Maisie Knew Research Articles

Экранизация повести Генри Джеймса «Что знала Мейзи»: любительский кинодискурс как подвид институционального кинодискурса

Amateur film discourse is a new special subtype of discourse that has not yet been subjected to scientific research. Its participants have no special cinema education: they discuss the film industry based on their own life experience, ideas, and values. This work was part of the contemporary anthropocentric paradigm, where language comes to the fore as the most important property of human beings. The article identifies the genre of amateur film discourse using online Russian comments to the screen adaptation of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), directed by S. McGehee and D. Siegel (2012). The methods of comparison and discourse analysis revealed sincerity in the way the commentors evaluated their impressions. The commentors seemed focused on the plot and the action. The discourse was highly emotional and colloquial, filled with aposiopesis and rhetorical questions.

Obscure Desire: Goethe and the Imbalanced Pedagogy of What Maisie Knew

Abstract: What is the importance of the children Mignon and Felix, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels , for the themes of sexuality and pedagogy in What Maisie Knew ? Grounded in suggestive correspondences between geographically distant, but conceptually allied narratives, James’s novel appears to invert the moral compass of Goethe’s bildungsroman to craft Maisie’s misguidedness and perhaps that of her narrator. While distancing Maisie from the preconceptions of the narrator, I credit, as a foreshadowing of What Maisie Knew , James’s allusion—in his personal review of the Meister narratives—to “pernicious conclusions.” Features of both Mignon and Felix, as transposed by James, resurface in Maisie, while Wilhelm morphs into a predatory Sir Claude.

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

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.

“For yet under the yerde was the mayde”: Chaucer in the House of Fiction

Abstract In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.

The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Frederick W. Feldman Hale, Dorothy J. 2020. The Novel and the New Ethics. Post*45. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. $90.00 hc. $30.00 sc. xxii + 330 pp. Ethics has been steadily taking center stage in literary studies, and Dorothy J. Hale’s new monograph pushes it to the fore of the conversation. Perennial concerns about the novel’s commodification, domination, and representations of otherness and subalternity all bespeak ethical consternation. At the same time, defenses of the humanities often appeal to literary reading’s promotion of empathy or justice. This concern with ethics and human rights is not restricted to the academy, as even a brief look at the last few decades of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels shows. Hale has recognized this renewed focus on ethics and argues that it grows directly out of the tradition of Henry James. Thus, The Novel and the New Ethics makes ethics definitional to the Anglo-American novel. In Hale’s theory of the novel, the genre is protean but not formless. Rather, “the novelistic aesthetics of alterity” (xi) is driven by the particular ethical demands posed by a given novel’s program of characterological autonomy. With that said, Hale refuses to endorse a particular ethical theory or argue that the novel qua novel actually has ethical import—this is a formal theory of the novel within a specific (though extensive) Jamesian Anglo-American tradition. As such, the book is first and foremost a literary history. Chapter 1 is where Hale works out the feature claim of the book, focusing on contemporary novels. While Hale identifies novelistic ideas of characterological autonomy in the work and craft-talk of earlier [End Page 790] authors, James is the writer who “most inspires and authorizes” this tradition of novelistic ethics; he is the “fountainhead for the aesthetics of alterity” (25). To draw this Jamesian genealogy, Hale summons a variety of textual support to write a sometimes surprising literary history. Whereas modernism is generally understood as a “break” from the explicit ethical concerns characterizing the periods that both precede and follow it (and recent work on the novel of human rights has reiterated this view), Hale provocatively argues that modernism is where the idea that narrative necessarily implies an ethics solidifies. Particular attention is given to the novelists’ own comments on their work, and Hale excels at this sort of close reading. Taking passages from Gish Jen’s lectures and reading them against Virginia Woolf’s essays, for example, Hale draws out surprising commonalities and material differences between the ethical attitudes expressed and metaphors employed, yet always finds something that points back to James. An impressive amount of contemporary novelists are touched on in a dense and persuasive chapter. The survey in the first chapter also serves to show the degree to which the new ethical turn in novel-writing has made the author’s ethical attitudes part of the conversation. This scrutiny, however, is not all that new. In Chapter 2, Hale turns to the source with a reading of What Maisie Knew. Her project is as much about how the inheritors of James’s tradition have received and responded to his stated goals and how they evaluate whether Maisie lives up to them as it is about how the ethics of otherness are felt in the novel itself. Hale begins the chapter not with James but with Toni Morrison mentioning James, continuing the book’s project of showing his contemporary influence. The dual approach of both examining James’s aesthetics of alterity in Maisie while also tracing its reception among other authors and critics makes this chapter a particularly effective close reading. Chapters 3 and 4 are close readings of novels by Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee. In Chapter 3, Hale examines On Beauty in light of Smith’s stated ethical goals and modernist influences—taken from interviews, essays, and allusions to other works—and, importantly, argues for how the novel itself, its aesthetics driven by its particular ethical problems, differs from those other genres. An unexpected but intriguing comparative reading of William Faulkner investigates style’s ethical implications. Hale ends...

