What Maisie Didn’t Know

First published in serial form in 1897, What Maisie Knew is a heartbreaking story of the impact of divorce on a young and sensitive child and a commentary on upper middle class Victorian society and its morality or lack thereof. Right off the bat, I admit that I find Henry James’ dense and digressive style of writing very off-putting. The only reason I made my way through the labyrinth is because I know his stories are interesting and insightful. I am not the kind of reader who skims through a difficult sentence; I will read it again and again till I get its import. With all due respect to the author, sometimes his circumlocutious prose has terrible syntax and does not make sense grammatically. Take any of his contemporaries- Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde or Sinclair Lewis to name a few. Their language is lyrical without being bombastic and a pleasure to read! I only trudged through What Maisie Knew as I found the story fascinating.

Beale and Ida Farange are getting divorced and get shared custody of their six year old daughter Maisie. A judge rules that she spend six months with her mother and six with her father. She is like a shuttlecock tossed between them and made a pawn in their disputes. Each parent sends her to the other with little messages. Her father tells her to tell her mother that she is a ‘horrid, nasty pig.’ The parents are both involved in adulterous liasions and make her their confidante. She is caught in between the mud slinging and in their adult world of adultery. She learns to play dumb as a coping mechanism. At first each parent denies her access to the other and later both parents try to dump her on the other. They must be among the worst if not the worst parents in fiction! 

“What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel of bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.”  

Beale marries Maisie’s governess Miss Overmore and Ida marries Sir Claude. But in a soap opera kind of twist, her step parents end up falling for each other. She is shuttled back and forth between the different adults of her life and caught in their web of sexual intrigue, deceit and drama. Her two step parents are only slightly better than her own parents. With all the different partners and changing last names, it is no surprise that:

“She therefore recognised the hour that in troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when—the phrase for it came back to her from Mrs. Beale—with two fathers, two mothers and two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn’t know “wherever” to go.”

The only person who is a loyal and constant presence in her life is her stodgy governess Mrs. Wix who has lost her own daughter and thinks of Maisie as her replacement. But even Mrs. Wix is not much different from the other conniving adults who use Maisie to further their own interests. At first, the innocence of the child acts as a foil to the vileness of the adults. Gradually, she gets corrupted by all the adult machinations she has been exposed to and has a precociousness that is quite disturbing for her age. Her childhood is stolen away from her.

Everyone stakes their claim on Maisie but she gravitates toward Mrs. Wix and her mother’s second husband Sir Claude who is involved with her father’s second wife, Miss Overmore, now Mrs. Beale. She is happy to have brought them together and encourages their affair. Sir Claude loves Maisie but he is a weak man completely besotted with Mrs. Beale. And Mrs. Wix has a huge crush on Sir Claude herself and uses Maisie to get closer to him. Oh, what a tangled web!

I was so moved by the plight of the child that I almost forgot she was fictional and wished to lift her from the pages of the book and give her a hug. She is abused mentally, emotionally and verbally. Her father calls her a donkey and a monster to her face. Miss Overmore calls her a hypocrite and a wretch. Her mother Ida accuses her of being ‘a dreadful, dismal, deplorable little thing’ and ‘a precious idiot, a little horror’. Once when she returns home after a long absence, Ida doesn’t see her for three whole days. Besides, she is isolated from other children and her education is abandoned.

Eventually her father and mother abandon her too and leave for America and South Africa, respectively. At first her father says he is willing to take her along with him to America but the poor child is perceptive enough to sense that he does not mean it and she declines his offer and decides to go to France with Sir Claude.

The choice of France for the denouement is interesting. They are away from the restrictive English society, and Maisie, on the cusp of adolescence, blossoms there to full maturity. She feels at home in Boulogne and has an awakening and discovers who she is. She also sees Sir Claude for who he is. She recognizes his fear of Mrs. Beale and is aware of his lies and ultimately she has the courage to give him an ultimatum.

