Andrew's Wiki
Masie Knew

An unsuccessful attempt to make you think that a poor embattled little girl is a moral light for all to follow and that James himself has perfected irony between the focalized and the implied author

Folks

• Beale Farange, the scoundrel father of Maisie who first marries the governess and then deserts her for a rich but horrid American; he wants to get rid of Maisie without being blamed for it

• Ida Farange, the perpetual man-hunter egoist who can’t handle Maisie being in her way; marries Sir Claude but ditches him for who-knows-whom

• Maisie Farange, James’ focalizor, a little girl who knows too much for her age but doesn’t actually know the truth behind what she says: she can only bat the phrases back and forth but doesn’t understand their meaning (Saussurean division of sigr and sigd); James wants you to think her sterling despite her decayed environ, but truly she just wants whoever happens to be with her at the time to like her; her only good point is that she truly wants to believe her mother is good

• Sir Claude, Ida’s second husband, a weak but charming young man who wants to be Maisie’s new father but can’t stand the beauty of Miss Overmore; the one thing he doesn’t do is manipulate Maisie, so that Maisie still does like him

• Miss Overmore, who becomes Beale’s second wife and funnily enough exactly like his first wife: she uses Maisie as a tool to manipulate men (she wants to be Maisie’s stepmother just in order to secure Claude for herself); false and hypocritical, she doesn’t like Maisie or Mrs. Wix and steals money from Maisie

• Mrs. Wix, who lost her little daughter, is the true moral center of the book and Maisie’s only hope for a decent life; she is maternal but turns out to be a true force once she’s given room to do so

• Susan Ash, the maid, whose threats show that she’s ready for the Marxist Revolution now

Themes

• How much does a child know?
• Education
  • Academic or social?
• Personhood as action
  • You can escape your identity for awhile, until you go home
  • Personality is not stable, but comes and goes, flickers
• New Mass Entertainments
  • Full of Exhibitions, Public Lectures, cafes, teashops: all of which provide a safe haven for the people who don’t legally “belong” to each other
• Travel
  • Mentions the Underground
  • Inns at Folkestone and Boulogne
    • Great description of hotel life (the meals, the rooms)
    • Set the stage for confrontations (in the anticipation of departures)
    • The gardens and walks set the stage for emotional interludes that couldn’t have happened in London
  • Spas
    • Beale and his new beau (the Countess) go to Spa, the original health sea resort
    • At Boulogne, they have medical water, apollinaris
• Treasure
  • Maisie is tempted by good things: the Countess’ bibelots and golden sovereigns, public entertainments, her mother’s money
  • She does stay innocent of them, though
  • They have shilling larks, though, as Claude goes to Mrs. Beale (they’re not strictly innocent)
• What does Maisie do?
  • She supposedly brings people together in a good way
  • She often gives them strength to say things they normally wouldn’t
  • She gives people a pretext for immoral activities (gives them an excuse to be together when they shouldn’t)
  • Doesn’t seem to be good in my opinion
• Relationships
  • People are united by their relations to other people, not to each other
  • Mrs. Beale and Claude together by interest in Maisie; Claude and Wix together by love of Claude

Quotes

• ”..her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision…”
  • Endless nested perceptions, like mirrors turned next to each other (150)
• “I despair of courting her noiseless mental footsteps here…”
  • One of the very few of James’ narratorial interruptions, it shows how difficult the early moderns found to get into a consciousness (212)
• “personal relation to her knowledge”
  • A felicitous phrasing of the types of knowledge these new novelists seek (204)

Position in his oeuvre / modernism / the novel

• An attempt to show how people mutely understand one another that doesn’t succeed but prefigures the more successful Ambassadors
• 196: classic argument against naturalism, the question of whether being exposed to the improper will make you improper or will show you how the improper is so bad and wrong