Joseph Conrad calls Henry James “the historian of fine consciences.”1 As many have noticed, Conrad’s description is particularly apt because it plays on the French “conscience”—a word that refers to both consciousness and morality as does the double focus of James’s art. The vicissitudes of consciousness fascinate James. To know and how to know, that is the question for James the epistemological novelist. But James is also a moral dramatist. His novels and tales dramatize the explorations of a deeply probing moral vision. These two aspects of James’s achievement raise a question that many of his readers and critics have pondered: What is the relation between James the epistemological novelist and James the moral dramatist? Namely, what connections join his interest in consciousness and his concern with moral themes?
A phenomenological approach to describing and explaining these connections suggests itself because of the close relation between James’s art and his brother William’s philosophy. Many critics have been intrigued by Henry’s surprised discovery that he had “unconsciously pragmatised” in much of his life and work. They have shown the extent to which he was right when, politely ignoring their marked differences in temperament and taste, he told William that “philosophically, in short, I am ’with’ you, almost completely.”2 But William James’s pragmatic, pluralistic radical empiricism itself anticipates the concerns of phenomenology and its scion, existentialism. Husserl read James’s Principles of Psychology early in his career and later acknowledged its influence on his thought. Moreover, along with his friend and colleague Charles Sanders Peirce, William James has come to be regarded as a founder of an American phenomenology. The growing awareness in philosophical circles of William’s significance as a pioneering precursor of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre should lead us to inquire whether Henry’s achievement has affinities with the phenomenological tradition.3 I will attempt to explain the phenomenological implications of William’s philosophy as I use his thought in my interpretations of his brothers art. It seems obvious, though, that if Henry and William share similar concerns and, further, if William and phenomenology share similar concerns, then (almost by syllogism) we can reasonably expect Henrys work to have phenomenological significance.
Guided by this expectation, we can pose the following questions about consciousness and morality in James: What is the relation between James’s understanding of consciousness and phenomenological theories of knowing? Does James’s moral vision converge with existential theory in such areas as freedom, responsibility, and the dilemmas of personal relations? Can the links between phenomenology and existentialism help to illuminate the connections between James’s epistemological and moral concerns?
James often acknowledges in his critical writings that for him the epistemological and the moral are a single concern, not separate issues. In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, for example, James claims that “the ’moral’ sense of a work of art. . . is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience.” According to James, the artist decides “the projected morality” of his work at the same moment he chooses which of the innumerable “possible windows” in “the house of fiction” to look through at the world and how to do this looking.4
At least two major implications about the relationship between the epistemological and the moral can be drawn from these deceptively simple but remarkably rich remarks. First, with a radical empiricism similar to his brother’s insistence on the primacy of experience, Henry James suggests here that we cannot go behind or beyond our lived engagement with the world. Specifically, an artist cannot claim foundations in some ideal or universal realm for his moral values or, by extension, for any other aspect of his vision. An artist’s moral vision rests on his experience as a knowing being, and experience provides a foundation that rests on nothing but itself. Second, James suggests that the epistemological and the moral are unified because they are systematically related to each other. They are correlated in such a way that an artist’s way of knowing—his way of looking at the world through his own particular “window”—necessarily implies and agrees with the “projected morality” of his work.
Just as James argues that the morality and truth of a novel depend at bottom on how the artist knows the world, so phenomenology finds that morality and truth in general can claim no other foundation than lived experience. This discovery throws conventional certainties about knowledge and human activity into a crisis both for James and for phenomenology. Since we cannot directly grasp the thing-itself, Husserl explains, but have only the phenomenon directed toward it, “knowledge, which in ordinary prephilosophical thought is the most natural thing in the world, suddenly emerges as a mystery.”5 When the myth of absolute knowledge falls, the dream of moral certainty collapses as well. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “morality is not something given but something to be created.” And so, “morality cannot consist in the private adherence to a system of values. Principles are mystifications unless they are put into practice” and “animate our relations with others.” Since morality depends solely on what we make of our experience, Merleau-Ponty concludes, “nothing guarantees us that morality is possible”—although “even less is there any fatal assurance that morality is impossible.”6 This perilous struggle to achieve morality on foundations no more certain than experience itself is a privileged subject for James’s dramatic art.
