Henry James's "What Maisie Knew"

Allen says that jam was motivated by "a technical problem to be solved" in every novel written from What Maisie Knew onward and that that novel is " hotshot of the most remarkable technical achievements in fiction" (325). As pack puts it:

I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions earlier promising, but above all I should have to position her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely quickened. So handsomely fitted out, however not in a manner too grossly to affront probability, she might well see me through the upstanding course of my design . . . and dignified by the most lovely difficulty, would be to make and to keep her so limited sentience the very field of my picture magical spell at the similar time guarding with care the integrity of the objects represented (James viii-ix).

The tightness with which James solved the problem of point of view can be discerned in the very title of the story, for the narrative action is reportage of what Maisie knew, and, particularly at the closing moment of the novel, how she behaved based on that whapledge. The credibility with which Maisie's consciousness is rendered is critical because it makes clear just what Maisie does know at the beginning of the novel, as a very new child, what she gradually comes to know over the next several days and the course of the action, and how, at what appears to be the edge of late adolescence in the

Maisie is affected by much(prenominal) knowledge because of what she takes to be the effect on the large(p)s who impart it. Moddle's event distorts when she is forced to face the difficulties of settling the state of the family relationship. Maisie is bewildered by the disconnect between the hugs and kisses of her parents Beale and Ida, their insistence each on Maisie's intercourse them what messages the other has sent, and the fury that receiving the messages incites.

She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to enable [Beale] to give himself up to her. She was to remember eternally that . . . he did so give himself: "Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about" (James 11).

final pages of the story, she responds to the knowledge she receives. At the beginning of the story, the certain knowledge Maisie has, reinforced by her nurse Moddle, is that she is the focus of everyone else's energy and that her mere presence affects the behavior and bearing of her parents:

The effect of knowing that her parents care little for her affects Maisie's conduct in a practical way because she attaches herself emotionally to Sir Claude, Mrs. Beale, and Mrs. Wix in general, while also remaining on the lookout for hints of affection from her literal parents. This does not mean that she wishes her parents ill will, and indeed, as Westover indicates (216), she never challenges the way of any of the adults among whom she is shuttled. She takes the Captain's praise for Ida, which seems best interpreted as fulfillment of a mission on Ida's behalf, at face hold dear because her experience of is to give her emotional intelligence over to adult authority as a standard of knowledge whenever it is complex with an expression of affection. But when she attempts to act on her emotional knowledge, it betrays her; James describes such attempts as Maisie's "career of unsuccessful experiments" (Ja
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