“Supreme Simplicity”: Reading the Child and Childlike Reading in Henry James's What Maisie Knew

Abstract By foregrounding the difficulties with reading the child, Henry James's What Maisie Knew reconfigures the relationship between simplicity, transparency, and opacity to create reparative “styles of knowing” in the novel. This article proposes that the difficulty with reading the child is tied to the child as reader; childlike reading in James uses style as an entry point through which to join in with lies, to repair them by making them performatively true. The author suggests that by analyzing texts that challenge the “supreme simplicity” of childhood and expose transparency as a strategy for obfuscation, we can develop a new practice of reading that is capable of interpreting performances of transparency, performances that currently work to deflect suspicious modes of interpretation. This article demonstrates how James's development of a childlike reading practice, which is founded in and embraces interpretative struggle, can provide possible ways forward in this regard.

Precarious bodies in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

ABSTRACTA critical history of treating consciousness as incorporeal in Henry James has been succeeded by an examination of embodied consciousness in his fiction, including cognitive, feminist materialist, and neurobiological approaches. This study shifts the focus in a political direction, reading What Maisie Knew as a study of how power conditions the experience of embodiment. Experiencing the divorce as a rupture that distorts her sense of bodily integrity, Maisie exhibits a heightened sensitivity to the precarious bodies of others. This sensitivity can result in either increased empathy with others or xenophobia, and the novel exhibits both. Judith Butler’s work in Precarious Life informs these reflections on precarious bodies in What Maisie Knew.

