Just before running into his wife with another man, Sir Claude walks with Maisie through Kensington Gardens and talks to her about Shakespeare. He says, “ ‘It’s the Forest of Arden . . . and I’m the banished duke, and you’re – what was the young woman called? – the artless country wench. And there . . . is the other girl – what’s her name, Rosalind? – and (don’t you know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he is making up to her!’ ” (104). This last exclamation is not about Rosalind and Orlando, but rather a couple further along the path than himself and Maisie, a couple Maisie identifies as her mother and another man.

Sir Claude figures Kensington Gardens, a place he calls “a hundred miles from London” (104), to be the Forest of Arden, a pastoral space, a place of refuge, an escape from the threat of death. It is a wilderness that is unfrightening, an unknown that works wonders, a wildness that breaks down and reestablishes a structure that works in the favor of everybody who populates it. Threats are neutralized in the Forest of Arden, a hundred miles from the place where Rosalind would have died if she had stayed. Kensington Gardens, a highly curated and harmless wild actually in the heart of London, also functions as a space that upends relationships within What Maisie Knew, but the order it breaks down and then reconfigures is not so neat as the one Shakespeare imagines.

Sir Claude imagines himself to be Duke Senior, the rightful duke banished by his brother, and imagines Maisie as Audrey. He does not think of Maisie as Celia, the actual banished daughter in the play, despite the fact that parental neglect is what lands Maisie in this London forest with her stepfather in the first place. Rather, he sees her as Audrey, the dim, or “artless” as Sir Claude says, country girl who marries the court jester. He fails to see how she might better suit a comparison to Celia, or even to Rosalind, because Sir Claude, like so many of the adults surrounding Maisie, fail to imagine her as a person with agency, something that, by this point in the novel, we see her attempting to wield. Just moments later, after her mother and lover have been identified, and after Maisie is left with yet another new adult while two she knows leave her behind to fight with one another, she imagines herself to be a young woman at a ball, fitting her behavior into a mold of what she imagines is something approaching “adult.” The Captain realizes that he might have said far too much in her presence and Maisie immediately reassures him by saying, “ ‘I’ll never tell’ ” (115). She is exercising her skill as a secret keeper as she continues to be passed around from adult to adult. Like Celia and Rosalind, Maisie is beginning to understand that adaptation to circumstance and the ability to present different aspects of herself to the different people she keeps getting left with might be the key to her navigating her childhood that is so bereft of true role models. Celia and Rosalind run from home, disguise themselves as men, survive in the Forest of Arden, and construct happy lives for themselves in the process, and yet Sir Claude can only compare Maisie to Audrey, strung along through the plot of the play, ultimately married to a clown to whom she does not speak often, because he cannot conceive of Maisie as a person who makes active choices for herself.

He does unintentionally imagine his own wife as a woman capable of that level of self-determination when he compares her and the Captain to Rosalind and Orlando. In this novel’s approximation of the Forest of Arden, this enclave in the heart of London that does not function as London at all, Claude finds that his wife has made for herself a space where she can exist without her husband and her child. Kensington Garden is acting in this part of the novel as one of the many spaces that upends familial relationships without achieving the secondary task of reshaping them in a better way.

The concept of “family” is played with in this text. Maisie’s biological parents are practically at war with one another, using their only child as a mule for information and insults between themselves. At times it seems they neglect the impact these actions will have on Maisie or nonetheless “spoil” her ways of thinking. In addition to this, Ida and Beale Farange neglect their duties as parents. They do not nurture Maisie’s growing mind nor do they give her access to formal education. Although at times it seems her parents forget she’s human, conscious of thoughts and observant of the world in which they reflect onto her, James reminds readers that she is capable of her own thoughts and is a very bright child indeed by bringing attention to her inner thoughts and emotions. 

The act of passing the child around every few months does not establish a true “home” in Maisie’s mind. Already as it is, she does not have proper relations with either of her parents, the governesses replace this missing element. In chapter 4, Maisie describes her impression of Mrs. Wix. James writes, “something in her voice at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never even yet been reached” (17). This precedes the implications that Mrs. Wix seems better fit to be a mother to Maisie than Ida herself. It follows “she had been…a mother, and that this was something Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusing) that mamma was even less” (17). For the first time Maisie gets a taste for the feeling of true, motherly love, from Mrs. Wix rather than her own birth mother. To feel touched in a spot that had never been reached implies that Mrs. Wix is fulfilling this lack of motherly love in Maisie’s life. Maisie feels this herself, she was beginning to see Mrs. Wix as a mother, her mother. What this scene does is raise questions about the meaning of family. In the literal sense, Ida and Beale Farange are Maisie’s family. However Mrs. Wix fulfills the familial role sufficiently in comparison. Therefore, in a metaphorical lens, Maisie views Mrs. Wix as her mother. 

James’ novel really makes readers wonder what really constitutes a family. In society there is and has always been an emphasis on the importance of “family”. Loving one’s father and mother, especially, is commonplace however in the unfortunate case of Maisie, what familial bonds are being established when she is being passed around? She has no real place to call home and her parents neglect their roles in emotional fulfillment. Although not biologically related, Mrs. Wix establishes the definition of “mother” in Maisie’s mind, she is family.

A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:

• a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
• a quick primer on how to create your first post
• a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.

2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences. In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible. And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class. For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) I have discouraged search engines from crawling our site, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class. If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.

3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.

4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

How do you post? There are several ways. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:

Then, write something: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.

We’re good, right? Happy blogging.

What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:

• contain 400-800 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
• analyze a text’s form and themes, using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
• engage the text critically, pointing out the particular ways it imagines, for example, racial or gender identities, relates to other texts we’ve read, harbors unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work.

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. The particulars won’t be familiar to many, but I hope it suggests some of what I’m looking for. Specifically note how the author:

• draws a tight focus on something “a bit weird” at the top: most casual readers won’t have focused on the way sleep is thematized in the text.
• uses quotations from different points in the text to show how the theme is threaded throughout the text.
• balances quotation/paraphrase and original analysis so we feel ourselves carries along by an argument, not just a grab-bag of moments.

Your results may vary, and that’s fine. I just wanted you to see what I consider strong work before you launch into it yourselves.

Hunter’s leadership has organized a “community read” semester-long event in which we’re encouraged to read the late, great Audre Lorde’s essays together. Please do: here are instructions on how to download a copy of her Sister Outsider from our library.

Looking forward to meeting you next week. For now, feel free to peruse the site. Note that the official syllabus, very much subject to change, will be on a Dropbox document that, for security reasons, will be private to course participants. Nonetheless you can see a basic schedule of readings under SCHEDULE here.