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

As it is conveyed in the novel, then, Maisie's legal status is contradictory: while the father does not automatically win custody of her, neither does her mother keep her until she reaches the age of seven. So the action of the book occurs at a time when, although attitudes were changing and these changes were reflected in the law, the application of new legal principles remained incomplete. James exploits the ambiguity of this legal situation in such a way as to criticize the law's insufficient provision for the best interest of the child. In other words, the novel implicitly asks, "should the child be treated as a possession or a person?" The novel condemns the treatment of Maisie as a possession so that its text implicitly pleads for a legal view that respects the child as a person.

James communicates this implicit plea through the narrator's ironic descriptions of Maisie's parents. Both parents persist in treating her as though she were simply an object to be possessed in a continuing game of revenge against one another: "They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other" (5). In addition, the themes of possession and dispossession become linked later in the novel when her parents make of Maisie "the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them" (14) and again when the narrator reports of Ida that

[t]he day was at hand, and she saw it, when she should feel more delight in hurling Maisie at him [her husband Beale] than in snatching her away; so much so that her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who had remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that each parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the other--a sort of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn't show to advantage. (19)

Indeed, Maisie's parents treat her like a symbolic pawn in their struggle to win possession not of her but of the cash deposited "in the interest of the child's maintenance" (3). The similarity between the phrasing of this last quotation and the legal principle of "the best interest of the child" is certainly striking; it suggests that James's phrase may be an ironic echo of the legal principle. The sentiment is at least the same in both.

In any case, the legal context of the novel supports the parents in their will to possess Maisie, for the court fails to appoint a more competent legal guardian in their place. As the narrator explicitly remarks:

This was odd justice in the eyes of those who still blinked in the fierce light projected by the tribunal--a light in which neither parent figured in the least as a happy example to both youth and innocence. What was to have been expected on the evidence was the nomination, in loco parentis, of some proper third person, some respectable or at least presentable friend. Apparently, however, the circle of the Faranges had been scanned in vain for any such ornament. (4)

After Sir Claude marries Ida, becomes Maisie's stepfather, and finally separates from Ida, he becomes a belated candidate for Maisie's custody. The fact that, despite his flaws, he would prove to be a genuinely nurturing parent to Maisie shows the moral weakness of the court's decision. In the custody debate concerning Maisie, there appears to be insufficient room for "some proper third person" embodied in the valid, alternative form of paternal possession later demonstrated by Claude.