I found Henry James' novel What Maisie Knew to be an unusual work. It was characterised by a sense of impregnability. One had a sense of glorious architecure obscuring some treasure behind stone walls. This, I know, is very James, but it is particularly pointed in What Maisie Knew because the protagonist herself is in the same condition. That is she similarly is surrounded by events and relations which she doesn't understand although is affected by a sense of their propriety and importance. The difference is she is inside looking out and we are inside looking in.
This unusual set up seems to me a perfect example of the emergence of the hermenutics of suspicion and reader anxiety. At first one worries the whole time that one has not satisfactorily understood, that one is missing something. In particular the title is infuriating, because we spend the whole time wondering what it is the Maisie knows, and it is often mentioned by the narrative voice or the other characters, but it is never told in full. As a reader ones affected intellectual relations to the work become exposed and challening. We wonder, 'oh dear, am I not as smart as I think?' or 'I should know what Maisie knows by now, shouldn't I? What if I've missed it? What if I don't understand this cannonical author! ... How am I going to lie about this in class?...'. The obsurity of James' writing brings to the fore this bundle of anxieties and self expectation associated with the act of reading, and the role of reading in our lives, which is normally masked by the accessibilty of other works.
The hermenutics of suspicion are raised with even greater force then reader anxiety in this work. One sees the self proclaimed motives of the women using Maisie to gain ascendency over Sir Claude, and those of Maisie herself, grate against an almost palpable hypocrisy of sexual tension. The increasing sordidness of the whole affair, masked vainly by Mrs Wix' tempest of morality, screams for some authorial comment. The fact that this is refrained from by James, at least in my case, resulted in the most enourmous suspiscious of not only what he was doing, but who he was such that either a) he was blind to the terrible animal tensions that underlay his text, or b) a unbelivably dark thinker who saw the sexual termoil and cruelty hidden beneath skin deep English propriety, maintained in a type of self-deluding mantra of politeness and reasonableness. While increasing my engagement with the work I still wonder when I look at and of James' book, 'what on earth were you thinking?'.
