Henry James creates an interesting juxtaposition in What Maisie Knew with Maisie’s age and how she sees and understands her world despite her age. The duality of Maisie’s perceptiveness and naïveté establishes irony for both the reader and the novel’s characters. Irony is strewn throughout the novel: when Sir Claude is first mentioned in Chapter 6, prior to meeting him Maisie asks Miss Overmore if the gentleman her mother has been seeing should be made her tutor. She asks, “mightn’t that make it right—as right as your being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?” Upon hearing this, Miss Overmore blushes, signaling that Maisie’s comment is exceptionally perceptive. Maisie understands the implications of Miss Overmore’s relationship with Beale, and Sir Claude’s relationship with Ida, and the irony in this scene is twofold: Miss Overmore recognizes the situational irony of Maisie’s question, and we as the reader recognize the dramatic irony of the role Sir Claude comes to play in Maisie’s life. Though Miss Overmore rejects Maisie’s proposition, Sir Claude does end up, in some sense, tutoring Maisie. Though he doesn’t give her a formal education, the outings Sir Claude has with Maisie give her an informal education of her world.
How Maisie sees the world is interesting, especially given the context of how spectating is used throughout the novel. As both an object and subject of spectating, Maisie transitions from the former to the latter over the course of the story. In the earlier chapters of the novel, Maisie exists passively; in her first stay with Beale, she is observed by the men going in and out the house, and “her features had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually nipped by the gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke of whose cigarettes went into her face. Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted, pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked—her shriek was much admired—and reproached them with being toothpicks” (Ch. 1). Similarly, when Mr. Perriam is first introduced to Maisie he remarks that Maisie is not a “myth,” as her mother was “always talking about you, but she’d never produce you” (Ch. 11). However, in the latter half of the novel, as Maisie ages she begins to gain agency, partly because of how she becomes more perceptive of the world around her—”so the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child’s main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity” (Ch. 12). Maisie uses her position as the subject of spectating to overcome the passivity that she has been cast into. This is shown in the multiple times Maisie pretends to not know anything, acting innocent and childlike to avoid confrontation with the adults in her life. With this action, Maisie reverses who is the subject and object of spectatorship; using the situational irony of feigning ignorance, she places herself as the subject to the reader, while she remains the object to the characters in the novel.
Perhaps James’s experimentation with the child as the focus of his novel is an exercise of literary modernism in its infancy. This is one of the earliest works I’ve read that establishes a child as the focal point of narration. The use of a child’s perspective gives way to ironic situations which arise from how adults see the child and degree of how much the child is expected to understand. Maisie is more emotionally aware than what we would consider the “average child” because she has been exposed to the difficulties of divorce and her role in the game that her parents play. James not only disrupts 20th century notions of a child, but our notions of children in literature as well.
