Primary Post: Applying Gubar to What Maisie Knew

In her preface to Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar concedes that her argument concerning the cult of the child is currently incomplete, and that a fuller understanding would necessitate an expansion of her body of primary sources to include (amongst others) “literary texts aimed at adults” (x). One such text she briefly mentions within Artful Dodgers is Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, which traces the development of a young girl as she is repeatedly handed off into the care of a series of irresponsible adults. This blog post will take a deeper look into What Maisie Knew to test Gubar’s arguments in this expanded arena.

Gubar pulls What Maisie Knew into Artful Dodgers in order to support her claim that: “The Victorian age was marked by a new interest in the child’s perspective and voice” (39). While What Maisie Knew is written from the perspective of an omniscient (adult) narrator, most of what readers receive is filtered through the lens of young Maisie herself, presenting readers with an “adult” translation of a child’s internal monologue. While written for adults, What Maisie Knew is indeed child-focused, and takes up questions of both child-agency and precocity. The title itself alludes to the text’s theme of knowledge acquisition and the blurred lines between knowing and not-knowing, which are often caught up in the novel’s adult-child relationships.

One of Gubar’s central arguments is that Victorian literature: “…represented children as capable of reshaping stories, conceiving of them as artful collaborators in the hope that – while a complete escape from adult influence is impossible – young people might dodge the fate of functioning as passive parrots” (8). Her idea of collaboration (which I agree with Elissa is incredibly capacious) I think largely serves to suggest that Victorian literature represents a blurring of boundaries between children and adults, which helps purport a two-way exchange of knowledge, as well as a breaking down of the assumed “innocence” of childhood which would preclude children from being analytical of adult influences.

So, does What Maisie Knew uphold or refute these claims? What are adult readers supposed to learn about childhood and the relationship between child and adult? And are children viewed as innocent or as artful dodgers?

At the start of the text, Maisie perhaps functions less as an “artful dodger” than as a “passive parrot.” Caught up in the ugly divorce of her parents, she is initially stripped of agency, imagined as “” (16), whose job was to literally parrot back the message of one parent to the other. She does not interpret or translate the messages, but simply repeats, fully under the influence of both adults and not yet questioning their motives. However, her mimicry quickly evolves and dissipates. As Gubar suggests of Victorian children, Maisie indeed comes to be associated with precocity: “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood , but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before” (9). After repeatedly being put in the position of shuttling back and forth bitter messages between adults – messages which often enraged their receivers – Maisie comes to learn she has another option, namely “concealment . She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.  Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen”  (16). Ironically, Maisie’s precociousness causes her to be dubbed an idiot by the unknowing adults around her; yet, she takes pride in the label because it symbolizes the success of her subversive tactics. Although her agency here takes shape as passivity in the form of silence, it is actively employed and demonstrates that she actually has learned to be an artful dodger of adult influence, refusing to serve as pawn. Such a behavioral shift would support Gubar’s argument of children as artful dodgers, as well as help to breakdown the idea of child as innocent, since Maisie is clearly aware of the adult influence around her, and understands way more about the communication patterns (and love affairs) of adults, as well as her own role in them, than the adults give her credit for.

However, it is also clear that this form of agency is problematic, and that, although Maisie learns how to disengage from adult influences, this also causes her to suffer from forms of oppression (i.e. – silence). Additionally, her precocity is not absolute. James writes Maisie as alternating between precocity and unknowingness. She is still often tricked and manipulated by adults, particularly one of her many caretakers, Sir Claude, who guilts her by expressing how much he and others have sacrificed for her well-being. In response, Maisie: “coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire it should be remarked how little was lost on her. ‘Oh I know! ’” (165). Since the adults in her life have actually made very little sacrifice for her (instead using her as a cover for their many extramarital or out-of-wedlock affairs) her “Oh I know” is actually a statement of innocence and unknowing as she fails to comprehend the manipulation. “Oh I know” becomes a constant refrain of Maisie’s throughout the novel as she feigns intelligence or unquestioningly agrees with adults in order to receive validation.

James succeeds in painting an image of a child who is deeply immersed in the world of adults, and of an incredibly blurred boundary between child and adult. While Sir Claude, similarly to Maisie’s parents, also labels the girl “the perfection of a dunce! ” (200), since this is a novel for adults, and we as readers are acutely aware of Maisie’s intelligence, this perhaps shows that one of the goals of the novel itself is to encourage adult readers to reevaluate our often false and reductive understandings of children. And despite this insult of Sir Claude’s, at other points in the novel, he makes drastically different observations of their dialogue, remarking: “I’m talking to you in the most extraordinary way—I’m always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain’t I? One would think you were about sixty…” (431). And the narrator comments elsewhere that Sir Claude “was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her being also a man of the world”(102). Thus, Maisie is imagined, even by the other adults in the novel, as a hybrid being – one which crosses boundaries of both age and gender. This forces adult readers to also reexamine the relationships between child and adult, as well as where children lie on the innocent to precocious spectrum.

James’ narrator, in fact, declares that if Maisie can be considered innocent at all, it is an innocence “saturated with knowledge” (233), which Gubar would perhaps agree with as a more true generalization of Victorian children than innocence (or maybe even precocious) alone. Additionally, the narrator sets up for a reciprocal (perhaps in Gubar’s terms – collaborative) relationship between adult and child, whereby Maisie comes to influence and edify the adults around her, even if unwittingly: “I am not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs. Beale’s” (361). Thus What Maisie Knew further breaks down the adult-child binary by proving how permeable those borders truly are. Not only can adults influence children, but vice versa.

Overall, an examination of What Maisie Knew supports Gubar’s claim regarding the Victorian era’s interest in, and complex relation to, childhood. Far from being the ideal of innocence, Maisie instead comes to represent one of the “complex, highly socialized individuals” (181) Gubar claims exemplify the definition of a Victorian child. And the novel importantly opens up questions regarding child-adult relationships, causing adult readers to act as artful dodgers themselves by reconsidering their own definitions of children and how those children do or do not differ from themselves.