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In What Maisie Knew Henry James explores some of the new narrative techniques that were developing at the turn of the century. The novel recounts the story of Maisie, a girl of five, whose parents, Beale and Ida Farange, divorce and start a virulent war against each other using their own daughter as the main weapon. They do not fight for actual custody of the child; rather, they find it much more effective to express their mutual hatred by leaving Maisie in the other's care beyond the period settled by the court.

Meanwhile, both parents begin having affairs and remarrying, so that Maisie soon finds herself with four parents, two of whom--the real ones--take no responsibility for her. Her stepfather, Sir Claude, becomes Maisie's friend but is too dependent on his passion for women, first Ida Farange and then Mrs. Beale, to be a real source of support for the child. Consequently, a succession of governesses becomes central to the girl's life. Miss Overmore is Maisie's governess until she marries Beale Farange, when, as Mrs. Beale, she becomes Maisie's ostensibly fond stepmother, but her lack of honesty and subsequent affair with Sir Claude prevent her from establishing a meaningful relationship with her. If Mrs. Beale is not altogether reliable, Mrs. Wix--Maisie's second governess--instills in the child a certain sense of morality and the difference between right and wrong. Mrs. Wix, however, is not a flawless character either--although she really wants to help the child, she worries about losing her job if she is even partially disloyal to her employer, Ida Farange. Moreover, she also falls in love with Sir Claude, who is half her age. But in the end, she is the only person to whom Maisie can turn.

Henry James chooses the story of a child struggling to make sense of adult wickedness and irresponsibility to demonstrate the wide range of perceptions, interpretations, and tricks she develops to help her construct a meaningful world. James does not make Maisie the narrator of her own experience because, as he explains in the preface, "Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary" (27). Though the narrating voice is not Maisie's, it reflects the vision, perceptions, and thoughts of the girl, making her the focalizer of the story. Maisie sees and listens to adults uttering baffling sentences in front of her--and the reader follows her train of thought, but the narrator masterfully provides the meaning that is beyond the full comprehension of an innocent child.

James is not as interested in the morality of sexual liaisons among parents and their lovers, as in the way the neglected child comprehends them. In fact, he seems to imply that if Maisie acquires a moral sense, she does so through assimilated experience, rather than through avoidance of thorny situations. Maisie is, then, the most highly developed character in the novel, and we learn about the others through her. She succeeds in maintaining her own natural goodness, harboring no feelings of rancour, revenge, or contempt for her parents, and--although perfectly conscious of not being loved--she still rejoices when she discovers that they are not entirely wicked. And despite her innocence, Maisie develops some artful tricks as means of self-defense. She learns to keep silent in order to exasperate her parents, because this apparent stupidity renders her useless in their vengeful schemes. Because of her profound desire to be loved and to trust others, she is quick to shift her affection from one person to the other according to the amount of care she receives from them. In the end she has learned to judge the reliability of human feelings and so act accordingly.

What Maisie Knew can also be read as a critique of the British upper classes in the late 19th century. Neither Beale Farange nor Sir Claude have any sort of career or occupation, depending instead on their wives for support. Mr. Farange is determined to divorce his second wife and leave England to follow a wealthy Countess. Ida Farange has an affair with Mr. Perriam simply because of his fortune. Love is apparently determined by money and status, even in regard to the child. The problem of bringing her up is not just an affective one. Sir Claude, Mrs. Beale, and Mrs. Wix raise this issue in their last argument, though it is Mrs. Wix--the penniless governess--who keeps the child, however uncertain their future may be.

In the development of the novel genre, one of the important techniques developed by James, as well as such other writers as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, involved nuanced ways of representing perception. In this novel, James engages in diverse manners of articulating or concealing reality and the ways a child perceives. Maisie "was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories" (42). By presenting two perspectives, Maisie's and the adult narrator's, we are offered a multilayered view of her situation and permitted access to the child's inner world. What Maisie Knew constitutes thus a sample of the reasons why Henry James is considered one of the milestones in the narrative technique of the last two centuries.

Bibliography:

Bellringer, Alan W. Henry James. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Henry James. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Kaplan, Fred. Henry James. The Imagination of Genius. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897. Edited by Paul Theroux. Reprinted, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985.

Reeve, N. H., ed. Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments. London: Macmillan, 1997.

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