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

Similarly, Mrs. Beale's flighty, chastening embraces culminate in her final grasping gesture:

Mrs. Beale made, with a great fierce jump, a wild snatch at her stepdaughter. She caught her by the arm and, completing an instinctive movement, whirled her around in a further leap to the door. (358)

Here, Mrs. Beale blindly embraces her desperate, wilful passion rather than a real little girl. Because Maisie would furnish Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude with a pretext for living together, Mrs. Beale abandons her customary exaggerated tenderness and clings to Maisie with a vicious fervor. Her tenacious passion reduces Maisie by reifying her: at this point in the narrative, Maisie is less a human being than a cipher or emblem of Mrs. Beale's adulterous desire. Thus Mrs. Beale asserts control over Maisie by means of a violently instantaneous gesture which is at once both figurative and literal, for Mrs. Beale clasps to herself--in a gesture of intensely aggressive possession--both Maisie-the-real-little-girl and Maisie-the-representation of her illicit desire for Claude. The violence of Mrs. Beale's whirling embrace is symptomatic rather than idiosyncratic, however, for her aggression signifies the appalling consequences for an unwanted foster child caught within the treacherous web of a patriarchal legal system.

Mrs. Beale's manipulative embrace reveals much more than her individual selfishness: it signifies a structural injustice inherent in the law itself. The fact that Maisie is in the grip of three foster parents reveals a critical measure of irony on the part of the narrator, for Maisie's "virtual," artificial family parodies the real and destructive family to which she biologically belongs. As Mrs. Beale blindly yet vehemently declares to Maisie in the crucial closing scenes of the novel, "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And he's your father. . . . We're representative, you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person [Mrs. Wix] represents mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law" (361). Mrs. Wix's response, while in the mouth of a character who is anything but objective, nevertheless finely reflects the disparity between justice and Mrs. Beale's morally dubious claim to legal propriety: "'Oh the law, the law!' Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. 'You had better indeed let the law have a look at you!'" (361).

In contrast to the many embraces that so quickly become jostling grasps and shoves is Sir Claude's gentlemanly touch. Yet while his touch is decidedly different from the violent, theatrical hugs of Ida and Mrs. Beale's remonstrating embraces, it is similar to them in that it communicates power. In his case, it is a power to possess that is based on a claim to an amiable and vaguely defined paternal authority. When Sir Claude lays his hand over Maisie's he is making a claim upon her, usually a subtle appeal to Maisie's sense of loyalty or a simple claim of affection, but a claim nonetheless.

Although Claude's affection and respect are genuine and do provide some basis for Maisie's "freedom" at the end of the novel, his gesture of affection is itself fundamentally ambiguous. This ambiguity arises from Maisie's ready submission to the claims made upon her.(7) Since her submissive attitude is so often manipulated by the selfish adults surrounding her, Claude's claims upon Maisie remain suspect until he proves his disinterested devotion to her freedom at the novel's end.