Club ReadPurely from the perspective of plot mechanics, 'What Maisie Knew' centers on the plight of an innocent girl and her mute pain and confusion suffered at the hands of the parents and their surrogates. In conversational exchanges throughout the novel, James stages the young Maisie interacting with the Beales, Ida and the weak Sir Claude, contrasting the heartful earnest qualities of the young girl with the calculating, self-involved motives of the conceited adults. When Maisie expresses the cautious hope that the Ida's trip to South Africa will include the watchful, loving presence of the Captain, the mother lashes out: "Him! -- the biggest cad in London!...you're a dreadful, dismal, deplorable little thing." The equally, unloving father gets off no better: Says Beale, 'Don't you understand when (Sir Claude and Ida) have made you as horrid as they can, they'll just simply chuck you?" Harsh words ringing on the contemporary ear. Still, as the story evolves, the heartbreak of this psychological abuse quickly becomes eclipsed by the pathos of Masie struggling to understand her place and function in a forever-changing, indifferent adult world. James means to explore this major theme -- unaided by first-person narration -- from the point of view of the child, Maisie's 'angle of vision' cocked, at the outset, surveying only behavior, never its logic or origins. At the beginning, the author lays it out for us: 'Her little world was phantasmagoric -- strange shadows dancing on a sheet'. Maisie starts as a tabula rasa -- 'what' she knows is almost nothing. But at key intervals in the story, Maisie gradual enlightenment emerges, and despite the maddening lack of chronological detail demarcating the early/middle/late stages of her childhood, we feel her angle of vision widening. And so it is, in a meeting with the Captain, she reveals an understanding beyond her years, empathizing with the position of her Mother relative to men and imploring the Captain to love Ida 'not only for a little..but always'. Later, her grasp of her situation still imperfect but growing, Maisie knows enough -- and has matured enough -- to condition Claude's plan to 'give up' Mrs. Wix on Claude's 'giving up Mrs. Beale'. Here, as in the final chapter in which Maisie finally clarifies her safe harbor as the unappealing, strict, but faithful guardian, she becomes not just a searcher for truth but its agent. 'What Masie Knew' is not finally source material for the case worker, but a a strange kind of mystery story in which the child comes of age by sleuthing the dark recesses of what passes for morality in the adult world. Though there are lapses and over-reaching, I would argue that James' abstract, ruminating narrative style and focus effectively supports this theme. If we are on a quest for knowledge, then we have passages that are structurally influenced by the examination of ideas, as when the narrative personna renders, spot-on, a child's mind struggling to parse the weird geometry of the amorous pairings on her life: "It was a matter of sides..Maisie was on nobody's; Sir Claude had all the airs of being on hers. If therefore Mrs. Wix was on Sir Claude's, her ladyship on Mr. Perriam's and Mr. Perrriam presumably on her ladyship's, that left Mrs.Beale and Mr. Farange..Mrs. Beale clearly was on Maisie's, and papa, it was supposed on Mrs. Beale's. Here indeed was a slight ambiguity, as papa's being on Mrs. Beale's didn't somehow seem to place him quite on his daughter's". Even when the prose is in the service of routine, behavioral descriptions, there may be an idea emerging, still faithful to Maisie's angle of vision but carrying extended meaning: "Her visits were as good as her outfits...She (Ida) was a person addicted to extremes -- sometimes barely speakng to her child and sometimes pressing this tender shoot to a bosom cut, as Mrs. Wix had also observed, remarkably low. She was always in a fearful hurry and the lower the bosom was cut the more it was to be gathered that she was wanted elsewhere." (It's another adult-behavior conundrum for Maisie, the logic of decolletage and visitation time, expressed here with a humor channeled from Dickens). Less successful and entertaining, of course, are those passages suffering badly, as readers have remarked, from vague antecedents to an earlier text or, conversely, references in a first sentence that cannot be completely understood until you have read the second ( a reason why so many readers, including myself, feel the need to re-read). I don't mind looking up words like 'titivate' and 'animadvert' but there are sections of Chapter XVII that I still don't get after multiple re-readings. As Yoda might have said, "Syntactically challenged is he, Mr. James!"As for Mrs. Wix, the occasional lapses into the tough-love Church Lady notwithstanding, I'll take her over the rest of this crowd any day of the week. Even as she remains vulnerable to the charms of a younger man, her actions and point of view are perfectly within character. Without her, James lacks the necessary dramatic voice to denounce these shameful proceedings, sealing the verdict, perhaps, that the Brits do indeed hate thier children.
In the annals of classic fiction I have encountered some truly monstrous parents (some of the parents in Austen or Dickens certainly come to mind), but the mother and father of little Maisie Farange must surely be the worst. They are truly beyond despicable, and if I could reach into the pages of Henry James's What Maisie Knew, I'd throttle them both! Okay, now that I've gotten that off of my chest, perhaps I can provide an objective review of this novel. What Maisie Knew was written by Henry James in 1897, while he was still living in London.The structure of this sophisticated novel is extraordinarily clever, as the entire plot is laid out from the perspective of the little girl, Maisie (and keep the title of the novel in mind as you read too). The novel starts off with the parents being granted a divorce and the court awarding that custody of Maisie will be shared. This poor little girl has to spend six months with her father and then be packed off for six months with her mother. What is even worse is that the parents use Maisie in their on-going fight-to-the-death with one another; at the same time they take on new spouses (and then immediately begin adulterous relationships!). And while Maisie is wise beyond her years and quite perceptive to what is going on around her in the world of the grown-ups that she is surrounded by, much of what she observes has to be interpreted through the lens of the experience of her own childhood and the little bit of love and kindness bestowed upon her from a scant few of the adults--but not her own parents--around her. Through the course of the novel Maisie does gravitate to the two characters that do seem offer her the hope and opportunity of kindness, love, and some semblance of stability, and those two characters are her governess, Mrs Wix, and her mother's second ex-husband Sir Claude. Sir Claude has his own 'bag-of-issues' to deal with, but he is really and truly genuinely concerned about Maisie and her long-term welfare. He ends being more of father-figure to the little girl, by a long-shot, than her own father did on his very best day. Ultimately, these two people, whom Maisie trusts with her heart and soul, do end up making the right decisions that give this little girl a chance for a wholesome life.Finally, it needs to be said that there's much in this novel that can offend modern sensibilities, particularly when it comes to how children are looked after (or not), guardianship issues, or even the exercise of parental responsibilities (or not!). The reader needs to remember that there weren't governmental agencies like 'Child Protective Services' in Victorian England to provide that safety net for children in Maisie's situation. Henry James, like Charles Dickens before him, seems to have been much affected by child welfare issues, and I have to think he was trying to make a point here that parental responsibility is a duty and an obligation and that love and a nurturing stable environment are what every child needs and deserves. As painful as it was to read, I'm glad that I read What Maisie Knew, and look forward to reading it again in the future. At this point, I would give this 3.5 stars out of five.But I still want to reach into the pages of this novel and throttle both of her parents!
What do You think about What Maisie Knew (1986)?
Well, I told myself to review more of my 5 star books instead of taking the easy way out projectile sneering at some grisly two star efforts. but it's hard. There are some brilliant Henry James reviews dotted around, and this won't be one of those. I think there's a point in some of these long, long literary careers (it's true of long musical careers too) where you've followed the writer out of the early period into the majestic middle period and you know the late period is going to give you a migraine, and there are a couple of books in the middle period in which everything comes right, the focus, the point of it all (what's he actually on about? Ah yes, I see!!) and for me What Maisie Knew is HJ gambolling and turning handsprings and summersets in the brilliant July sunshine before the dementia of subjunctive clausitis set in for good and they took him away and you could only see him on Tuesday afternoons and then only if you didn't speak. So sad. Give the old fellow a bun and some typewriter ribbon. HJ had this filtered-point-of-view thing, he banged on about that for his entire career, and here he filters viciousness through innocence, Maisie's rebarbative parents and their sophisticated internecine wars conducted through the medium of their little daughter's hapless life. It's brilliantly upsetting, much more so than any number of Dickens' pathetic put-upon Little Dorrits and Little Olivers and Little Miss Dombeys. Not to badmouth Dickens, you can't, it's actually illegal, but you don't go to CD for psychological finesse, you come to Henry James. In my humble opinion you can stuff your Portrait of a Lady, that one's an unaccountably popular turkey. What Maisie Knew is second only to The Turn of the Screw in the HJ all time Top Ten, and that's just the simple truth.
—Paul Bryant
Arabeschi.Ho faticato molto, durante la lettura di questo romanzo, a riconoscere l'Henry James che tanto amo. Si riconoscono il guizzo, la sua ironia e a volte anche l'elegantissima prosa, ma spesso la stessa è talmente avvitata su se stessa da far perdere il senso del racconto e da rendere faticosa la lettura.Da un punto di vista psicologico, direi di sì, che è efficace e moderno, anche se la psicologia è caratteristica propria di Henry James e si evince dalla lettura di tutte le sue opere (parlo di quelle che ho letto, ovviamente), ma da un punto di vista letterario qualcosa mi ha respinta.La scelta di raccontare attraverso gli occhi della piccola Maisie (attenzione, proprio attraverso quello che Maisie vede e le si mostra, non attraverso le sue parole), i cambiamenti che avvengono nella sua vita dal momento che i due vanesi e superficiali genitori decidono di separarsi, dando così via a un sontuoso minuetto di corte in cui, proprio come nella danza, si scambiano e si alternano di continuo nuovi amanti, istitutrici e mariti (e naturalmente mogli), e persino le abitazioni, è sicuramente un'intuizione geniale, ma...L'ho trovato più ostico, meno incline a mostrare la bellezza della sua scrittura, più attaccato all'idea che alla forma, più involuto; se così si può dire considerando che invece fa parte della produzione più vicina al Novecento e quindi successiva a quella dei suoi scritti più famosi; forse più sperimentale, ecco. Ma certo, bisognerebbe leggerlo in originale.
—Piperitapitta
A tough but very rewarding read. Maisie has the unenviable lot of being born to a handsome but worldly couple unready for either marriage or parenthood and is used by both parents as fodder for their contentious divorce and subsequent perpetual warfare. One might think that this would be a very dark book ( it was written just after The Turn of the Screw) but that would be without reckoning with Maisie, who is a comic marvel, a little genius and ultimately a heroine. Some say she is a bit of a self-portrait of HJ himself. Her stepfather, Claude, is also very memorable, funny and likeable.
—Mark Stephenson
