This research will examine the short novel What Maisie Knew by Henry James. The research will provide a critique of the emergence of knowledge of the self and of the world and the impact of that knowledge and of the process by which it emerges on the shape of personality that the "knower"--in this case a young girl--develops.
The pattern of ideas in What Maisie Knew is most accurately described as an accretion of awareness and understanding by the child Maisie, who is the object of a nasty and protracted custody battle in the wake of her parents' divorce. As of 1999, this seems an obvious subject for treatment on (say) the Lifetime cable network, but in fact James published this work in 1907 and set it in the context of London's contemporary high society. The setting is important because it is very much the context of social and economic privilege, where the principal actors involved, not being obliged to scratch out a working-class living, have the leisure to pursue the working-out of their psychoemotional states of being and the living arrangements to accommodate those state.
Who does not have much power, at least as the proceedings first get under way, is dear and winsome little Maisie. The child is very much acted upon rather than prime mover of action; however, as James explains in his preface to the story, he set himself the problem of point of view, i.e., telling the story from the child's point of view without either lapsing into a babyish motif or so drawing the child's character as to make it impossible to correlate her perceptions with verisimilitude. Allen says that James was motivated by "a technical problem to be solved" in every novel written from What Maisie Knew onward and that that novel is "one of the most remarkable technical achievements in fiction" (325). As James puts it:
I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with pe...