Primary Text: What Maisie Knew by Henry James

What Maisie Knew by Henry James (1897)

Blurb on the text from: Smit, David. “The Wishful Fantasy of ‘What Maisie Knew.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 29.3 (Spring, 1997): 1-14.

There is a wishful fantasy at the core of What Maisie Knew that counts on the resources of the imagination…to make the weak strong and the vulnerable invincible.

Merla Wolk is right, I think. In What Maisie Knew, Henry James does not confront directly the implications of the main premise of his novel: whether a girl with a great deal of imagination and the potential for a high moral sensibility can transcend her corrupt environment by the sheer exercise of her imagination and moral sensibility. It takes a leap of the imagination to believe that Maisie’s fine sensibilities could develop in such a corrupt moral atmosphere in the first place, but on this matter we may willfully suspend our disbelief and grant James his donnée: his interest in Maisie as “a small expanding center of consciousness” and “register of impressions” who would not submit to “the inherited tie and the imposed complication” of her familial circumstances but who would “create, without design, quite fresh elements of this order – contribute, that is, to the formation of a fresh tie, from which it would then (and for all the world as if through a small demonic foresight) proceed to derive great profit.”

However, by concentrating on Maisie’s developing consciousness, James finesses the larger social and legal context of her choice and what the consequences of her choice may be. In doing so, he has given tacit permission to critics to explore Maisie’s final choice to go off with Mrs. Wix, as if it occurred in a social and cultural vacuum, untouched by the realities of London in the 1890s, a London of sweat shops and law courts, of child labor and social turmoil over the rights of women and children in a patriarchal society. I would argue from the evidence of his notebooks that James was aware of Maisie’s legal situation, and for a while considered it to be the focus of the novel. Gradually, however, his interest evolved toward Maisie’s consciousness, and his interest in the social and legal issues dropped out of the foreground. Nevertheless, these issues continue to hover in the background of the novel as part of what James assumed his readers in the 1890s would have understood about Maisie’s situation, and we ought to consider social and legal issues when we weigh the degree of Maisie’s moral development and especially her freedom. If we do take Maisie’s social and legal situation seriously, we may see that her final choice to go off with Mrs. Wix is severely constrained and that if that choice is based primarily on moral considerations, it is tragic.