The Scarlet Feather: Racial Phantasmagoria in What Maisie Knew

Education is thus simply the means by which society prepares, in its children, the essential conditions of its own existence.

--Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (1895)

A terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter. The former is certain to draw; for English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.

--Oscar Wilde, "The American Invasion,"
Court and Society Review, March 1887

The American Countess continues to cause quite a stir since she first emerged arm-in-arm with Maisie's father (Mr. Beale) from a "side show" called "Flowers of the Forest"--a "large presentment of bright brown ladies" who "were brown all over," displayed "in a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance" on Earl's Court in London (WMK 143). The Countess in What Maisie Knew (1897) appears "so brown" to Maisie that she initially mistakes her "for one of the Flowers" before following the Countess's "upright scarlet plume" through the crowd and remarking to her stepmother, "Did you ever in your life see such a feather?"; Mrs. Beale, Maisie's former governess, responds to her stepdaughter with vitriol: "Oh that's the way they dress--the vulgarest of the vulgar!"

Understanding the logic and force of this "vulgarest" "they" has proven complex for critics who have addressed the assumptions regarding race that underpin James's depictions of elite Anglo-American culture. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison notably characterizes the Countess as the "black" woman "lubricat[ing] the turn of the plot and becom[ing] the agency of moral choice and meaning" (13). Kenneth Warren, in Black and White Strangers (1993), extends Morrison's mention of the Countess, arguing that James's fiction both figures racial difference as a sign of class vulgarity and contributes to eroding "the distinction between civil and social rights"--an erosion central to the characterization of segregation as an unregulable social preference in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896.

Walter Benn Michaels disagrees. For Michaels, James's particular association of vulgarity and race in the figure of the Countess contradicts the segregationist principles of Plessy--principles that Michaels argues asserted a categorical white/black racial status regardless of social class standing. Michaels concludes that because James was living and writing in England he was not under the sway of the racialist assumptions undergirding Plessy. Consequently:

Not only is Beale not white, the Countess, Morrison to the contrary notwithstanding, is not black--she is a "brown lady"; by which I mean not that, under the American system of racial classification, she wouldn't count as black but rather, that in the world of What Maisie Knew and The American Scene, the American system of racial classification is not in force. (289)

John Carlos Rowe revises Michaels's explanation in The Other Henry James (1998). For Rowe, the fact that the Countess is "brown" not "black" does not "[conclude] the discussion of the status of racism in Jamesian realism"; instead, "the American Countess may [ . . . ] be linked with a wide range of other marginal peoples in the English imaginary" and thereby shift "the question from American binaries of 'black and white' to the confusion of race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, and age often used to prop up otherwise unstable notions of English 'national' identity in the late nineteenth century" (144-45). "The brown lady" agitates anxiety over economic power by reflecting an ambiguity of racial type at the very intersection of colonial rhetorics and histories of British control in India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America. The plot of Maisie's final dispossession unfolds as her parents travel to sites of British colonial enterprise in order to perpetuate, to consolidate, and to enjoy their relative privilege; Beale's waning family wealth and his former...