader to elucidate much of his meaning. In the field of adaptation theory, therefore, James presents somewhat of a problem for the film adaptor: how does one convey on screen James' delicate implications, which are formative to the text without actually existing on the printed page? This project not only works to answer that question, but it also addresses a more serious question: what does adaptation have to offer to the student of literature? In the case of Henry James, the film adaptations of his novels expose the trope of voyeurism which functions as one of the central operative mechanisms in the novels, allowing both authorial omniscience into the minds and lives of the characters, as well as the creation of a voyeuristic character through whose perceptions the reader's knowledge is filtered. In examining recent film adaptations of The Portrait of a Lady. The Wings of the Dove, and Washington Square, it becomes apparent that the key to adapting James is careful attention to this trope of voyeurism, which ultimately becomes more important to a successful adaptation (an adaptation which most closely reproduces James' observations and biases rather than those of the director) than exact fidelity to the plot itself. With these considerations in mind, I have indicated that Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady most successfully achieves James' purposes, highlighting both the on-screen voyeurism of Ralph Touchett, then using techniques (lighting, camera angles, editing, sound) to similarly construct the viewer as voyeur. Agniezka Holland's Washington Square, however, ignores James' careful positioning of Catherine Sloper as an object of visual amusement to her father and creates an insipid film that plays the drama as a mercantile transaction gone awry. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove bloats the construct of viewer as voyeur into ineffectuality through his use of full nudity to capture the eye of the audience, ensuring that the film's images, rather than its story, are all that is remembered.

In the world of Henry James's novels, characters are often placed in difficult situations where their happiness depends on their ability to make a free choice. Female characters are manipulated and diminished by a patriarchal system that not only seeks to subordinate their will, but also to objectify them, to place them on the shelf as a trophy. Fathers and husbands are typically the controlling agents, but James also presents women who appropriate the dominating role. With varying degrees of success, each female character rejects the status of trophy. Instead, each attempts to make choices and determine her own future. James allows for ambiguity and nuanced resolutions. With ambiguity comes hope in the steadfastness of Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, in the tragic heroism of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, and even in the sacrificial loss of Verena Tarrant for Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians.