Can "What Maisie Knew" be read 'out-of-context'?

I want to briefly return to our discussion of Stephen Best’s notion of the past that we choose or choose not to continuously address as part of our collective history. I most liked Best’s idea that “to be historical in our work, we might thus have to resist the impulse to redeem the past and instead rest content with the fact that our orientation toward it remains forever perverse, queer, askew” (Best 456). By the end of the article, Best asks us to consider if we are “being invited to ponder how thoroughly we cannot conceptualize the order in which we are living – to see that we have arrived in a world of ‘no protection but….difference?’” (Best 474). To add on from this week’s readings, what perhaps could follow from this collective consciousness of our history or understanding our present via our differences is the creation of a ‘we’ that informs our reading of texts. Colebrook seems to engage similar ideas to Best, but pushes them further by analyzing their implications for the application of theory:

A certain mode of reading and writing—a certain archive—presupposes this silent and necessary “we” of humanity in general. Questioning the ways in which all reading necessarily addresses some normative horizon of humanity, while the reading of texts can never be contained by any contextual horizon, is at the heart of what has come to be known as “theory” (Colebrook 703).

I am attracted to the concept of forming a coherent idea of humanity (stemming also from Chakrabarty’s article), and then questioning how this “normative horizon of humanity” (perhaps like a shared past?) shapes/does not shape context. 

At the heart of What Maisie Knew lies a fundamental assumption that the reader can identify with Maisie’s emotional struggle – James appeals to a universal empathy for the plight of unwanted children: "'Poor little monkey!' [the good lady] at last exclaimed: and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie's childhood." (James 5). He quickly thereafter places the text in an odd temporal space: “In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child’s mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future…She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute; the present alone was vivid.” (James 12) This narrative choice consequently releases the text from its legal and social context and maybe even creates an "ideal situatio[n], at once entirely of its own time and interes[t], yet also generating another ideal or imagined time and space" (Colebrook 704). 

I am curious, then, if we might be able to explore this text as at once in and out of time, as a moment in our past when the private life of a family became public through litigation, and a story that transcends its specific time because James seeks to appeal to universal truths. How might this text resonate if it did not draw on a collective human empathy that we might feel as a result of a shared past? Why is James successful (or is he?) in shifting the novel away from the social scene of divorce and into the realm of a child's psyche? And could this become "a world in which there may well be an archive without any possibility of retrieving sense" (Colebrook 702) if the assumptions on which James rests his novel were to become unintelligible due a collective shift of human sentiment? How much does context depend upon "the order in which we are living" (Best 474)? These questions are largely unanswerable, but it's fascinating to try to think beyond "a historical development of epochs, among which we might range with empathy but beyond which we [apparently] cannot think" (Colebrook 716).