Shock and Astonishment: The Rise of Cinema Spectatorship and What Maisie Knew

Shock and Astonishment: The Rise of Cinema Spectatorship and What Maisie Knew

From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel ed. Holly Blackford

Reviewed by: From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel ed. Holly Blackford Yvonne Hammond BLACKFORD, HOLLY. From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2018. 296 pp. $50.00 hardcover; $50.00 e-book. Definitions of the “child” differ based on varied and diverse circumstances and the myriad of disciplinary perspectives, especially the ever-evolving psychological mappings of human development. Although the definitions for “child” and “childhood” have widespread cultural and political implications, these definitions often draw from cultural narratives driven by fantasy notions produced by mainstream culture. In literature the child remains ill-defined, complicated by the effort to represent the child’s voice through adult perspectives. Holly Blackford’s From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel works to bridge gaps between psychological and literary definitions of the child by drawing together the various ways child consciousness has been represented and defined. Situated within the developments of psychology, anthropology, sexology, and sociology, Blackford’s argument asserts that the novel’s use of child protagonists tends to reflect psychology’s efforts to understand the human psyche. According to Blackford, child studies is both a detached object of scientific contemplation and a study of interiority apart from moral judgments. Her definition [End Page 315] broadens possibilities for an ambitious project examining American and British literature to consider the contributions of modern novels’ comprehension of the “wonders and limits” of child consciousness (4). Blackford’s primary claim isolates the unique nineteenth-century novel’s child consciousness in texts such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Peter Pan—novels featuring characters with a “growing sense of the child as an intellectual, developmental, and artistic being”—to expose how the child characters “express modernity by expressing ‘alienated perspective[s]’” (23). Rather than highlighting the moral qualities of the characters’ experiences, the novels in her study use child’s play, imagination, and moral reasoning to reveal the child’s experience and parody of the modern world, and to inform adult understandings of the world (23). While grounded in late-nineteenth-century works, Blackford extends her argument to consider the comprehensive impacts of her definition for child consciousness, specifically concerning theories about queerness, criminology, and disability. Blackford’s key methodology pairs the literary tradition of the child consciousness as an “experimental site for the unstable concepts of evolution, civilization, and development” with the use of the child protagonist as a means for exploring adult behavior and psyche (5). The child’s perspective explores the adult social environment in “alternative” geographies like Neverland, the Looking-Glass House, and the Unconscious, all of which project distortions, windows, and alternative surfaces to “pierce an aperture and offer a distorted lens on the social scene” (6). Blackford’s work draws attention to new Darwinist evolution theories—no longer a tabula rasa—emphasizing the child as a remnant of ancestral memory, which is exemplified by child protagonists’ capabilities, such as expressing jumbled collections of cultural knowledge in profound streams of consciousness. In the first four chapters of the book Blackford pairs texts to follow the shifting landscape of the child’s mind. In the first chapter, Blackford begins with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, novels influenced by the Victorian idea that the child is “pre-evolved” and alien to the adult world. The chapter explores how the protagonists, Huck and Maggie, articulate the evolution of human consciousness in climaxes dependent on expressing moral reasoning through exercising freedom of choice. In the next chapter, Blackford transitions to modernist novels, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass, to discuss newly pioneered methods for interpreting and displaying child consciousness—child stream of consciousness. Transforming the adult world, the novel, and novel theory, Alice’s opening monologue establishes a metaphor for the margins of consciousness between internal and external worlds, which pass and mix in the permeable child imagination. In Chapter Three, Blackford introduces the child as increasingly queer, an alien to civilization both practically (as outside the workforce) and psychologically. Analyzing J. M. Barrie’s...

The Masquerade of Social Selves in What Maisie Knew by Henry James

The Masquerade of Social Selves in What Maisie Knew by Henry James

What Maisie Knew: Moral Imagination and Two Conceptions of Moral Thought

AbstractAccording to a widely held view, moral thought essentially involves the survey of an array of independently specifiable morally relevant facts, on the basis of which an agent is to reach a judgment about how anybody in that situation ought to act. I argue, drawing on Henry James’s

Writing Adolescence: Coming of Age in and through What Maisie Knew, Lolita and Wide Sargasso Sea

Writing Adolescence: Coming of Age in and through What Maisie Knew, Lolita and Wide Sargasso Sea

Luca Ronconi: Temporality and Illusions in the Adult-Child

In his 2002 stage play based on Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, theatre director Luca Ronconi creates the paradox of an adult-child. The novel becomes, for this adult Maisie, a “stream of memory” consisting of fragments of the original text subsequently reassembled into a script to be used by actors. The director deals with the novel avoiding any rewriting, and the novel is theatricalized without any mediation, its literary nature preserved and offered to the public with the illusion of dealing with the “reading” of one of James’s most challenging novels.

Experimental Maisie: Zolien Naturalism and the Compulsion to Convert

This essay considers Zola’s treatise Le roman expérimental and, more broadly, French Naturalism as constitutive of the educative process and epistemological conditions of What Maisie Knew. Through an analysis of formal repetition in Maisie’s education, particularly her acquisition of the French language, I argue that James’s experiments with Naturalism in such novels as The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians were far from being flirtations with a popular literary mode. Rather, Zolien scientism, with its emphasis on verifiability based on repetition, its tension between linear progress and circularity, and its conversion of observed external phenomena into knowledge, is incorporated into the formal strategies (and in doing so come to inform the epistemological determinants) of James’s late fiction.

Radical Pedagogy in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann

ABSTRACTThis article considers pedagogy as a consistent theme in Doris Lessing’s fiction. It draws on a deleted prefatory note in the typescript to Mara and Dann, which states that the heroine is “consumed with a passion to learn and go to school.” The article explores how Mara learns in a reimagined Africa after a future ice age. In the absence of formal schooling, a game is used in which children are asked repeatedly, “What did you see?” This game is compared to Henry James’s use of a child’s perspective in What Maisie Knew, to strategies for unveiling and “naming” the world in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and to ideas about teaching in Idries Shah’s The Sufis and Learning How to Learn. The article thus argues that radical and anticolonial approaches to learning are figured in Lessing’s fiction, and in her Nobel lecture, as essential for human survival.

