The Road to Knowledge: Signifying Space in What Maisie Knew

Abstract

What Maisie Knew is an exemplar of James’s narrativistic rendition of how a consciousness develops into subjectivity, and how eventually it becomes an ethical subject that transcends existing discursive order. The gap between Maisie’s perceptions and her capacity for articulating her knowledge is one of James’s main concerns in the novel, from which germinates the meaning of the narrative itself. In short, the novel’s meaning lies mostly in the space between experience and utterance, between inchoate apprehension and articulate (and articulable) knowledge. What Maisie Knew involves a twofold endeavor to engage with a movement toward knowledge. On the one hand, it chronicles the little girl’s effort to navigate the division between experience and knowledge toward a fuller and more mature existence. On the other, the text incites our negotiation with this division in the act of reading. We may call the former the formation of a knowing self, and the latter the formation of a hermeneutic subject. While the narrative delineates the coming into being of a subject who knows more than what she perceives, it simultaneously prompts constructing a reading subject who reads more than what the pages offer. This paper is a study of this doubly formative aesthetic that What Maisie Knew instances. The question of epistemological uncertainties that preoccupied James in What Maisie Knew is aestheticized in an ethical turn, for Maisie’s growth into an ethical subject transforms the vulgar and vacuous reality into the métier of art. The text, in parallel, invites the reading subject to the possibility of an ethics of reading that simultaneously resides in, and exceeds, the text’s discursive content, for the space between perception and knowledge opened up on the pages of What Maisie Knew necessarily calls for critical hermeneutic exercise.