Technologies of vision in Henry James's what Maisie knew

Maisie received in petrification the full force of her mother's huge and painted eyes-they were like Japanese lanterns swung under festal arches. (124)

She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which [the Captain] had his season ticket. (125)

The next moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had been suddenly thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller's shopfront. (125-26)

Poor Maisie's [confusion] was immense; her mother's drop had the effect of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she had seen suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining shop fronts. (166)

Ida smiled at Sir Claude with the strange air she had on such occasions of defying an interlocutor to keep it up long; her huge eyes, her red lips, the intense marks in her face formed an eclairage as distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. (168)

In each of these instances, the immobilizing or "petrifying" character of the maternal gaze is matched by a highly metonymic and reifying representation of the maternal body. It is a fragmented and denatured body, linked with cosmetics, artificial light, and hard, inorganic materials such as glass and metal; a "smash of glass" announces the traumatic nature of the maternal embrace. Ida is inscribed within a perversely eroticized (and exoticized) regime of looking, producing "the sense of a kind of abuse of visibility" (Maisie 38). The vocabulary of fetishism, the exotic, and uncanny animation is insistent; she has "the stare of some gorgeous idol described in a story-book" (Maisie 77) and is described, in James's Notebooks, as "the painted Idol, the sharp, showy, fiercely questioning mamma" (163). The corps morcele of the maternal body becomes a psychic/somatic theatre of objectification analogous to the world of the novel itself. In the preface, James writes that Maisie "makes her mother above all, to my vision-unless I have wholly failed to render it-concrete, immense and awful; so that we get, for our profit, and by an economy of process interesting in itself, the thoroughly pictured creature, the striking figured symbol" (Maisie 29).

The "picturing" of this grotesque maternal fetish-object raises important questions about the constitution of the urban-and fictional-gaze at work in the text. What is the "economy of process" that governs these symbolizations, and that generates a "profit" for the reader? James's commentary highlights the pictorializing tendency of the "scenic method," a tendency towards objectification or materialization that is characteristic both of children, whose attraction to dolls and puppet theaters represents a form of fetishistic perception, and of capitalist culture. He invokes a financial language ("profit," "economy") that suggests a certain symbiosis between the figurative strategies of What Maisie Knew and the process of commodification of which Ida is clearly a representative. She becomes an allegorical figure, the death's head or petrifying face of urban modernity. The other women in the novel form an array of false or oppressive maternal surrogates, who share something of Ida's petrifying character: notably, the wall-eyed Mrs. Wix, whose dress, early in the novel, is likened to "the polished corselet of an ugly beetle" (49) and whose braided "diadem" and "goggles" cast her as another Medusa-figure. Maisie's "petrified" vision of her mother can therefore be seen as the prototype of the novel's allegorical procedures, in its persistent dehumanizing and objectification of the social world under the sign of the commodity. It marks the insertion into the register of realism of that "phantom objectivity" that Marx attributed to the commodity (128).