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

Jeff Westover

Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of thrusting hands" (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet no one has done a systematic study of that imagery. The hidden significance behind the repeated patterns of hand images in What Maisie Knew, however, justifies a particularly close analysis of those patterns. The shifting dynamic of power relations between Maisie and the other characters in What Maisie Knew may be charted and interpreted, for example, by focusing on a particular gesture that recurs throughout the book: the laying of one's own hand upon that of another person. The curious repetitions and variations of the verb-phrase "to lay one's hand upon" suggest that in the novel power and possession are communicated through touch. It is therefore significant that Sir Claude and Maisie more frequently act as the subjects of the verb-phrase in its various mutations than do any of the novel's other characters. Sir Claude's frequent resting of his hand upon Maisie ultimately empowers her, for his gesture subverts the code of power established by the other adults in the book.(1)

Claude's laying-on of hands confers authority and blesses, for when he performs the gesture it routinely stimulates and consecrates Maisie's growth as an individual. The touches of all the other adults, however, communicate their attempts to control and manipulate Maisie. While all the hands that fall on Maisie make some claim to possess her, Claude's hand alone conveys freedom. By contrasting the body language used by Claude in his primarily positive relationship to Maisie with that of the other adults in their fundamentally destructive relationships to her (including, of course, Maisie's parents), James reveals the moral limitations of nineteenth-century family law.

James criticizes such law by focusing on the adults' treatment of Maisie as an object to be possessed, for English law traditionally considered the child to be a servant (and hence a possession) of the father (Presser and Zainaldin 519-20).(2) The laying of an adult hand upon Maisie represents a kind of claim which, given the legal definition of the child as possession of the father, can be interpreted as an expression of legally sanctioned power. James articulates and criticizes the enduring legacy of the legal ideology that equated the child with a possession through his distinctive repetition of the phrase "to lay one's hand on _________" throughout the narrative of Maisie's development.

The novel opens with a prologue that relates the post-divorce battle for custody of the only child produced by the marriage of Ida and Beale Farange. Although the account of the settlement reached between the two parties indicates that the father wins custody, the fact that the divorce court did not unreservedly favor the father's petition for this custody suggests that the action of the novel occurs in a period of the nineteenth century when the legal protocol for awarding custody of children in England was changing: from the Middle Ages until the modern era (including well into the nineteenth century), the common law preferred "the father, and not the mother, in the matter of guardianship of the child" (Einhorn 123). In the period in which the events of the novel occur, the traditional judicial prejudice which favored the father in awarding custody of children has thus begun to be abandoned (Presser and Zainaldin 537).

The development of the principle of "the best interest of the child" as the guiding factor in the determination of custody rights is a specifically modern legal precept. (3) An early articulation of this precept occurs in British law in 1839. In that year,

the British Parliament modified . . . father-centered rules of child custody, in an act which authorized English equity courts to enter orders for the access of the mother to her young children and, if the child was under seven years old, to require that it be delivered to and remain in the custody of the mother until reaching the age of seven. (qtd. in Presser and Zainaldin 537-38)

The novel also reflects the principle of the 1839 law when, in chapter 2, the narrator wryly quotes the colloquialism in the following passage: "the associates of either party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called 'the real good, don't you know?' of the child" (14-15). While Ida's shared custody of Maisie reflects this change in the legal perspective regarding children and the family, it also underscores Ida's inability to recognize, much less provide for, Maisie's best interest. Moreover, all of the aspects of the law have not been applied to Maisie's case, for she is with her father even though she is under seven years old. As the narrator informs us, her father saw to it that "she was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to enable him to give himself up to her" (11).

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.

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

[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)

In What Maisie Knew, James uses comic irony to depict Maisie as a kind of servant--a personal possession or form of private property, in effect--who is subject to the vengeful caprices of her parents. Through such comic irony, James exposes not only the sheer greed of the Faranges, but the essential injustice of a legal system that fails to recognize the child as a person who deserves to be granted independent rights.