Because ethics depends on experience for James, he defines the moral realm broadly. His moral vision addresses more than criteria of judgment or standards for conduct. Rather, it surveys the whole field of human activity. It thereby cuts beneath the claim of inherited conventions to provide indubitable criteria for guiding and evaluating behavior. James is fascinated with social conventions, but he does not consider them fundamental as arbiters of right and wrong. This perceptive student of manners recognizes that conventions are socially codified ways of interpreting the world and relating to others—culturally contingent customs that organize experience along particular lines and that owe their existence to the agreement of the community to practice them. For James, then, morality cannot find its ultimate justification in conventions; derivative rather than fundamental, conventions are structures of experience.
James is intrigued by the endless complications and ambiguities that arise in trying to differentiate between right and wrong. But he is less interested in where the line between them lies than in how one draws it, and with what legitimation. For James, questions of morality can only be decided—to the extent they are answerable at all— by consulting the structure of experience and studying the basic constituents of human activity. Descending beneath the contingency of conventions and the abstractions of ethical debate, his moral vision probes the concrete immediacy of human experience: the risks and values of the imagination, the dialectic between possibilities and their limits, the shifting balance between conflict and care in personal relations, and the struggles over power that give a political dimension to daily life. These matters are more fundamental to James than the right and wrong of conduct because they provide the ultimate basis upon which any distinction between these ethical poles must rest. Where James the epistemological novelist explores the vicissitudes of knowing, the moral dramatist takes as his domain human doing in all its many aspects. Consciousness and moral vision are consequently unified for James just as knowing and doing are; knowing is a kind of activity, and modes of doing grasp the world according to a particular understanding of it.
This description of James’s moral vision leads us back to the second major implication of the remarks I quoted earlier about the relation for him between an artist’s way of knowing and the “projected morality” of his work. If James assumes that the epistemological and the moral realms form parts of a systematically unified whole—a whole where each part implies and agrees with all the others—then this unity depends on the unity of knowing and doing I have just described. Our worlds do not naturally divide themselves into independent parts like mind and body, consciousness and behavior, knowing and doing. Phenomenology regards such divisions as artificial categories that we construct after the fact in order to understand various aspects of existence that actually resist such compartmentalization because they belong to a seamless totality. In refuting the subject-object split, for example, William James argues that experience is all a unity and that we divide it up into subject and object only by looking at it retrospectively in particular ways that serve particular purposes.7 With Henry James, this holistic unity of our worlds is what supports the unity between matters of knowing and doing, consciousness and activity, epistemology and morality.
The relation between knowing and doing in James finds an instructive parallel, I think, in the historical connections between Husserl’s first phenomenological investigations on the foundations of knowledge and later existential researches on the activity of being-in-the-world. Like James, only as a philosopher rather than an artist, Husserl devoted much of his life and work to reflecting on the activity of knowing. He found that “objects exist for me, and are for me what they are, only as objects of actual and possible consciousness.” Equally and oppositely, he declared, all consciousness is “consciousness of something.”8 For Husserl, consciousness is not a passive receptacle for contents from the outside world but, instead, directs itself actively and even creatively toward its objects to posit, constitute, and give meaning to them. For example, when we are presented with three sides of what seems like a cube, he argues, we assume the existence of the other three hidden sides as we construct the “intentional object” that our “intentional acts” presume to deal with. If we discover later that these sides do not exist, our surprise only shows that we had been intentionally active in assuming them earlier.9 We know the world through phenomena that endow objects with meaning through this process of “intentionality.” The basic structure of consciousness is the relation between intentional acts and intentional objects. When Husserl describes consciousness as “intentional,” however, he does not mean to portray it as self-consciously purposive in the colloquial sense of the term. Rather, for him, “intentionality” refers more broadly to the entire activity of engaging ourselves with the objects in our world.
This theory of knowing invites an existential turn, as first Heidegger but then many others after him realized, including Husserl himself. Existentialists are phenomenologists who have taken Husserl’s theory of intentionality as a guide for studying a wider range of phenomena than he at first considered. Existential phenomenologists contend that “it is not only the mind of man which is intentionally related to the world . . . it is man himself, as a concrete, living, experiencing, thinking, perceiving, imagining, willing, loving, hating, communicating being who is intentional of the world.”10 This reformulation of intentionality builds on Husserl’s assertion that knowing is an activity by pointing out that all human activity is a way of knowing the world. As Sartre points out, “knowledge and action are only two abstract aspects of an original, concrete relation” between man and the world.11 Heidegger calls this relation “being-in-the-world”— a concept that describes how man comes to know himself, his objects, and other people in his world by the activity of projecting himself in the present toward his possibilities in the future. Working from Husserl’s theory of intentionality, existential phenomenologists have studied such aspects of being-in-the-world as the imagination, freedom, our relations with others, and our relation to social history. Although different from each other in many respects, these aspects of experience are not only unified as parts of a coherent whole but also have homologous structures to the extent that they share the characteristics of intentionality that Husserl first posited for consciousness.
