Abstract
At the turn of the century, Henry James was inspired by the story of two divorced parents to write a novel centered on the consciousness and experiences of a child thus divided. But the “partagé child” provided James with more than a captivating central character; it also gave him a new idea for how to write the modern novel. What Maisie Knew initially purports to be a novel given to following the limited and evolving consciousness of this child, but the novel is most remarkable for the way that it changes course. In the end, Maisie’s strategies of coping—silence, secrecy, and diversion—also come to characterize the narrative technique of a novel that never, at last, reveals what Maisie knew.
An earlier version of this chapter originally appeared as an article, Phillips, Mason. “The ‘Partagé Child’ and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew.” The Henry James Review 31:2 (2010), 95–110. © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
“What Maisie Knew,” The Literary World; a Monthly Review of Current Literature” 28.25 (December 2, 1897): 454.
- 2.
“Henry James’s New Work: ‘What Maisie Knew,’” New York Times 27 November 1897: BR9.
- 3.
“Mr. James New Novel” in Current Literature 22.6 (Dec 1897): 505. This same reviewer buttresses his/her defense by also asserting that even if sense of immorality is present, the story is “so well” told that “the sense of its unpleasantness is forgotten in the reader’s admiration of the author’s fine restraint.”
- 4.
Though Maisie’s parents may seem like monstrous exceptions to the rules of parenting, their views of Maisie’s interiority are amazingly conventional. Referring to such popular Victorian metaphors of childhood as “The Child of Wax, The Ceramic Child,” and “The Child Botanical,” James R. Kincaid argues that “Over and over, this child-rearing discourse transfers the being of the child to the parent…reaching for a variety of metaphors to suggest openly that the ‘child’ is nothing more than what it is construed to be, nothing in itself at all” (Child-loving 90).
- 5.
Prior to Locke, who made a central case for the child’s capacity to reason, there was little to separate the child from the animal. See Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance.
- 6.
Pifer also notes the adult characteristics of Maisie and argues that the novel thereby collapses the gap between child and adult. This conclusion, however, does not, to my mind, account for the dematuration of the adults in the novel. In other words, it seems to me that the gap is sustained—but it is inverted.
- 7.
That this ability for internal perception (to see one’s meaning even when that meaning is either not verbalized or is contrary to what is) is not equally shared by the adults in Maisie’s life is highlighted by the further details of this late exchange between Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix. It is Maisie who follows Mrs. Wix’s circuitous charge, “that there must at last be a decent person” in Maisie’s life, as an implicit critique not of Sir Claude, who is the most immediate, visible target, but of the absent Mrs. Beale. Sir Claude, Maisie is surprised to see, misses this indirection and takes the remark as personal insult (192).
- 8.
James uses the phrase “limited consciousness” to describe Maisie earlier in the novel (26). In this scene, he uses the phrase “dim perception” to capture Beale’s ignorance (149). The latter clearly recalls the former and suggests, yet again, just how dramatic the role reversal between child and adult has been.
- 9.
Walter Isle identifies the cluster of shorter texts that James wrote following his failure in the theater as experimental and as the direct precursors of the “involutions and obscurities” of James’s “so-called ‘late style’” (11). Sergio Perosa agrees with Isle and draws a further distinction between the thematic experiments in James’s fiction pre-1890 and the technical experimentation, the merging of his interest in the dramatic method with a new limited point of view, central to his novelistic endeavors immediately following his failure in the theatre (5–6). And most recently, Christina Britzolakis argues that What Maisie Knew serves as an “‘experimental’ precursor of modernism” as well in that it “constitutes a key moment in the refinement, specialization, and elaboration of a technique of fictional looking devised to negotiate the shocks of urban modernity” (370).
- 10.
John C. McCloskey argues that Maisie’s is a traceable empirical development with a very restricted environment. Jeff Westover traces Maisie’s as a path from passive dependence to active autonomy through the novel’s various physical laying on of hands. And Christina Britzolakis’s brilliant analysis of the phantasmagoric qualities of Maisie’s vision nonetheless restricts Maisie’s perception to literal sight, arguing that there remains throughout the novel a fundamental disjunct between what Maisie physically sees and what she cognitively understands (383–384).
- 11.
Susan E. Honeyman argues that the inaccessibility of childhood is precisely what allows James to develop his late method, a method which dramatized the novel’s struggle with representation. And Dennis Foster challenges the basic assumption that Maisie knows anything at all by showing that Maisie more often than not takes up the language of the adults around her in an attempt to please and impress them without really understanding the words themselves.
- 12.
The line explicitly echoes the earlier expression that Maisie’s parents should do something for “‘the real good, don’t you know?’ of the child” (42). In that instance the expression proves a lie for as “any spectator” of the proceedings could see, Maisie’s parents “wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other” (36). The second such manifestation, though not false, nonetheless proves equally futile, at least with Sir Claude as the agent of the child’s good.
- 13.
“Some Tendencies in Contemporary Fiction,” The Living Age 223.2891 (Dec 2, 1891): 587.
- 14.
“The Novels of Mr. Henry James,” The Living Age 236.3061 (Mar 7, 1903): 578.
- 15.
“Henry James’s New Work: ‘What Maisie Knew,’” BR9.
- 16.
Barbara Eckstein makes a persuasive argument for narrative ambivalence in Maisie, based to large extent, on the narrator’s restricted, humanly deficient omniscience.
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Phillips, M. (2016). The “Partagé Child” and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. In: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_3
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