The emotional blackmail of using children as weapons

What Maisie knew (1897) is a cult novel by Henry James (New York, 1843-London, 1916) which analyzes a corrupt, immoral, and hypocritical Victorian English society through the lens of the protagonist's parents: the selfish Ida and the vain Beale. They are the negligent parents of little Maisie, who will have to suffer the bitter divorce and the dire consequences of this traumatic separation.

A dysfunctional and presumptuous family, in addition to being powerless, with a father, mother, stepmother, stepfather, governesses (one of them, Miss Overmore, becomes a stepmother when she marries Beale), and nannies. From the ages of six to twelve, Maisie—disturbingly perceptive for her age—tries to understand the complex world of adults, forged in terms of ambiguity, hypocrisy, deceit, guilt, and, above all, the vulgarity of hatred. From an admirable exercise in narrative style, Henry James, fascinated by the idea of a child's vision, constructs a story of baroque and at the same time transparent prose that led Borges to define the novel as "a horrible story of adultery told through the eyes of a girl who is not capable of understanding it."

But What Maisie knew Not only is it horrible for the adulteries Ida and Beale commit once they have new partners (Claude and Overmore, respectively), but also because each parent sends Maisie the other insulting messages, thus turning her into their confidant. Ida and Beale are the worst parents in fiction, along with characters from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Furthermore, in a kind of soap opera twist, Maisie's stepfather and stepmother also end up falling in love. It's funny that Maisie's name, in biblical tradition, means precisely "desired daughter."

Living six months with your mother and six with your father

Maisie's character, in fact, is the sounding board, a pawn in a chess game who lives six months with her mother and six with her father. The girl often hangs from the balcony railing to observe the world, and this gesture immediately brings to mind the "high-altitude vision" that Valle-Inclán preached in his esperpentos. Perhaps the only constant presence in Maisie's life is Mrs. Wix (also in love with Claude), a governess who has lost her daughter and sublimates motherhood in Maisie: she tries to educate the girl with an exaggerated moral rigidity that contrasts with what the girl sees and experiences: that corruption at all levels of mental, emotional, and verbal abuse by those who, instead of banishing her, should have loved her.

Radically contemporary, What Maisie knew It addresses emotional blackmail based on the use of children as weapons or the abandonment of children by miserable human beings. And since we are dealing with a stream of consciousness, James's narrative style is also concretized by partial conclusions, unfinished dialogues, insinuations, the absence of a classic plot, and the appearance of a succession of seemingly unconnected scenes that make up the fragmented experience that demands a similarly fragmented form.

Maisie doesn't know everything because she's a little girl. But Henry James and the reader do. All she knows is that she shouldn't completely trust anyone and that she should lie to please or simply play dumb and keep quiet. Like Nabokov's Lolita, Maisie intuits rather than knows. Like Lolita, she also ends up maturing poorly and develops incestuous relationships with Claude, her stepfather, an aristocrat in decline. Or even triangular situations, with Claude and Mrs. Wix, when at the end of the book, Henry James skillfully removes the three characters from their London context and sends them to France. Like Lolita, Maisie eventually discovers the effect she has on others not only because of what she knows but above all because of adults' approximate idea of what she knows. In this process of early maturation, Maisie learns self-censorship, and as she does, the third-person narrator disappears, and cruelty no longer filters through innocence.