James's critique of the patriarchal family and of the legal assumptions supporting it is specifically formulated in his ironic treatment of Maisie's care: in his complex articulation of the difference in relationships Maisie enjoys between her natural parents and her "adopted" parent Sir Claude. Whereas nearly all of the other characters in What Maisie Knew either express affection for or assert authority and control over Maisie by embracing her with effusive shows of emotion, Sir Claude normally expresses his own affection and paternal authority by holding Maisie's hand or resting his hand gently upon her.(4) Motivated by her need for affection and a sense of protection, Maisie's first meeting with Sir Claude makes her feel "as if he had told her on the spot that he belonged to her, so that she could already show him off and see the effect he produced" (57; emphasis added).

This expression of Maisie's emotions illustrates the essentially contradictory nature of the relationship between Maisie and Sir Claude, for at the precise moment when "he took hold of her and kissed her, [she] as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride in him" (58). Claude's possession of Maisie permits her to assert her own possession of him. A curious kind of equality thus exists between Maisie and Sir Claude from the beginning of their relationship. Though Maisie does not--and indeed cannot--know it, this equality is what distinguishes Claude from the rest of the adults in her experience. As the narrator explains (on Maisie's behalf), Claude's entrance in her life is full of sparkling promise:

No, nothing else that was most beautiful to her could kindle that particular joy--not Mrs. Beale at that very moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mama when she was dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost overflowed in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had come to see her now so that he might know her for himself. She could see that his view of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away with him, and, further, that it was just what he was there for. (57; emphasis added)

As this passage demonstrates, Maisie is deeply enchanted by her first meeting with Sir Claude, whose clear intention is to claim her as his own and "to make her come away with him." In time, Maisie also comes to regard Claude's confidences as a charming compliment. She delights in his "pleasant fraternizing, equalizing, not a bit patronizing" manner, discovering that it makes her "ready to go through anything for him" and that "it was so much less a deceitful descent to her years than a real indifference to them" (80). Claude's frank and introductory gesture is both affectionate and commanding, conveying to Maisie both a sense of freedom and genuine equality.(5)

In contrast, Mrs. Beale, Mrs. Wix, and her mother Ida all engage Maisie in ambiguous embraces which customarily threaten or diminish Maisie's independence and growth. As Merla Wolk points out, for example,

Mrs. Beale's embraces are often occasioned by comments of Maisie's that reflect her growing perception and understanding. The remarks that invite the hugs are also those that put Mrs. Beale in a bad light, suggesting that the hugs have the intention of reproof by way of stifling. (198)

Mrs. Beale's insidious use of hugs as ostensibly mild reproofs imbues a common expression of affection with a sense of guilt and punishment; such embraces create a fundamental and persisting confusion for Maisie because of their chastening effect on her developing cognitive abilities. Whereas "Ida's actions are direct and clear" and Maisie can therefore reckon with them, "Mrs. Beale's hugs, followed [as they are] by cold withdrawal of affection, disconcert Maisie" (Smith 228). Wolk explains the destructive effect that Mrs. Beale's false affection has upon Maisie. "To know, to see, to understand," she writes,

are all signs of individuation, of creating one's own space by making sense out of chaos. The hug, a sign that is meant to blur boundaries between self and other in the name of love . . . [is] used aggressively . . . by Mrs. Beale. (198)

The net effect of this aggression is a decrease in Maisie's relative power. The hugs are an artful attempt on Mrs. Beale's part to erode Maisie's growing individuality by discouraging "the growth of [her] perceptual powers" (Wolk 198).

As a repeated gesture, Mrs. Beale's embraces constitute a language of domination that is diametrically opposed to Sir Claude's liberating laying on of hands. While Claude's laying of his hand upon Maisie's own gently and consistently expresses his confidence and encouragement to Maisie, conferring trust and independence, the grasping handling on the part of the other adults checks and restrains Maisie's personal development.

