Constantly cutting Maisie's "already-present" to add chaos to the city

Reading Moretti together with Smyth caused me to rethink the implications of ‘geography’ and mapping in What Maisie Knew. In conjunction with the idea of crossing physical space as a plot device, as well as using a body as a central location (which I’ll explain in a minute), I was also interested in Smyth’s idea that "producing a text by cutting up and reordering existing texts places less stress on the creation of new words, and more on the reordering of the already-present. Cutting thus recalls that understanding of invention…meaning to come upon, discover, or find, rather than to invent ex nihilo, in a more modern sense" (471).  James uses, in many of his novels, existing late-nineteenth century tropes and assumptions about relationships, marriage, and family, and deliberately dissembles, or cuts up, the plot and rearranges it to suit his fancy. It’s not that he necessarily was a novel structural revisionist (as George Eliot was accomplishing similar feats with her rearrangement of the novel), but that he traded in on “the already-present” in unique ways. Moretti, then, enters this picture when he acknowledges Dickens’s use of the mystery of the separated family and unknown origins to unite the two halves of England and minimize the ‘noise’: “As London’s random and unrelated enclaves increase the ‘noise,’ the dissonance, the complexity of the plot – the family romance tries to reduce it, turning London into a coherent whole” (130). In What Maisie Knew, James is using Dickens’s "family romance," taking out the mystery, keeping the idea of the family traversing London to find one another, and therefore “cutting up and reordering” an existing story.

James early on introduces the idea of movement into the novel when the parents agree that Maisie will live with each of them for six months out of every year. Not only is she physically moving, which causes her considerable consternation throughout the novel, but James also presents the possibility of viewing Maisie’s body as a central site toward which the other characters gravitate, and a terrain that each character desires to ‘map.’ Right from the beginning, Maisie’s body is not her own, but rather a moveable object that her parents use to convey nasty messages to one another: “[S]he was the little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking…of each other, they poured into her little gravely gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle” (James 12). Here, Maisie is a site on which her parents inscribe words, perhaps “more a space onto which strips or blocks of texts are placed, glued, or pinned” (Smyth 477).  She is not useful for being herself, but useful because she can act as messenger: “missive[s]…dropped into her memory with the dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box" (James 12). We similarly throughout the novel only see the events for which Maisie is present; the plot literally revolves around her movements, and each of the adult characters uses her an excuse to travel and see one another. 

Physical movement in this novel also enables relationships between the adults in Maisie's life that otherwise would not occur. If Maisie did not move, James would not be able to orchestrate meetings between Maisie’s parents (Beale and Ida Farange), stepfather (Sir Claude), and Maisie’s two governesses (Mrs. Wix and Mrs. Beale née Overmore) that vie for Sir Claude’s attention. To just cite one example, “[Sir Claude and Maisie] rode on top of ‘buses; they visited outlying parks; they went to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places for the best one to have tea…they dropped…into shops that they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too small” (82). As this occurs, Mrs. Wix (the governess in Maisie’s mother’s house), sits at home and entertains the fantasy that Maisie is her child and Sir Claude her husband: “Could they but hold out long enough the snug little home with Sir Claude would find itself informally constituted” (83). Mrs. Wix, however, is by and large bound by the four walls of Maisie's mother's home in which she works, while Sir Claude is able to move about at large and wreak havoc on Mrs. Wix's fantasy: "Mrs. Wix looked so ill...that Maisie asked if anything worse than usual had occurred, whereupon the poor woman brought out with infinite gloom: 'He has been seeing Mrs. Beale'" (87). Movement also acts an an embodiment of agency and self-directed fate - Mrs. Wix and Maisie are moved about rather than given the opportunities to move themselves (until, that is, the end of the novel).

I would say that though James doesn't necessarily focus on London as a map onto which this story is placed and upon which this story hinges, he does emphasize the importance of movement as he, instead of minimizing 'noise,' adds to the chaos of the city in which Maisie dwells.