There are romantic undertones in Sir Claude’s relationship with Maisie. To me the strange nature of their relationship became apparent in the last few chapters. James is fascinated with the subject of sexual repression and development in children and in Maisy’s precocity, we see seeds of The Turn of the Screw which was published a year later. Maisie had always put Sir Claude on a pedestal since she was a little girl as he treated her with a lot of kindness. Maisie’s exact age is left in the dark but she is probably a teenager or close to being one by the end of the novel. Though nothing explicit is said, there are lots of hints dropped like the way they almost leave for Paris together and how their closeness arouses the jealousy of the other two women. His body language becomes different towards her. One wonders if he is aware of the erotic tension and tries to defuse it by missing the train to Paris on purpose, needless to say, an honorable action on his part.

Maisie has to do what no child should be forced to do; she has to pick her guardian. She makes her choice after some deliberation but the ending left me in tears. It was probably the best outcome for Maisie and possibly influenced by an epiphany she had from the sight of the statue of the Madonna or the ‘high gilt Virgin’ in Boulogne. I feel that not one among her potential guardians was fit to take care of her! So I suppose any ending would have left me in tears. At first I thought that Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale were the most suited in spite of their adulterous liaison which was a scandal at the time. I thought they had the child’s best interests but Mrs. Beale turned out to be quite manipulative and selfish. I also didn’t think Mrs. Wix, the voice of Victorian morality was fit to be her guardian. She has bouts of anger and she uses Maisie as her confidante and accuses her of having no moral compass disregarding the fact that she is a child who has no idea of the restrictions separating men and women in Victorian society.

You wonder if Maisie will survive her childhood. She is amazingly resilient but this kind of toxicity catches up with you. I was struck by these powerful lines that appear early in the novel:

“She found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t big enough to play…A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was to discover there later”

The stuff children are not able to understand or process when they are little is stored in the subconscious and surfaces laters in life- in their worldview, in their behavior and in the relationships they have with others. Our childhood leaves an indelible mark on our adulthood.

I love the way that in spite of the narration being in the third person, James is able to put himself in the mind of a very young girl. There is a gap between what Maisie sees and comprehends and what we deduce as readers. This is a brilliant tour de force as the readers understand what Maisie doesn’t know. What Maisie Knew is a disturbing and disheartening story with an unusual plot. You wonder how many Maisies have lived and continue living in the real world! Alas! If only they had Child Protective Services back then! 

The Painted Veil

I recently read The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, selected by my book club. It turned out to an apt book to read during the pandemic as a part of the plot is set in a place in interior China, besieged by cholera. Although cholera is a water borne disease, the fear experienced by the population is eerily familiar. As the outbreak sweeps through the region, people are dying like flies, there are daily burials and abandoned corpses on the street. People are ordered to quarantine at home and doctors work around the clock to attend to the ill. Death hovers everywhere and the precariousness of life hits you with uneasy relevance.

The cholera epidemic is however not the main theme of the book but an important backdrop which triggers a transformation in the main protagonist. Kitty Garstin is a beautiful but shallow and frivolous socialite who marries for the wrong reason. When her younger sister announces her own engagement, she panics and accepts a proposal of marriage from Walter Fane, a shy and boring bacteriologist, her total opposite. She is not in love with her husband but he seems to worship her. The story is set in the English colony of Hong Kong in the 1920s. While Walter is entirely absorbed in his work, Kitty has a torrid affair with Charles Townsend, the charismatic Assistant Colonial Secretary who is married with three children.

When Walter discovers her adulterous affair, he gives her an ultimatum:  She should either move with him to a remote region in China ravaged by the cholera epidemic where he has volunteered to help in fighting the disease or prepare to be brought to court on the charge of adultery which will ruin her reputation and that of her lover’s too. He also gives her another option: if she convinces Charles Townsend to divorce his wife and marry her, he will move out of their way and she can stay in Hong Kong. Kitty is delighted by this unexpected suggestion but when she confronts her lover with the proposal, he refuses to leave his wife. She is heartbroken and agrees to go with her husband to fight the cholera epidemic in Mei-tan-fu. Walter must have been confident that Charles wouldn’t leave his wife. But Kitty failed to realize that he was a shallow cad and is utterly devastated. Walter knows that his wife doesn’t love him and utters these heartbreaking words, among the saddest on unrequited love in literature:

“I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humoured affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favour.”