If Mrs. Beale's ambiguous embraces contrast sharply with the touch of Claude's enhancing hand, so too do those of Mrs. Wix and Ida. While Mrs. Wix's devotion to Maisie is both genuine and consistent, her embraces are somewhat smothering: although "the salient feature of her character is her motherliness" (Sharp 128), she is an "ultra-possessive mother" (Mitchell 185). Mrs. Wix's selfish fear also makes her occasionally blind to Maisie's best interests. Ida's displays of affection, on the other hand, have an even worse effect on Maisie. Since "James imagines Ida's maternal breast as having the qualities of a weapon" (Wolk 198), one can conclude that Maisie finds the prospect of her hugs potentially more threatening than comforting. In addition, James's comic references to Ida's breasts throughout the novel further underscore the hypocrisy with which Ida cushions Maisie's head against them. "We are told," for example, "explicitly about her bosom, which becomes one of the landmarks of the novel, like a familiar headland, heaving one minute, cushioning Maisie's head the next, with its wilderness of trinkets" (Theroux 11).

Ultimately, Ida wants power over Maisie only to be rid of her. As Ida plainly reports to both Claude and Maisie in Kensington Gardens: "I've given her up to her father to keep--not to get rid of by sending about the town either with you or with any one else" (144). Here, Ida paradoxically exercises her power over Maisie by surrendering possession of the child to her husband. Ida delivers her message concerning Maisie's return to Beale as a vindictive taunt, responding to Claude's own earlier claim to possess the girl: "Maisie," James writes,

felt Sir Claude immediately clutch her . . . "She's mine."

"Yours?" It was confounding to Maisie to hear her speak quite as if she had never heard of Sir Claude before.

"Mine. You've given her up. You've not another word to say about her. I have her from her father," said Sir Claude--a statement that startled his companion, who could measure its lively action on her mother. (147-48)

This petulant bickering and bartering over Maisie--this literal and figurative laying claim to her--demonstrates her status as a mere possession. In this scene, James shows how a family law that favors parental rights over the best interest of the child is destructive to the child. Claude, a figure who genuinely cares for Maisie, has no legitimately legal power to act as her guardian. Instead, the law supports Maisie's parents even as they consistently push her away and finally surrender their responsibility and legal claim to her altogether.

While such observations focus on the manipulative use of embraces by women in the novel, it is clear that Maisie's natural father, Beale, also coddles Maisie in his own effort to get what he wants. Beale's motives are clearly demonstrated in the scene in which he relinquishes his responsibility for Maisie, when he cynically offers to care for his daughter on the condition that she leave Sir Claude, Mrs. Beale, and Mrs. Wix. He hypocritically hopes to force Maisie to reject his proposal (calculated as it is to cover his ignominy). After accusing Maisie of being disingenuous, Beale

came straight over and, in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasped her in his arms a moment and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours--with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: "I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all. . . ." This is what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked. (187)

This extraordinary scene exemplifies the fusion of language and touch in the novel. Maisie's need for affection is tangled up with her frustrated attempts to interpret the hidden meanings behind the language of the adults surrounding her.(6) Aware that their teasing insinuations leave Maisie at a loss, adults wield power over her by manipulating both her emotions and her ability to understand. Embraces and touches communicate painfully unexpected messages to Maisie: Beale's "tremendous pats," James suggests, are eminently communicative. By invoking Maisie's desire to please in order to win affection, the adults in the novel succeed in manipulating her in order to maintain their power over her and over one another. Such adult machinations, for instance, account for the fact that Ida's histrionic embraces are so quickly followed by shoves of rejection.

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.

Despite his generosity and bright candor, Claude is clearly not without his limitations. His flirtatious confession to Maisie regarding his affection for Mrs. Beale prompts her later suggestion that the two of them steal off together, abandoning Mrs. Wix and Mrs. Beale. While there is an air of sweet transported innocence to this proposal of Maisie's (which reveals no sign of overt sexual awareness on her part), the plan also suggests a potentially incestuous liaison between Maisie and her young stepfather. But because of her intelligence, the freedom Claude encourages in her, and the complex influences of Mrs. Wix's moralistic (and somewhat hypocritical) hectoring, Maisie ultimately succeeds in resolving for herself the painful dilemma of her circumstances.

Moreover, Sir Claude's nurturing warmth towards Maisie is markedly evident even from the moment of their very first interview. This warmth is conveyed by Claude's familiar gesture of affection for Maisie: his laying of his hand upon her own. Sir Claude's laying of his hand upon Maisie likewise becomes a confiding gesture when, in the course of a conversation which is by turns playful and grave, each reveals to the other a shared fear of Mrs. Beale:

"I'm awfully afraid of Mrs. Beale," Maisie objected. He raised his smooth brows. "That charming woman?"

