Technologies of vision in Henry James's what Maisie knew

The passage manifests the metaphoric conflation of visual and cognitive experience-what one might call an ocular rhetoric of understanding-upon which the narrative turns, and which runs through the entire novel. Maisie's infant consciousness is likened to a magic lantern show, suggesting the state of mystification in which, at the start of her journey from passive spectator to active participant in the adult world, she is trapped. The phantasmagoria or magic lantern show is one of the "figures not yet at her command" in which her preverbal consciousness is assimilated to a spectacular model. The situation of Maisie in the "dim theatre" can be contrasted with that of the author-observer in the many windowed "house of fiction," who is metonymically present as "a pair of eyes" or "field-glass." The shift from the field-glass, or binocular telescope, to the magic lantern, announces a redefinition of the realist project. Whereas the "field-glass" represents an aspiration to verisimilitude, the magic lantern is associated with theatrical performance and illusion, substituting a reflected image for a direct one.

The metaphorics of marvellous illumination and projection announce, at the start of the book, a shift in narrative perspective, from the third-person discourse of the prologue, which reports the legal details of the divorce judgement, to the "scenic method," in which "everything takes place before Maisie." A quasijuridical, omniscient voice gives way to a highly performative or scenic moment, a figure in high relief, which is concerned, at the level both of style and substance, with the production of spectacle. The moment is a representative one, insofar as What Maisie Knew can be seen to mark the point at which certain key elements of James's highly metaphoric late style emerge. In Frederick Dupee's classic description, "the medium begins to put forth remarkable metaphors without fear of violating its prose character," which "connect James's refined-- appearing world with the realm of the physical and the elemental, of latent horror, of 'the thing hideously behind"' (194). In Maisie, the magic lantern becomes a model for the novel's own narrative and figurative procedures, and for its experimental testing of the limits of realism.

The word "phantasmagoria" appears in a revealing context in a letter of February 24, 1899, from James to Henry James Junior. In response to his nephew's inquiry as to his opinions on the Boer War and, more generally, on the question of Empire, he writes, "Thank God, have no opinions, not even on the Dreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria, and dime museum" (James, Letters 318). James's sense of profound disengagement from public life coincides with the lowest point of his success in the literary marketplace, and with his dismal failure as a popular dramatist. His figuring of this sense of disengagement through three forms of nineteenth-century urban popular entertainment that turned the pleasures of spectatorship into a commodity is therefore symptomatic. The "phantasmagoria" or magic lantern show, which initially purported to produce spectral or diabolical apparitions for the entertainment of an audience, was one of a wide range of popular visual spectacles that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century.9 Optical illusions were projected onto a screen by means of a light source refracted through mirrors and magnifying lenses. After the advent of photography in the mid-century, magic lanterns were increasingly produced and sold primarily for domestic use. From the outset, the word carried powerful atavistic associations with magic and the supernatural, which, in the course of the nineteenth century, shifted, as Terry Castle has argued, from an external to a largely internal or subjective reference. Panoramas were peep-show attractions, sweeping views that unrolled before the spectators, giving them the illusion of moving through a landscape (often an urban landscape), at an accelerated rate. Like the phantasmagoria, they can be seen as primitive or anticipatory forms of the cinematic apparatus itself, which was introduced in the mid-1890s (the first motion picture was exhibited in London at the Polytechnic on February 20, 1896, a year before Maisie's publication), and which confirmed their obsolescence.