What Maisie Knew and the Impossible Representation of Childhood

As a result of the post-structuralist tendency to scrutinize the social layers that construct identity, much interest has turned towards the subject position of childhood. This interest is not new: the factors of difference suggested by age have long been recognized by realists attempting to depict children. In this essay I will discuss how Henry James saw children as inaccessible subjects, and how this inaccessibility provided the perfect challenge for him as a realist who constantly tried to expose and work through the limitations of language and subjectivity. In James, children are ever elusive, both representationally and narratively. His unique combination of externalized focalization, visual objectivity, and dramatic irony anticipates post-structuralist approaches to the social subject and draws attention to the one-sided and unchecked power of adults constructing children.

To represent creatively requires models as common frames of reference for author and reader. Models, always generalizing (thus, essentializing), appeal to the adult thinker's rationalist tendency to categorize, explain, pin truths. For the novelist, whose task depends upon language entirely, whose narrative mode, no matter how experimental in terms of chronology, depends upon linearity, whose genre, no matter how "objective" in point of view, springs from and inspires interpretive thought, these rationalist tendencies are central. However, the impulse to conveniently essentialize identity can be frustrated by the need to realistically represent others. Dorrit Cohn has pointed out that "Narrative fiction is the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker can be portrayed" (Transparent Minds 7). When the novelist tries to bridge subjectivities to convincingly "get into the mind" of and create a character, s/he must con-vincingly speculate. Yet, as Cohn states, "the special life-likeness of narrative fiction--as compared to dramatic and cinematic fictions--depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels" (5-6). It is the rationalist prerogative to define, but we are limited by our own socialization in our abilities to understand, let alone represent, others. ¹

In representing the position of childhood, even the illusion of an inter-subjective link between adult writer and child is impossible. As James Kincaid explains, the essentializing notion of "the child" evolved as "everything the sophisticated adult was not, everything the rational man of the Enlightenment was not" (15). Thus, the concept of childhood has been defined by adult discourse as that which lies outside of and cannot engage that discourse. There is a language gap, an inherent inaccessibility, between the concept of a child and the adult mind that creates it. Childhood is viewed as prelapsarian, relatively preverbal, outside empowered discourse, unknowing, irrational--the very opposite (though constantly shifting without center) of "adulthood." Childhood is whatever adults have lost and maybe never had. How can any adult writer convincingly represent a position that has been constructed as such?

At the turn of the century, in the middle of what Neil Postman calls the "high watermark of childhood," much interest turned toward defining "the child," as "the certainty of opinion about the nature of childhood began to be questioned" (61, 67). Realist and psychological novels reflect this trend. According to Muriel Shine,

The evolution of the child in English and American fiction closely parallels the development of the novel itself. [. . .] An outstanding characteristic differentiating the modern novel from that of the nineteenth century is the shift in emphasis from concern with external phenomena to preoccupation with inner experience. [. . .] The simplistic view of the child yielded to the probing analytical impulse of the writer and the child became a vessel of consciousness to be explored in depth. (18)

With the modern "inward turn" towards investigating psychological process, novelists began to shift towards narrative techniques that provide an illusion of phenomenological immediacy. Popular modes, such as the omniscient narrator, gave way...