Handing over power in James's What Maisie Knew - author Henry James

[Ida] . . . came . . . and sat down on the bench with a hand laid on her daughter, whom she gracefully drew to her and in whom, at her touch, the fear just kindled gave a second jump, but now in quite another direction. Sir Claude, on the further side, resumed his seat and his newspapers, so that the three grouped themselves like a family party; his connexion, in the oddest way in the world, almost cynically and in a flash acknowledged, and the mother patting the child into conformities unspeakable. Maisie . . . had the positive sense of . . . catching . . . her [mother] in the act of getting rid of her burden with a finality that showed her as unprecedentedly relaxed. (209; emphasis added)

Whereas Claude's touch in the previous scene had been tender and sincere, the hand that Ida lays on Maisie in this scene is suffused with an insidious deceit. Ironically, it is the "pressure of possession now supremely exerted by Ida's long-gloved and much-bangled arm" which provides the signal to Maisie that she has "been so irrevocably parted with" by her opportunistic mother (209). Maisie's interview with her mother in this scene, as well as the one with the Captain in Kensington, demonstrates again the great extent to which James expresses Maisie's "vulnerability . . . by recurrent references to hands" (Tanner 289). But of course it shows much more than this, for whereas Maisie feels the pressure of her mother's momentarily tightening fingers as a possessive, claiming gesture, she experiences a kind of baptism into freedom beneath Claude's gently glancing hands. Whereas the natural mother's hands move to remove the daughter, the surrogate father lays his hand on her in a gesture of benevolent blessing.

In addition, James's satirical account of the interview between Maisie and her mother discredits the legal conception of the family. In his rendering of this scene, James presents a parody of the "natural," biological family, apparently suggesting that Ida, Maisie, and Claude do not constitute a family at all. "The three grouped themselves like a family party," James writes, reminding the reader that the group resembles a family more than it actually embodies one. To whom, then, do parental rights properly belong in this farcically artificial family? While the novel never flatly answers this question, which it implicitly raises, the narrative emphasis on the positive interaction between Claude and Maisie does "answer to" the issues embodied in the question. Prior to the cynical family tableau of this scene, Maisie instinctively grasps Claude's hand when she first sees her mother:

for the first time of her life in Ida's presence [Maisie] so far translated an impulse into an invidious act as to clutch straight at the hand of her responsible confederate [Claude].

(208)

James's narration of this event suggests that Maisie's gesture is an act of independence on Maisie's part, an "invidious act" that signals Maisie's desire and self-assertion. The translation from impulse to act transforms Maisie from patient to agent, a transformation assisted by Claude's "responsible" and responsive presence. Whereas Ida legally possesses Maisie, Claude's possession of Maisie is mutual, enabling, and affectionate. The law that favors the natural parent fails to recognize the moral importance of the child's need for care, a need which is addressed better (though not sufficiently) by the stepparent than by the actual parent. As a result, in James's novel, Claude's superior parenting--so tenderly expressed by the subtle touches of his hands--indicates the inadequacy of nineteenth-century family law in England, since such law permits Maisie's painful predicament to persist.(9)