What Maisie Knew: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl Learning Language
Résumé
Henry James’s 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew, a bildungsroman centered on a small child whose plight is that of a helpless “bone of contention” buffeted between divorcing parents, step-parents and other would-be guardians, is one of the author’s five major works focusing on the trials and tribulations of young English women of heightened awareness but of uncertain social status, all of which were written in the immediate aftermath of the author’s painful and spectacular failure as a would-be London playwright in the early 1890’s. Through intense experimentation with dialogue, cross-relations, voice and point of view during this period, James sought to devise the perfect hybrid of the stage play and the novel of consciousness and symbolically staged the progressive withdrawal of his authorial presence within each of these five works of the late 1890’s (The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, “In the Cage”, “The Turn of the Screw”, and The Awkward Age). Thus, in most of these works, James allows the young female ‘centers of consciousness’ to gradually wrest the control of their narratives from him as they successfully move from the status of object to that of empowered subject within their stories—with the noted exception of the governess in “The Turn of the Screw”, who is given full “authority” over her text immediately after the Prologue, with the disastrous and inconclusive results we are aware of.
However, if the heightened sensibility of a young impressionist painter like Fleda Vetch or a surprisingly mature and cultured young woman like Nanda Brookenham seem to allow for a smooth transition of power over the narrative, in no work is the feat more remarkable, in terms of language and point of view, than in the story of little Maisie Farange. James knew full well how difficult a challenge such a narrative set-up was. In the oft-quoted line from his 1908 Preface, he explains:
Small children have 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. […] She wonders, in other words, to the end, to the death—the death of her childhood, properly speaking; after which (with the inevitable shift, sooner or later, of her point of view) her situation will change and become another affair… (xi, my italics).
Thus two key aspects of Maisie’s development are stressed here: (1) that there will be a gradual development and “shift” of her point of view in the novel, and that (2) this growth and rise to power will involve, or possibly be the result of, her much-needed acquisition of “terms” and “vocabulary” that she so dearly lacks at the outset.
What is most interesting about Maisie’s rise to power through language, of course, is that it happens on two narrative levels, both within the narrative, as her increasing language skills allow her to rise to power over the adults in her story, and on the extradiegetic level, as James allows the child’s voice to progressively overtake his authorial voice and presence. In addition, in both cases this development occurs in three clear-cut stages, concurrent with the three ‘acts’ the plot seems to be structured upon.
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