Henry James’s achievement has phenomenological significance because of the similarities between the ways in which he and Husserl’s compatriots understand the various aspects of experience. Through interpretations of James’s works in the chapters that follow, I will attempt to describe these aspects of experience and to explain further how and why they combine to form a systematically unified whole for him and phenomenology. Obviously, only concrete interpretation can hope to demonstrate the usefulness of a phenomenological approach to James both in the particular task of explicating his writings and in the general work of clarifying the relation between his epistemology and his moral themes. Let me therefore single out one work for detailed analysis to provide a vehicle for introducing my overall argument. What Maisie Knew offers a kind of paradigm of the relation between consciousness and moral vision in James’s fictional universe. By showing the underlying unity of Maisie’s epistemological and moral crises, I hope to clarify further the unity between knowing and doing that both James and phenomenology assert. My interpretation will also introduce the conceptual framework that will guide the rest of my study.
Readers of What Maisie Knew customarily ask what she knows and whether she develops a “moral sense.” They are divided, though, over whether she triumphs morally or ends up utterly depraved. One side argues that she transcends her vulgar surroundings by learning to penetrate the evil ways of her parents and stepparents. For example, in a classic statement of this side’s claim, Pelham Edgar insists that Maisie acquires “a sense of the distinction between the right and the wrong of conduct.”12 Those on the other side agree with Oscar Cargill, however, that Maisie remains to the last “the refuse-catching vortex about whom a current of dissolute life pulses and whirls.”13 We may be able to cut beneath this controversy if we rephrase the central issues under dispute. Instead of asking “What did Maisie know? And was she moral?,” we should turn to the more fundamental problems that make these questions possible. That is, we should ask: “How can Maisie know? And how does her initiation into the activity of knowing involve her in struggles where the stakes are her freedom and her relations with others?” We shall address these questions one at a time from a phenomenological perspective that, in exploring the relation between Maisie’s epistemological and existential dilemmas, may clarify further the relation between James’s fascination with knowing and his “moral vision.”
Maisie’s dilemma begins as a distressing epistemological situation. James observes in his preface that, in general, “small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.”14 But in Maisie’s situation, this general condition has taken on extreme proportions. “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.”15 No matter how valiantly Maisie translates what she sees into something she can understand, she seems ever unable—at least until the end—to eliminate the obscurity caused by the excess of her seeing over her understanding. It is her burden to carry “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 yet big enough to play” (p. 12). She can only grow “big enough” to manage her dilemma by learning to attach meanings to these ambiguous, bewildering “images and echoes.” The excess of seeing over understanding that imprisons Maisie in a world of ambiguity is the surplus of her unreflective experience over what she can appropriate in reflection. Maisie’s dilemma presents an extreme instance of a general condition Merleau-Ponty has described. Once we begin to reflect, he argues, all of us find that we—like Maisie—have already been thrown into unreflective engagement with the world. Some obscurity will always haunt us because our efforts to achieve self-conscious clarity can never completely catch up with our original experience.16 Maisie’s challenge is to make the unreflected less obscure so that she can gain knowledge and freedom in a situation that threatens her with ambiguity and bondage. Maisie’s “moral sense” and her overall development depend on her struggle to achieve epistemological competence.
