Henry James, What Maisie Knew
Aw crap, it's another masterpiece, and it will probably have to kick off my dissertation because I have no idea how to dispose of it in a paragraph. Notes to self:
- Vertigo of perspectivalism - struggle of book is to find a synthetic viewpoint - I doubt it succeeds
- Child's viewpoint foregrounds the architecture - makesa choice of POV etc into a clear conceit (in Elizabethan sense?) - the sort of thing modernist novels will also use as structural grounding. But to describe a child's mind is not yet to speak as a child does; James almost never throws his voice.
- Disinterested perception = lack of agency; looking at her own life with her nose pressed against a pane of glass
- A hermeneutic education - her moral initiation consists of learning to read signs; prior to that it's senseless to think of her as making choices. To read a sign means to translate the world into the late Jamesian style. (Late style as gloss on a text? We don't always get to read the text itself.) The ambiguity isn't skeptical - interpretations aren't inherently fallible, they're only more or less apt.
Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours - with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: 'I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all. Repudiate your dear old daddy - in the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you - it isn't in his nature: therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty.' This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked.
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