Kitty is not a sympathetic character at first; she is quite loathsome. And Walter appears to be a saint. But why does he wish to take Kitty to a cholera infested place, risking both their lives? Is there more to this than meets the eye? While in Mei-tan-fu, he becomes increasingly cold and inscrutable, she is filled with remorse and begins to appreciate his good qualities and respects him more. She befriends Waddington, a local customs official who helps her find meaning in life and introduces her to Taoism. “Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way, and it leads nowhither.”  He also accompanies her to visit Catholic nuns in a local convent who end up having a profound impact on her. She finds their values of self-sacrifice, duty and charity awe-inspiring and starts working with the orphaned and sick children there. Maugham shows a parallel between the Christian detachment and self denial of the nuns and Buddhist and Taoist philosophies. Kitty starts pondering the mystery of existence and realizes that there is more to life than the petty problems she faces.

The story has a lot of twists and turns which I don’t want to reveal in case anyone reading my post is planning to read the book. Does the couple reconcile and find happiness together? Or does Kitty go back to the arms of her insincere lover? Are they able to emerge unscathed from the epidemic that ravages the region? Meanwhile Kitty discovers that she is pregnant as if life weren’t complicated enough!

Maugham has the amazing skill to make us change the way we perceive both the main characters. Although Kitty was a disagreeable character at first, by the end of the book you are more forgiving of her and understand her actions better. She was the product of her environment and raised by a hen pecked father and a vain and self absorbed mother whose only agenda was to groom her daughters for marriage. Walter himself was superficial and married Kitty only for her looks although he was aware of her flaws.

After going through the dark night of the soul, Kitty reassesses her life and the choices she made. Human beings have the capacity to learn from mistakes and grow but it is a two step forward one step backward process as we see in Kitty’s case. She becomes more sympathetic to her father’s plight and both father and daughter are united in their grief and learn to express their love for each other.  There is a beautiful feminist message at the end of the story.

My only criticism with the book is the dehumanizing portrayal of Chinese children. Kitty Fane has a distaste for the Chinese orphans who “…sallow skinned, stunted with their flat noses, .. looked to her hardly human. They were repulsive.”These derogatory epithets made me cringe. One could say that it is the character’s perspective and not the author’s but in general there are no significant Chinese characters in the story. They are nameless and lumped together. There is a Manchu princess, the mistress of Waddington who with her painted doll face is exoticized to such a ridiculous degree that it erases her agency as a human being. The story has to be read in the colonial context of the era.

The title of the novel is taken from the opening line of a sonnet by Shelley, “Lift not the painted veil which those who live call Life..”. If we lift the veil we discover the truth that lies beneath the painted veil. Is it better to live an authentic life and face the realities of imperfect relationships rather than dissembling or living in denial? Does it matter as life is an illusion anyway? Maugham was deeply interested in Eastern philosophy and the veil could refer to the Buddhist concept of maya or illusion.

There are two other literary allusions in the story. In the preface to the book, Maugham writes that he was inspired by a canto in Dante’s Purgatorio in writing the book and he explains how he proceeded from a story rather than from a character.“I think that this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character. It is difficult to explain the relation between character and plot. You cannot very well think of a character in the void; the moment you think of him, you think of him in some situation, doing something…” The second intertextual reference is to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith. I am refraining on commenting on both the references as they would reveal plot details but they add a lot of depth to the story.

The Painted Veil is more than a story of forbidden love- it is a beautiful tale of self discovery and redemption. Kitty Fane often gazes at the vast and dreamlike Chinese landscape from a curtained chair lifted by coolies. Her journey through interior China is a moral one too and the image of her, veiled, at a height and distance is an apt metaphor for many things- the colonial gaze, her spiritual awakening and last but not the least, the painted veil that is life.