Many obstacles impede Maisie’s work of transforming her confusion into clarity. For example: “To be ’involved’ was of the essence of everybody’s affairs, and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual” (p. 137). Consequently, it is that much more “involved” a job for her to make sense of her situation. It is difficult, for example, to achieve a coherent understanding of your world’s interpersonal structure when that structure refuses to hold together coherently. Maisie’s trouble here begins with “the opposed principles” in which her parents try to “educate” her—each insisting on the other’s irremediable evil. Instead of helping her develop confidence in herself and her world, they confront her with contradictory perceptions and then abandon her “to fit them together as she might” (p. 6). Maisie’s entanglement in everyone’s conflicting affairs only gets more incoherent, unstable, and contradictory as her story unfolds. Maisie is not just thrown into a situation; she finds herself thrown from situation to situation with unsettling unpredictability. The rude shocks, the sudden stops and starts in Maisie’s world frustrate any historical genesis of meaning. Husserl points out that the creation of meaning develops temporally—that children and adults build and change their worlds by adding to acquired habits of intentional activity.17 But Maisie cannot trust her life to develop steadily from one minute to the next so that she might increase her competence as a knower by modifying and refining past practices of understanding. Such habits might even be more a liability for her than an asset, since they would limit the flexibility she needs to react quickly to unexpected temporal jolts. She cannot build much meaning without the foundations that confidence in the reliability of past experience would provide. And the construction of meaning seems futile without assurances about continuity with the future.
Still, despite the odds against her, Maisie does try again and again to wrest meaning from her confusion and thus to liberate herself from the prison of obscurity. One of the earliest of these efforts is the play she undertakes with her doll Lisette. She uses her doll to counter the bewildering shock of being laughed at unexpectedly by adults when she displays her naiveté. Maisie may try quite seriously to ask a question that would clarify an ambiguity—only to find that she has set off a round of guffaws among the people she had trusted to assist her. This laughter “seemed always, like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and make her jump” (p. 31). Jolts like these upset the genesis of meaning she seeks. But Maisie’s failures to find consistent meaning in real situations induce her to experiment in play. And with her doll’s help,
Little by little . . . she understood more, for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette’s questions, which reproduced the effect of her own upon those for whom she sat in the very darkness of Lisette. Was she not herself convulsed by such innocence? . . . There were at any rate things she really couldn’t tell even a French doll. She could only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the impression of having great mysteries in her life. (p. 34)
Maisie reverses roles, of course, by projecting ambiguity and bondage onto her doll in order to appropriate clarity and freedom for herself. Even more, though, Maisie uses Lisette to help her reflect on the un-reflected; she finds that she can explore in the safety of fantasy what overwhelms her in the immediacy of experience. She takes advantage of the way in which play enables children to master through absence what they find baffling in presence by constructing meanings which themselves are absent from presence; signs have the power to mean, after all, by virtue of the distance between them and what they signify. 18 Maisie’s dilemma is that the usual resources that children employ to create meaning do not suffice for her situation.
Outside of her nursery, Maisie pursues meaning and mastery by using her imagination. As James explains in his preface, Maisie “has simply to wonder” and objects “begin to have meanings, aspects, solidarities, connexions” that help to reduce the fund of obscurity in her world.19 In order to understand what she sees, Maisie calls on her imagination to spin out hypotheses about the hidden sides that lie beyond her immediate, limited view of a situation. And her imagination works hardest when she has to rise to meet a sudden crisis.
Consider, for example, her idyllic outing with Sir Claude to Kensington Gardens that comes to an all too abrupt halt when they run into her mother strolling with her latest boyfriend. Suddenly and without warning, Maisie must deal with the shock of a rare pleasure interrupted, the nuisance of Ida’s appearance, the mystery of her mother’s presence contradicting Sir Claude’s understanding that she is in Brussels, the anxiety of her stepfathers annoyance and then anger, the violence of being embraced by her mother “as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller’s shopfront, but only to be as suddenly ejected with a push” (p. 145), and—as if all this were not already enough—the confusion of the new boyfriend’s identity. Most immediately, Maisie needs to penetrate the opacities surrounding her—to clarify what she sees and to understand it. As always, though, she is poorly positioned for the task. Exiled with the Captain while Sir Claude and Ida quarrel, Maisie finds herself in her accustomed position of “hanging over banisters” (p. 55) and wondering about what’s happening downstairs. Her standpoint as an observer grants her an extremely limited perspective on the situation at hand, with more sides of what she sees hidden than disclosed. But she can only understand what she sees by questioning what her perspective reveals in order to guess what lies beyond it. She must develop hypotheses about the hidden sides implied by the side she perceives, just as anyone presented with three sides of what seems like a cube— to recall the example I gave earlier—must posit the existence of three other hidden sides in order to construct the intentional object that his or her intentional acts presume to deal with.