"Well," she answered, "you can't understand it because you're not in the same state."

She had been going on with a luminous "But" when, across the table, he laid his hand on her arm.

"I can understand it. I am in the same state."(115)

With this unassuming and sincere motion of his hand, Claude places Maisie on an equal footing with himself. However much her confused and adolescent ardor contributes to her devotion to Claude, Maisie remains distinctly grateful to him for his sincere affection and for his relatively consistent treatment of her as an equal. As odd and striking as Claude's relation to Maisie appears, it is clear that his honest commitment to her independence and his astute recognition of her intelligence ultimately empower her to acknowledge and to act upon her moral freedom in the final scenes of the novel in which he repeatedly defends Maisie's freedom before Mrs. Beale (356, 359). Because of his empowering role, Claude's status as an effective surrogate rather than biological (and legal) father defies a traditional definition of the family as a fixed and natural unit. By suggesting that the family is a social and mutable unit instead of a biologically fixed and essential one, James's portrayal of Claude's relationship to Maisie questions the legal assumptions informing the traditionally constructed patriarchal family.

James complicates his picture of the family further when, in the Kensington Gardens scene, he presents the Captain as a parodic "double" of Claude. As yet another of her mother's lovers and as a perceived father surrogate, the Captain asserts the strength of his position over Maisie and in a sense thereby dominates her. The Captain capitalizes on Maisie's willing acceptance of the various claims of authority made upon her due to her need for affection. Feeling bewildered and somewhat frightened by the vituperative exchange between her mother and Sir Claude, Maisie is relieved by the Captain's winning kindness. As the narrator remarks, the Captain "smiled down at her, hesitating, looking pleasanter and pleasanter" (146-47). Maisie's discomfiture and reluctance begin to melt before the Captain's expatiation of his bemused adoration of Ida. When the Captain extends "a big military hand" (147) to her, it is no surprise, then, that Maisie immediately takes it.

But the Captain's extended hand, however inviting it may be, is yet another instance of an adult assertion of power over Maisie. The hand is given as an invitation for Maisie to join him for a walk. While on this walk, he leads her along the path of the garden, but he also leads her along the path of his vision of her mother. His adulation of Ida charms and soothes Maisie, so much so that she quite surrenders herself to him:

The Captain, inclining his military person, sat sideways to be closer and kinder, and as her hand was on the arm of her seat, he put his down on it again to emphasize something. . . that would be good for her to hear. . . . He gave the child the sense of doing for the time what he liked with her; ten minutes before she had never seen him, but she could now sit there touching him, touched and impressed by him. (147; emphasis added)

Here the operation of the Captain's power over Maisie is subtle but nevertheless evident. While he "gave . . . the sense of doing . . . what he liked with her," Maisie both touches and is "touched and impressed by him" (147). Thus the Captain's emphatic gesture forms an affective link between the two: Maisie is at once both literally and emotionally touched by him.

The significance of Maisie's interview with the Captain rests in her response to him, for "she had never, she thought, been so addressed as a young lady, not even by Sir Claude the day, so long ago, that she found him with Mrs. Beale" (154). This passage makes clear that Maisie interprets the Captain's confiding speech and demeanor as decidedly flattering. The Captain seems to welcome her into the circle of the adult world, and she appreciatively, although incorrectly, interprets this treatment as a simple compliment.(8) The Captain's influence over Maisie, however, is marginal and fleeting. In addition, the Captain's gesture shows his claim to possess Maisie, since it gives her the sense that he does "what he like[s] with her" (147). The sexual overtones of the language describing the Captain's manner towards Maisie also suggest that there is something sinister and menacing about him. The significance of the hand gesture differs when applied to the Captain as opposed to Sir Claude: the Captain's handling of Maisie is suspect since its influence includes his exercise of power without the customary sense of equality that Claude communicates when he performs the gesture. As a result, the sense of equality that the Captain conveys to Maisie is impermanent and false. Maisie has, it must be remembered, been sent to him at her mother's bidding, and the Captain certainly acts as Ida's eager advocate. In fact, he stands in for Ida when he supports her through his speech. He extends the reach of Ida's power over Maisie when, in order to emphasize his patronizing (and obviously misguided) praise for Ida, he places his hand upon Maisie's. And he does so not only once, but twice, for after "abruptly" dismissing the claim that a certain "Count" belongs to the circle of Ida's admirers, the narrator comments that the Captain "put down on the back of her own the hand he had momentarily removed" (149).

