Baroque and Female Body: From Ecstasy to Madness in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

Abstract

Henry James’s critics suggest numerous form-conscious reasons for his serpentine meaning-making aesthetics. Seeing the undecidability of James’s proto-modernist narrative on a par with that of the baroque aesthetics, this paper cites the inscribable essence of the female body in James’s materialism as one undiscussed reason. In the theories of écriture feminine or feminine writing, the female writer’s integrity with her body serves as the source of logic for the writing practice that revolts against phallogocentric conventions. In search of a concrete example for this assertion, I celebrate the content-conscious contemporaneity between James’s What Maisie Knew and New Woman writing in light of four common motifs: the psycho-ethical analysis of (1) the protagonist’s melancholic mother-daughter relationship and (2) her quest for truth paves the way for the essentialist insight into (3) the privilege of feminine aesthetics and (4) the emancipated motion of the New Woman’s body. The secondary objective of this paper is to celebrate the ideological return of the baroque in James’s proto-modernism through such topoi as imperfect beauty, motion, and madness so as to introduce the meaning-making role of the body in his impressionistic integrity of subject and object.