Husserl’s theory of intentionality suggests that to know is to believe. Indeed, Peirce argues that our “truths” are simply hypotheses on which we act in the faith that they will bear themselves out.20 Hence William James’s contention that “’the true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking. . . . The ’absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge.”21 To dispel her confusion, Maisie desperately needs some hypothesis on which to act with full faith in its truth. She consequently makes a guess about hidden sides in her extravagant, imaginative interpretation of the Captain as her mother’s knight in shining armor. By romantically believing him the only one to appreciate Ida justly, to love her truly, and to offer her the hope of salvation, Maisie secures herself a hypothesis on which to act according to an understanding of her situation; that is, she can play the part of “the young lady at the ball” (p. 148) with her noble escort. In constructing this fantasy, she assumes an attitude of good faith toward her surroundings—an attitude that normally underlies everyone’s dealings with objects, but one that is usually denied her. She also asserts her freedom by discovering invigorating possibilities in a deadly dilemma. She does so by adeptly creating meaning out of mystery.
Sudden shocks may require Maisie to respond with considerable imaginative agility. But many of the surprises that spring on her show how unexpected hidden sides can emerge and shatter her hypotheses about what lies beyond her grasp. William James warns: “Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.”22 “Reality” can be distinguished from “illusion” because our beliefs have consequences. If Maisie plays “fast and loose” in her fantasies at Kensington Gardens, the consequences of her “false connexions” follow at Folkestone when Ida reappears. Maisie’s fantasies give her a set of expectations about how her experience will unfold and disclose the sides hidden from her but implied (she assumes) in her perspective. She expects that their emergence will confirm her hypotheses about her mother’s love life. But Ida’s reappearance robs Maisie of the validation she anticipates for her imaginative interpretation of the Captain.
Fittingly enough, Ida’s unexpected entrance interrupts yet another of Maisie’s performances in the art of imaginative world-construction; at first, Maisie regards her mother as a threat to the glamorous adventure on which Sir Claude has whisked her away. Once again poorly positioned to discover what’s happening behind the scenes, Maisie “wondered intensely, . . . was mystified and charmed, puzzled” (p. 211) about Ida’s motives and the state of her relations with Sir Claude. Then, after Ida’s charm and sweetness dispel Maisie’s sense of imminent danger, the child gets a wonderful inspiration. She decides to exploit her apparent safety by constructing a bridge between her world with Sir Claude and her world with the Captain. Conjecturing that the Captain is saving Ida just as Sir Claude is rescuing her, Maisie allows herself to enjoy two fantasies instead of just one. Also, she thus wins a clue to her mother’s motives that can serve as a cue for her own actions. Furthermore, Maisie’s inspired connection of one situation in her history with another later is an attempt to unify and strengthen her world by relating meanings across time and building on acquired habits of understanding. She is only trying to sustain the situation—as she understands it—when she invokes the Captain as a witness in support of Ida’s plea that no one has done her justice. But “her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take such a stare” (p. 223). Maisie has unfortunately extensive experience with surprise in her “career of unsuccessful experiments.” She errs more than rarely in the hypotheses that she tests, and she most often finds that those errors compound her mystification instead of improving her acquaintance with her world.
James’s experiments with point of view in the novel call on the reader to understand Maisie and her world better than she does. James explains in his preface that he adheres to her perspective because her “wonder” transforms the “vulgar and empty” into “the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art.”23 He thereby runs the risk of misleading the reader, however; Maisie’s imagination is epistemologically unreliable precisely because it is so nobly persistent in dressing out the worst circumstances in romantic finery. James avoids this trap by the juxtaposition he establishes between her perspective and his own narrative voice. His preface claims that his “own commentary constantly attends and amplifies” Maisie’s adventures by going “’behind’ the facts of her spectacle” to point out hidden sides so that we can “take advantage of these things better than she herself.”24 For the most part, however, James’s narrator is too subtle and self-effacing to offer explicit evaluations of his heroine; his most revealing and pervasive form of commentary is the complex ironic attitude he maintains toward her interpretations—an amused detachment that exposes her foibles with a mild touch of comic demystification, balanced against sympathetic involvement with her trials that invokes our pity for her and encourages us to participate in her struggles. Iser claims that all reading requires both immersion and observation as we alternate between inhabiting a fictional world and criticizing the perspectives within it.25 With James’s novel, however, this dialectic reduplicates in the experience of reading the dialectic between belief and doubt in knowing which the story itself explores. The narrator’s irony calls upon the reader to join Maisie in the hypotheses she projects but at the same time to criticize them and to learn the necessity of suspicion even while appreciating the reasons for her faith. This dialectic inducts the reader into the double motion of belief and doubt that all understanding entails.