James favorably contrasts Sir Claude's positive, nurturing influence over Maisie with the Captain's less benign caresses when, in the midst of their flight from Folkestone to France, Claude repeats his trademark gesture of affection for Maisie. As the narrator relates, Sir Claude "laid his hand, while [Maisie] waited with him, kindly on her own" (201). Oddly enough, this evokes in Maisie the memory not of Claude's earlier touches, but of her interview with her mother's former lover:

[T]his was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done; her present situation reminded her a little of that one and renewed the dim wonder of the fashion after which, from the first, such pats and pulls had struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business and even a little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. (201)

Claude's touch puts Maisie's earlier "patting" by the Captain into a more clearly defined perspective. Claude's gesture provokes a process of retrospective understanding and, through the achievement of such new understanding, a more perfect personal freedom on Maisie's part. Thus Claude's touch of Maisie's hand triggers in her a meditative reverie, in which she reflects on the nature of her role within the extravagant drama of her family life and she discovers that the "pats and pulls" to which she has been constantly subjected have nothing whatsoever to do with her as an individual and everything to do with the scheming and competitive adults who constantly besiege her with their blind desires. This discovery initiates a period of new understanding for Maisie that enables her to achieve her eventual independence.

Once again it is Sir Claude's kindness and care that nurture Maisie's autonomy. His "renewal" of her "dim wonder" provides the impetus for her puzzling efforts to understand and act upon the circumstances that control her. This instance of Claude's gesture must be understood in its proper context within the novel's plot, for it comes several chapters after Ida's announcement that she is returning Maisie to her father permanently and only shortly after Beale's own insidious renunciation of his daughter. Paradoxically, both parents assert their power over Maisie by renouncing their responsibility to her. Since her status as a possession is reinforced by the law, the Beales can and do legally forfeit her. Whereas power has been previously linked to possession, the Beales reverse that relation and maintain their power through the simple surrender of possession. Thus Maisie is literally dispossessed, reduced to the status of an undesired item. Cruel as it is, Maisie's dispossession is a logical consequence of the doctrine that considers a child a possession. Despite the legal view favoring parental rights over the child's best interest, however, Maisie moves toward independence through the beneficial, though ultimately compromised, influence of her sometime-stepfather Claude.

The same phrase describing Claude's gentle and loving gesture in the scene recounted above communicates parental power and authority in a vastly different manner when it is applied to Ida's encounter with Claude and her daughter in the garden of their hotel at Folkestone. The maternal nurture of Claude's caress radically contrasts with Ida's suave manipulations. The following passage nicely demonstrates this discrepancy:

[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)

Maisie's position of power is drastically altered later in the novel, however, when she finally finds herself with Sir Claude and Susan Ash in France. There, Maisie herself is the actor who extends searching hands in order to bless, claim, and possess the promising new world around her:

On the spot, at Boulogne, though there might have been excess there was at least no wavering; she recognized, she understood, she adored and took possession; feeling herself attuned to everything and laying her hand, right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her. (232; emphasis added)

Here Maisie is not the passive instrument of manipulative adults but an inquisitive and enthusiastic subject (as well as agent), equally eager to know and to act. The wondrous environment of Boulogne is the site of a liberating revelation for Maisie; this liberation is expressed as a union of consciousness and action, of delighted wonder and an authoritative act of possession. "Laying her hand, right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her" (232), Maisie assumes a newly active status. She recognizes that the world belongs to her as much as she belongs to the world. This discovery is liberating for Maisie precisely because it reveals to her that she has the power to act and thus to influence the world in which she participates. Moreover, she has clearly been introduced to this new state by Sir Claude. In other words, Claude has had a hand in bringing Maisie to this new and liberating point in her consciousness. It is a consciousness that engenders the self-reliance that ultimately--and of course paradoxically--enables Maisie to make her painful break with Claude at the end of the novel.