Maisie’s Spasms: Transferential Poetics in Henry James and Wilfred Bion

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reading of Henry James’s midcareer novel What Maisie Knew (1897) as a study in group psychology. Maisie, James’s child heroine, is at the center of an expanding and transforming family group that includes various governesses as well as her divorced parents’ multiple new partners. I set James’s novel beside Bion’s Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1961) and its Kleinian approach to the continuities and discontinuities between individual and group experience. Rather than insisting (as Freud tends to) only on a narrative of individuation and adaptation, Bion emphasizes the necessity and difficulty an individual inevitably experiences in making contact with the emotional life of the group in which she lives. James casts the frustrating necessity of group experience in entirely theatrical terms, figuring Maisie from the start as a spectator to, and eventually an active participant in, the affective circuits of those around her. In my reading the transferential poetics of James and Bion make available the affective, transindividual nature of knowing as a contingent activity that takes place between persons and other objects. The essay concludes by unfolding some of the surprising televisual aspects of James’s late style.

Fear of Falling and the Rise of Girls: Lamarck's Knowledge inWhat Maisie Knew

To the extent that living things diverge from type, are they abnormal … or are they inventors on the road to new forms? What if [Woman] were no longer trained to marry, but trained to live? She would be, as a being, very other than she is now. In TheStudy of Dolls (1897), the psychologist G. Stanley Hall observes that when children hold conversations with their dolls, the “doll is taught those things learned best, or in which the child has the most interest” (51). In Henry James's What Maisie Knew, published in the same year as Hall's study, we overhear Maisie Farange's tête-à-tête with her French doll, Lisette. After Maisie has been away for a while, Lisette “tried hard to discover where she has been.” “Maisie replied to her … as she, Maisie, had once been replied to by Mrs. Farange: ‘Find out for yourself!’” (419–20). A child of divorce who shuttles between her parents' houses, Maisie often wonders where her mother, Ida Farange, has been or where she is going. At the close of the novel, Ida seems to be off, again: “I'm thinking of going to South Africa,” Ida announces, “but that's none of your business.” “No, I won't tell you. You can find out for yourself’” (550).

Character and Story in The Golden Bowl

This paper discusses What Maisie Knew in three different contexts in relation to learning to read. First, it talks about the author’s experience of reading the novel, aged fourteen or fifteen—not understanding much, but piecing a reading together out of fragments, and feeling the novel’s complexity as a promise of complexity in real things. Next, it discusses teaching the novel to students, helping them build an understanding of its meaning from the bottom upwards, out of the detail of the text. Finally it explores the novel’s own preoccupation with a child’s learning to perceive meaning and value in the life around her.

Snapshot Seeing: Kodak Fiends, Child Photographers, and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

In this article, I argue that James’s What Maisie Knew investigates the consequences of a distinctly modern mode of observation that both depends on and subverts literary naturalism’s trope of the sensually vulnerable but inarticulate brute—a mode of observation much like the kind of snapshot photography that was widely practiced at the turn of the century. With her innate and curiously modern perceptual sensibilities, James’s Maisie gestures toward an anxiety about the potential of naturalism’s brutes to tell their own stories—an anxiety that I argue was also evinced by the rise of snapshot photography as a popular and affordable hobby.

More Perceptions than Terms to Translate Them: The Enigmatic Signifier and the Jamesian Unconscious in What Maisie Knew

This article examines Henry James’s What Maisie Knew in the light of Jean Laplanche’s theory of the Enigmatic Signifier. It argues that James uses highly charged, individual words to outline two forms of unconscious libidinal investment: the first corresponds to a model of the unconscious mind conditioned by moralistic repression, while the second corresponds to a responsive, intersubjective model of the unconscious as a conduit for connection between individuals. This analysis leads in turn to a consideration of how James might be situated at the intersection of several competing Victorian theories of the unconscious mind.