It also prompts us to counter Maisie’s hypotheses with guesses of our own about the hidden sides she misconstrues and the patterns she misapprehends. Iser argues that we read by filling in gaps and joining elements together in consistent arrangements—completing indeterminacies and discovering modes of coherence that join the parts of a text into a whole.26 Once again, however, James orchestrates these processes into a commentary on the activities of knowing which his novel takes as a major theme. Just as Maisie’s guesses try to fill in blanks that lie beyond her horizons and to build a consistent image of her contradictory, topsy-turvy world, so the reader of her story must do the same—but projecting different hidden sides and a different pattern of meanings than she does, at least until her awakening at the end. Because aspects we misconstrue often contain hints that could lead to a more appropriate understanding of the object, the reader of Maisie’s history can (and must) study her perspective on the events she misconstrues to disclose other interpretations it might allow. The narrator’s irony encourages and guides the reader in this endeavor. The ironic distance between our own interpretations and Maisie’s theories calls for us to reflect about the hazardous but inescapable role that hypotheses play in understanding, whether in reading a text or making sense of an ambiguous situation. In Maisie as in many of his other novels, James manipulates point of view and narrative authority to draw attention to the vicissitudes of consciousness as a process of projecting hidden sides and seeking consistency. This is one hallmark of James’s modernity if, as Iser claims, modern fiction asks the reader “to become aware” of “the functioning of [his] own faculties of perception, ... of his own tendency to link things together in consistent patterns, and indeed of the whole thought process that constitutes his relations with the world outside himself.”27
Maisie could hardly avoid much of the ambiguity and many of the surprises she suffers, though, because the hidden sides of other minds are particularly elusive. We have access to the Others world through our understanding of his expressions—not only his speech but also his bodily gestures—and through a usually dim awareness that the horizons of our world shade off into more or less distant possibilities that can belong to him if not to us. But as Merleau-Ponty contends, “I am necessarily destined never to experience the presence of another person to himself.”28 We can never know the Others world as he or she knows it, inasmuch as we can never understand the Others experience except from the position of our own experience. Husserl was too sanguine, then, in supposing intersubjectivity guaranteed by our ability to project ourselves into the Others position by empathy or analogy so as to understand him as experiencing aspects “like those I should have if I should go over there and be where he is.”29 Maisie is not a solipsist. Others matter to her a great deal. She is continually involved with others whom she understands at least enough to talk with and whom she often wants to understand better. But when others laugh at her naive questions or remarks, for example, Maisie learns that meanings in her world can have different and inaccessible meanings in other worlds. Her misunderstanding of the Captain’s status and of Ida’s situation at Folkestone are failed experiments in intersubjectivity which show that reading the Others speeches and gestures correctly can be extremely difficult. She can only understand others through their Self-for-Others, which may or may not provide a reliable guide to their Self-for-Themselves. Her story dramatizes the difficulty of achieving intersubjective clarity since the Other must always remain somewhat opaque.
Intersubjective opacity makes the lie possible, as Maisie discovers—or, too often, gullibly fails to discover—in her dealings with her parents and stepparents. Maisie inhabits a world of disingenuous appearances where intrigues and deceptions take unfortunate advantage of the necessary element of mystery in the Other. Maisie knows from Mrs. Beale, for example, that she had kept things “perfectly proper” while the former governess was winning Mr. Farange’s affections and that she later helped her stepmother and Sir Claude by “bringing them together” and “doing them good” in myriad unspecified ways (pp. 39, 64, 133). But Maisie’s comforting sense of the family joys made possible by this talent of hers for facilitating relationships hardly corresponds to her stepmothers calculating understanding of the possibilities for sexual intrigue in the same situations. Many critics have noted with Dupee that Maisie “never knows where she stands with her elders”—that “her life is poor chiefly in affection and serenity; it is poor in candor, in transparency.”30 Her elders’ lies exploit her inevitable blindness to the Other’s innermost feelings and motives by manipulating the signs that Maisie takes in good faith as representative of their worlds. Her understanding of others cannot readily increase if they refuse to cooperate. But Maisie’s parents and stepparents are too intent for their own purposes on making themselves ambiguous to care much about helping her clear up the opacity of the Other.