This new stage in Maisie's development as an individual is advanced and refined further during the course of her final outing with Sir Claude. The desultory episodes comprising chapters 30 and 31 convey the drama of Maisie's efforts to comprehend and resolve the intractable dilemma of her circumstances. During the course of their breakfast together, Maisie reflects upon Sir Claude's character. Her reflection and conclusion about him unite the abstract and literal through the novel's peculiarly recurrent gesture of possession:

She seemed to see$at present, to touch across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one thing just such a man could be afraid of. He could be afraid of himself. (326; emphasis added)

Maisie's discovery is expressed through the familiar figure of possession because this discovery includes the empowering knowledge that "his fear was sweet to her, beautiful and tender to her" (326). Maisie's generous attitude towards Claude's disabling fear has a maternal aspect: the girl "mothers" the man. But Maisie's relation to Claude is not merely maternal, for "Maisie and Sir Claude are natures attuned, and because they are alike she loves him even though she comes to see his weakness. Her love is not corroded by judgments of him as Mrs. Wix's is" (Blackall 143). Maisie's knowledge of Claude's fear is also, however, a "sign of Maisie's emerging sexual maturity . . . for fear is, throughout the novel, associated with sexual weakness" (Wasiolek 171). Maisie's understanding of Claude's fear gives her power over her situation because it informs the thinking that culminates first in her proposal to Claude that they disappear together and subsequently in her decision to live with Mrs. Wix.

In her subversive counterproposal to Sir Claude's suggestion that she abandon Mrs. Wix to join himself and Mrs. Beale, Maisie demonstrates that she "is no longer acquiescent to adult demands out of the desire to please" (Blackall 144). Maisie's fearlessness, then, is a function of her newly won independence.(10) The narrator expresses this independence by altering the signal phrase "to lay one's hand on" from the indicative to the conditional--"as if by laying her hand on it" (326; emphasis added)--and by translating the action from the realm of the literal to the domain of the figurative, where Maisie can better control the action's implicit and imposing limitations, its restricting marriage to power. Maisie's achievement of knowledge is thereby fused with her achievement of independence. As Paul Armstrong appropriately notes, "'What Maisie knew' is that she holds her existence in her own hands" (533; emphasis added).

While Edward Wasiolek is surely right in his characterization of Maisie's proposal to Claude as "a frank assertiveness of what she wants" (168), he fails to point out that this assertion is in fact the culmination of her struggle to establish her independence. For Maisie's achievement of autonomy derives from her acceptance and recognition of her own desire: "What helped the child," James's narrator explains, "was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning had made her at last learn that" (357). Maisie will again display this independence in the final scene of the novel. She learns to confront her desire fearlessly, drawing upon the fund of her newly won self-knowledge in order to meet "her crisis by embracing it as a turning point for her existence" (Armstrong 531).

Maisie's newly won power is further confirmed when Sir Claude again lays "his hand across the table on [Maisie's] own and [holds] her as if under the prompting of a thought" (332). This familiar motion is meant of course to emphasize Claude's point, but it also emphasizes Claude's fearful and pleading vulnerability. He wants to be assured that Mrs. Wix will agree to live with Mrs. Beale as well as with Maisie and himself. Because he feels certain that she will not agree, Claude's appeal to Maisie is both poignant and somewhat pathetic. The fact that he makes this appeal to Maisie, however, once again indicates the equality of their relationship. In doing so, he dramatizes his handing over of power to Maisie once more, for it is through this acknowledgement of equality that Claude helps Maisie achieve her freedom.

