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What Maisie Knew and the Improper Third Person Sheila Teahan Sheila Teahan Michigan State University Notes 1. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 148, 149; hereafter cited parenthetically as Notebooks. 2. The Art of the Novel, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1984), p. 145, cited parenthetically as AN. 3. As Neil Hertz has noted, James' unease about his novel's subject invites comparison to Freud's similar defensiveness in Dora; see "Dora's Secrets, Freud's Techniques," in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). 4. A number of critics, however, assume that it is possible to distinguish the narrator's language from Maisie's. Donna Przybylowicz, for example, argues that Maisie ultimately acquires mastery of the "figures" initially in the narrator's control: "one notes an increase in the use of analogies as Maisie matures and grows more aware and a concomitant reduction in the use of imagery on the narrator's part to describe her inchoate sensations, for she eventually initiates much of the figurative language herself"; see Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James (University: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1986), p. 26. 5. What Maisie Knew, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, Vol. XI (1908; New York: Scribner's, 1936), pp. 14, 5. 6. For a Lacanian reading of the "residuum," see Dennis Foster, "Maisie Supposed to Know: Amo(u)ral Analysis," HJR, 5 (1984), 207-216, 212. James' terminology of residue and residuum resonates suggestively with Shoshana Felman's reflection on the textual residue inherent to reading: "the question of a reading's 'truth' must be at least complicated and re-thought through another question, which Freud, indeed, has raised, and taught us to articulate: what does such 'truth' (or any 'truth') leave out? What is it made to miss? What does it have as its function to overlook? What, precisely, is its residue, the remainder it does not account for?" See Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Felman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), p. 117. 7. On catachresis, see J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), p. 21. 8. However, many critics have taken the problem of "what Maisie knew" unironically, assuming that she undergoes moral and epistemological growth over the course of the novel. 9. "Anthony Trollope," Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 1330-1356, 1343. 10. The interrelated metaphors of locus standi, "logic," "backbone," "ground," and so on, belong to an entire set of metaphysical assumptions about unity, linearity, and causality governing the Western theory of history and of narrative fiction. For an account of how these metaphors have conditioned thinking about the "realistic" novel, see Miller, "Narrative and History," ELH, 41 (1974), 455-73. 11. In the Cage and Other Stories, ed. S. Gorley Putt (London and New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 72. 12. "The Pupil," in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, Vol. XI, p. 547. 13. Several critics have noticed the connections between the novel's narrative strategy and Maisie's figurative "death." Carren Kaston notes that "James himself uses Maisie in the novel's preface in some of the same ways that her various parents use her in the novel"; see Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984), p. 123. Neil Hertz comments on the preface's "thematics of sacrifice and compensation," and suggests that "the figurative death Maisie is said to endure is made to seem the price paid for the remarkable transforming effects of her wonder" (p. 125). I would argue, however, that the effect of Maisie's "wonder" is more ironic than redemptive. 14. For a reading of this passage and of the novel that complements mine in many respects, see J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 23ff. This essay was composed before the appearance of Miller's...
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