The "Partagé Child" and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew

This essay examines the figure of the divided child in What Maisie Knew and its pivotal role in shaping James's emergently modernist method. The product of divorce, Maisie's is an unconventional interiority whose division the novel seeks to preserve in ironic contrast to the Victorian ideals of childhood unity. Subsequently, Maisie develops a method of sustained detachment and restraint, which the novel itself comes to embrace in the method of its telling. Silence, secrecy, and diversion characterize Maisie's method, but they also come to characterize the narrative technique of a novel that never, at last, reveals what Maisie knew.