Claude's insistent defense of Maisie's freedom in the final scenes of the novel nurtures that freedom to its full maturity. In the end,

Maisie's identity is preserved . . . [for] she neither collapses under the weight of the pressures put on her nor becomes what the people around her want her to become. She resists them all, finally. (Sears 25)

As Sears suggests, it is finally through her own resistance that Maisie achieves autonomy. This transformation becomes clear when she takes the initiative with Claude at their final parting:

On the threshold, Maisie paused; she put out her hand to her stepfather. He took it and held it a moment, and their eyes met as the eyes of those who have done for each other what they can. "Good-bye," he repeated. "Good-bye." And Maisie followed Mrs. Wix. (363)

The wonderful restraint of this scene subtly conveys the painful passing of Maisie's childhood and of her friendship with Sir Claude at the same time that it decisively affirms her achievement of autonomy, for even here it is precisely Claude's prolonged handshake that communicates his solicitous recognition of her equality.

While Maisie does not know "everything" by the end of the novel, she certainly has learned much about the need to rely on herself rather than on the limited, limiting, and selfish adults surrounding her. Throughout the novel, Maisie has puzzled over and guessed at the various meanings of her circumstances. Throughout her experiences she has been disabled by an inconclusive, obscuring wonder, a wonder that has persisted "to the death . . . of her childhood" (xi). Her wonder is now largely displaced by the knowledge she has gained through her suffering. But this knowledge, however harrowing its achievement actually was, ultimately confers on Maisie an undeniable autonomy. Maisie's final plight--her recognition of the necessity of choosing the least problematic of the options available to her concerning her future--demonstrates the extent to which family law has constrained and hurt her as an individual. Maisie has been able both to grow morally and to assert her own choice successfully (to express, in other words, her own sense of her best interest) because of Claude's supportive laying on of hands and despite her physical domination at the hands of other adults. But since her domination is both permitted and perpetuated by a law which is effectively blind to her best interest, the novel is as much a criticism of the legal system's failure to secure true justice on her behalf as it is a celebration of her personal triumph in the midst of overwhelming adversity.

Notes

1 In this essay, I draw on material presented by Michael Ryan in his Law, Power, and Violence in American Culture course at Northeastern University (Fall 1991). I submitted an earlier version of the essay to him for that course.

2 I am indebted to Michael Ryan for drawing my attention to Law and Jurisprudence in American History: Cases and Materials, edited by Stephen Presser and Jamil Zainaldin.

3 The recent case of a boy who sued in his own behalf for a "divorce" from his negligent mother (and the attendant coverage of the story by the media) demonstrates the enduring currency of the legal and family issues explored by James in What Maisie Knew. See, for example, Wingert and Salholz.

4 Other adults clearly do, however, also exercise their authority over Maisie by taking up her hand. As Tony Tanner writes: "quite simply [Maisie] . . . is always being taken by the hand" (289). Since adult manipulation of Maisie is symbolized (and sometimes literally effected) by the grasping of her hand, it makes sense to point out that, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, manipulate derives from the French manipuler and Italian manipolare, meaning "to gripe or claspe with the hands." The English word manipulation ultimately derives from the Latin manipulus, which means "handful."

5 As Philip Weinstein aptly comments, "when Sir Claude appears, [Maisie] . . . makes him the center of her life, its primary stability. He stands solid in her world . . . and becomes the recipient of those feelings her parents failed to nurture and reciprocate" (89).

6 Weinstein's comment confirms my point: "The adult social world of What Maisie Knew," he writes, "is flooded with gestures of affection, but the feeling behind the gesture is often impossible to discern or rely upon" (82).

7 "Maisie's ready submission" to Claude's claims upon her are, however, complicated by the fact that Maisie regularly experiences Claude's possession of herself as a mutual possession on her own part of him.

8 Cf. Smith: "Affection and attention belong to an adult society which excludes Maisie when her usefulness is over" (228).

9 The central idea for this paragraph derives from an essay by Julie Rivkin entitled "The Proper Third Person: Undoing the Oedipal Family in What Maisie Knew," to be published in False Positions: The Logic of Delegation in Henry James' Late Fiction by Stanford University Press. Michael Ryan drew on this essay in a lecture for his course in Law, Power, and Violence in American Culture (see first note).

10 On this point, Blackall adds that "[i]n reconciling the disparate elements in her own character [i.e., her fond and genial allegiance to Claude, her growing moral sensibility], Maisie . . . achieves an independence which is instantaneously signalled by her being no longer afraid" (144-45).

Works Cited

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