Maisie Learned
What Maisie Knew, by Henry James, is a novel written in 1897 about a little girl whose parents divorce, and Maisie is then repeatedly used by both parents in power plays. Neither parent cherishes or nourishes her emotionally as parents should. The thing that ultimately saves Maisie's childhood is her nanny, Mrs. Fix. Maisie is a perceptive observer of the behavior of the adults around her, and she is given quite a show to see. She spends six months of each year with each parent, accompanied by her nanny.

From the very first page we can see that Maisie has been used as a pawn even in the divorce agreement: her father has been given custody of her but has to repay the child support money her mother put up. She only gets to spend six months with her mother because her father cannot repay the money, and both…...

Henry James's work is not only a book about bad parenting, as it is not a book about relationships. It is about a fragmented and decadent society where normal values, such as caring for your child and offering her a loving home, become relative. This relativism of values leaves the character without a norm and without intrinsic knowledge about doing what is right.
Maisie's parents are not necessarily bad people in a complex meaning of the concept of "bad," just as Mrs. Wix, no matter how much the reader gets attached to her because of the way she adores Maisie, is not a sublimely good person. At least, despite developing interesting characters, James's objective is not to define good and bad and categorize his characters accordingly. I believe his goal is to see what the characters are doing and how they are behaving in a particular societal context, namely that of…...

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Bibliography

1. Sethi, Mira, (2010). Henry James's Most Affecting Portrait. Wall Street Journal

2. James, Henry, (1897), What Maisie Knew. The Project Gutenberg

3. French, Philip, (2013). What Maisie Knew -- review. The Guardian. On the Internet at   Last retrieved on November 1, 2014http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/25/what-maisie-knew .

(In his master's voice)
But, since this is totally a novel regarding memory and return, the narrative keeps recoiling, as if going after James's thought processes, into the vital episodes of his bygone life. In this astute manner we are able to inch into James's strange family life which gives an account of his father's horrendous pursuit of spiritual perfection, his mother's shielding care of her writer son, the ailment and demise of his scathing, talented, neurotic handicapped sister Alice, his disagreement with his haughty elder brother William. Henry's avoidance of the American Civil War radically was at divergence with his brother Wilkie's injuries; his love for his alluring and destined young cousin Minnie Temple; his proximal, jittery friendship with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, her suicide in Venice and James's vacating of her belongings. However, they are assorted with the scenes which Toibin has made-up or drawn up from…...

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References

Benjamin Markovits reviews: The Master by Colm T. ib'n. Retrieved at   Accessed 5 November, 2005http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/03/21/botoi21.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/03/21/bomain.html .

Charles, Ron. Portrait of a portrait artist. Retrieved at   Accessed 5 November, 2005http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0525/p15s01-bogn.html .

Mars-Jones, Adam. In his master's voice. February 22, 2004. Retrieved at   Accessed 5 November, 2005http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1154220,00.html .

Robinson, David. Portrait of a young Master. Retrieved at   5 November, 2005http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=260292004Accessed