What Maisie Knew and the Improper Third Person

Abstract

James' preface to What Maisie Knew is oddly defensive in tone. James is clearly uneasy about novel's subject, dilemma of young girl surrounded by adulterous intrigues of parents and step-parents, and he devotes some attention to anticipating charges of having mixed Maisie up in novel's erotic quadrangle. As often in history of James criticism, preface has proven self-fulfilling prophecy: critics have tended to repeat antinomies of James' ambivalence towards novel, replaying both preface's and text's internal debate as to whether Maisie is corrupt or innocent, disingenuous or precociously wise--the ambiguity, in short, about how much Maisie knows. The novel's critics, including James himself, are correct in their intuition that equivocal knowledge invites investigation, such as novel's repeated probings of sense. But, as I shall argue, James' doubts about moral sense of What Maisie Knew, and playing out of these doubts in subsequent criticism, can be attributed to something other than novel's manifest thematic content. His defensiveness may arise less from its adulterous theme than from representational strategy that creates knowledge it appears to reflect, for though narrator claims merely to report Maisie knows, he is deeply implicated in construction of that knowledge. ambiguous knowledge and ultimate scapegoating, figurative death marked in James' preface as the death of childhood, are themselves produced by Jamesian representational strategy of central intelligence, which both brings Maisie into being and sacrifices in name of its antithetical logic. As its title indicates, What Maisie Knew is explicitly concerned with epistemology of Jamesian reflective center. The novel's narrative strategy is one of deliberate self-restriction to impressions; as James exhorts himself in his notebook entries, make my point of view, my line, consciousness . . . of child . . . EVERYTHING TAKES PLACE BEFORE MAISIE.(1) But because children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,(2) this scheme assumes rhetorical disjunction between narrator and receptive intelligence. If Maisie is an infant (AN, p. 145) in etymological sense of infans, speechless or without language, then great gaps and voids of verbal capacity must be filled by narrator himself. Although Maisie's terms accordingly play their part, narrator's own commentary constantly attends and amplifies, translating perceptions into figures that are not yet at command (AN, pp. 145, 146). The narrator fills out lacunae of linguistic resources and mediates preverbal consciousness. His relation to is one of translation or metaphor, through those words' shared etymological meaning of transference or carrying over. The ambiguities of this scheme may account for defensive tone of preface.(3) In his eagerness to forestall objection that nothing could well be more disgusting than to attribute to Maisie so intimate an 'acquaintance' with gross immoralities surrounding her (AN, p. 149), James acknowledges rhetorical conundrum pointed to by novel's title. For given difficulty of distinguishing narrator's terms from Maisie's, since she can only know narrator tells us she knows, what Maisie knew names symbiotic narrative relation in which knowledge depends on its articulation by adult narrator.(4) And despite James' scruples about the |mixing-up' of child with anything unpleasant (AN, pp. 148-49), novel's opening figuratively repeats exactly this crime: parents pour evil into gravely-gazing soul as into boundless receptacle, and Jamesian vessel of consciousness becomes a ready vessel for bitterness, deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. …