Abstract
What Maisie Farange knows is that she doesn’t know her lessons. Shuttled between her divorced parents, Ida and Beale, her education is a haphazard affair, and proper schooling always has for her the attraction of the unattainable. As the prospect of it becomes increasingly remote, Maisie feels ‘as if she were flattening her nose against the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge’.
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5. What Maisie Knew
Cf. Kenneth Graham’s illuminating comments on the presentation of Mrs Wix in Indirections of the Novel: James, Conrad and Forster (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 61–4.
Edward Wasiolek usefully emphasised Maisie’s self-assertiveness in his article ‘Maisie: Pure or Corrupt?’ (College English 22, Dec. 1960, 167–72), which also makes the point that ‘purity’ vs ‘impurity’ is too crude a dialectic to employ here. He still yields too much ground to those critics who focus too exclusively on the erotic element in What Maisie Knew. Maisie’s being glad to see Sir Claude afraid of her doesn’t necessarily, as Wasiolek suggests, imply a new, sexual basis to their relationship. Sir Claude may associate fear with sex, but Maisie, as demonstrated in her attitude to her mother, associates it with love.
That is one reason why their alliance strikes us as more credible than that between Fleda and Owen, as Elizabeth Allen has pointed out (A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London, 1984, p. 128).
F. R. Leavis, ‘A Disagreement’, in Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and some other American writers (London, 1952), p. 131. His defence of Mrs Wix is, however, provoked by Bewley’s exaggeration of her sexual interest in Sir Claude.
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© 1994 Virginia Llewellyn Smith
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Smith, V.L. (1994). What Maisie Knew. In: Henry James and the Real Thing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376618_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376618_6
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