Hopeful Disorientations and Washington Square: Finding new Ways of Living in Times of Crisis in Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise (2022).

Abstract

This paper addresses Hanya Yanagihara’s third novel To Paradise (2022), and, more specifically, the ways in which it is entangled with Henry James’s Washington Square (1880). Yanagihara’s text, written during the Covid-19 pandemic, is divided in three parts, each dealing with different disorienting situations and each set in Washington Square, New York. I argue that this seemingly irrelevant fact both connects the novel to James’s novel and, more importantly, readapts its way of dealing with disorientations as a productive and hopeful tool through which to address a reality entangled in complex social crisis.