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Handing over power in James's What Maisie Knew - author Henry James
Style, Summer, 1994 by Jeff Westover
Maisie's faint, merely remote presence in the prologue confirms this interpretation of What Maisie Knew as a critique of traditional legal and social mores regarding the family. In the novel's opening narrative, Maisie's presence and importance is only briefly and obliquely cited. In the prologue, in other words, Maisie "does not yet exist as a live, experiencing subject" (Galbraith 201). Laconic though the prologue's description of Maisie may be, however, it is also rather telling: she is defined entirely in terms of the role she plays in the selfish feuding between her parents as a symbolic object of possession. The narrator informs us, for example, that
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[w]hat was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was the lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. . . . She would serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had alike been crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. (5-6; emphasis added)
In this passage, Maisie is reduced to the status of an inanimate object ("a ready vessel"), merely a thing to be grasped at and bargained over by various adults more concerned with their own personal prestige than with her individual well-being. Lee Heller rightly notes that "Maisie exists for her parents . . . [only] through her capacity to be utilized" (78). In other words, the adults in the novel perceive Maisie primarily as an instrument for the advancing or hindering of an endless series of their desires and designs. Their hands weigh as oppressively against Maisie as "the heavy hand of justice" reportedly does upon her parents in the passage quoted above. The "heavy hand of justice"--the law's long arm--paradoxically serves such patently selfish parents at the expense of the child, for in the case of the Beales the negligent possession (and dispossession) of the child is sanctioned and maintained by that very law.
Maisie's significance in the prologue is defined not in the humanistic terms of the individual person but in terms of her social role within the defunct and destructive family to which she naturally belongs. This definition of the child as parental servant is remarkably similar to the status of children as historically defined by English common law:
[T]he common law principles applicable to parent and child in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries derived historically from the same set of feudal conditions that had dictated the subjection of married women to their husbands. . . . The child was regarded in certain contexts as a "servant," and the law pertaining to master and servant was applied to family situations. . . . Long after feudal tenures had been abolished and the protective jurisdiction of chancery courts extended over wealthy young heirs, most children continued to be regarded, for legal purposes, as quasi servants who had no recourse against the mistreatment or neglect of their paternal "masters ." (qtd. in Presser and Zainaldin 519-20)
