What Maisie Knew - Presentation

What Maisie Knew¬ ¬– Reading and Interpretation


I’m writing this post just after the seminar presentation, so while I intend to write about the notes I had made on the novel in preparation for the presentation I will sometimes refer to points that came out in the discussion. What I found particularly interesting in the novel was that the novel is written from the perspective of Maisie, the young girl pulled back and forth between warring parents, and finally abandoned by both. The narrative is quite unique in that (aside from the initial prologue-type section) the narrator only sees, or at least only relates, what Maisie sees and what occurs in Maisie’s consciousness. We don’t have access to the mental states of the adult characters beyond what can be inferred from the actions to which Maisie is privy. The nature of this style of narrative is that it draws attention to the processes of reading and interpretation, firstly, we witness Maisie’s struggle to understand the situation she is in. Secondly, the process of reading the novel itself is that the reader must read between the lines to understand what is happening.

I gave the example in class of the section in Chapter 1, when Maisie is being teased by her father’s friends, who:

“...pinched the calves of her leg till she shrieked...and reproached them with being toothpicks. The word stuck in her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She found out what it was: it was a congential tendency to the production of a substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she didn’t like."

After reading this example the first time I didn’t know what the word was that Maisie was referring to, and had to re-read the passage to work it out. I spoke in class a little about how I thought that the book was one that required careful reading, with attention to suggestion and subtle clues, and this passage seems to be an example of that, as, I think fairly uniquely (amongst the books I have read at least),the reader is put into the position of a confused child, seeing only what Maisie sees, have trying to make sense of pieces of disjointed information.

The other example I gave that illustrates the practice of reading as it is portrayed in the novel occurs in chapter 17,

"The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the nature of things to be none of a small child’s business, even when a small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie’s experience so true to their nature that questions were almost always improper; but she learned on the other hand soon to recognise how at last, sometimes, patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange’s when the monosyllable ‘he’always meant, meant almost violently, the master, but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude’s merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scare took every two letter to name him. ‘He keeps me up splendidly – he does, my own precious..."



In this example, Maisie is a little older than in the previous example, which is evident in her increased understanding. She realises now that asking questions is not necessarily the most useful means of gaining knowledge, rather she has become a more skilled reader, now attuned to ‘patient little silences and intelligent little looks’, and able to interpret pronouns, when the name of the object is not stated explicitly.

I referred to an article I had read in which the writer, Adele Brebner, argues that an important question to ask of the text is, ‘what does Maisie actually know?’. Brebner concludes that we really cannot judge this, as we are not given this information in the text, and she cites the blurring of time periods in the narrative as evidence that the actual level of knowledge Maisie has at certain ages is unclear. I spoke a little about how I thought that this was in some ways correct (e.g. in the final scene we don’t really have access to Maisie’s reasoning for the wager she makes, and how much she understands of the implications), however, I said that we certainly know some of what she has come to understand, for example the ‘amour’ passage. However, what Dr Hardie pointed out at this moment in the discussion was that the interest in knowledge in the novel is more nuanced that just what facts about the adult relationships etc. Maisie understands. Rather, the interest is in different modes of knowing, just as above I wrote about the way the novel portrays different reading practices. I think this idea certainly fits with what James writes in the preface about why he chose to write the novel from the perspective of the child, for her ‘undestroyed freshness’ and ‘vivacity of intelligence’. James is interested in Maisie’s psychology, her thought process, and so the way she conceptualises her experience – the way that she, a child (and the particular type of child that she is) ‘knows’ it – is what James dwells on, and is facilitated by having the narrative from her perspective. In this last paragraph I’ve been mostly just writing as I think, so I’d love to hear if this makes sense and what anyone else thinks of this... or anything else I’ve written =).

Reference: Adele Brebner, “How to Know Maisie,” College English, 17.5, 1956, 283-285.