Maisie often helps her elders more than they help her, in fact, since she often seems not to want to expose the lies that confound her understanding. Quite the contrary, she frequently seems to prefer that the hidden sides of her interpersonal world stay hidden, if only because it is more pleasant to dwell in fantasies than to face disillusionment. Turning a blind eye to deceptions with the help of her imagination acts to cover up the jolting discontinuities in Maisie’s world and to establish the security of apparent clarity where confusion threatens. Mrs. Beale may have darker designs on Sir Claude than she will admit; but uncovering them might hurt Maisie more than help her, since the appearance of caring with him for the child that her stepmother cultivates for her plot “really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very dear at least to two persons” (p. 163). More innocent, perhaps, than her other manipulators because less resolute and more deceived himself, Sir Claude has even less trouble deceiving Maisie than anyone else does because she trusts and depends on him more. Consequently, “to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from under his lovely mustache, to breathe upon it” (p. 137). Since he promises to guarantee continuity and security in her world by promising that he will “never, never forsake her” (p. 107), Maisie works to protect his guarantee by ignoring signs of its weakness. Mrs. Wix may be the only adult who tries not to lie to Maisie. But her own romantic notions about Sir Claude’s possible role as their savior feed Maisie’s fantasies when more clear-headed guidance might have helped the child pierce the veil of deception around her.
What Maisie knows, then, is insecure and unreliable—as insecure and unreliable as her precarious moral and existential situation. When Mrs. Wix attacks Maisie for lacking “the moral sense,” she tells the child her righteous indignation started when she saw “how it was that without your seeming to condemn—for you didn’t, you remember!—you yet did seem to know.” Maisie responds with a question: “If I did know—?” But Mrs. Wix admonishes her: “If you do condemn” (pp. 283-84). Yet Maisie’s question is the right one. To condemn is itself nothing more than to know in a particular way by taking an attitude toward a situation that reveals it in a particular light. Examining her moral dilemma in light of her epistemological confusion, we could defend the child by arguing that Maisie did not know what she was saying when she asked, “Why shouldn’t we be four?” (p. 271)—the governess, the child, and her amorous stepparents all one big happy family in adultery. This episode ranks as one among many where Maisie fails to understand the moves in the games played by manipulators like Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude. She acquiesced to her stepmother’s lie of caring nobly for her stepfather because both cared for her. Her imagination filled out the pretended meaning of this lie romantically and reassuringly, and she misconstrued the hidden side behind its facade. Once again, then, as so often before, Maisie’s unreflected experience has outstripped her ability to assimilate it. Maisie’s “moral sense” is no more certain than what she can know from her experience, and that is none too certain.
But if Mrs. Wix errs in assuming that Maisie knows with such certainty that she can and should know a situation by condemning it, she errs equally in assuming that only a sense of right and wrong is at stake in the drama of the child’s development. From Maisie’s play in her nursery to her struggles with understanding at Folkestone and Kensington Gardens, her epistemological difficulties are never separate from more encompassing trials. For Maisie to resolve her epistemological dilemmas would mean not simply to develop an ethics but, more fundamentally, to transform her situation by changing the possibilities disclosed to her choice. Wresting clarity from ambiguity might mean, then, wresting freedom from bondage. Unmasking lies and making transparent the opacity of others would reveal to Maisie what her prospects for caring personal relations really are. So far we have concentrated on the epistemological aspects of Maisie’s situation. But now, moving toward the existential dynamics of James’s “moral vision,” we must examine the problems of freedom, limitation, and personal relations in which her trials with knowing play a part, although an undeniably critical part.
Maisie faces crises in freedom and care. When Maisie struggles with perception, reflection, and meaning-creation to interpret her situation and even to construct a world for herself imaginatively, she is trying to disclose the limits and range of the choices available to her. Kierkegaard defines freedom as the “possibility for possibility.”31 But freedom is never unconditional. We can have our possibilities only from a position that excludes us from other alternatives. As Heidegger explains, we can project ourselves into our possibilities only by accepting the limits of the “ground” onto which we have been “thrown” as the starting point for our freedom.32 This “ground” includes every contingency of our existence that we must accept because we cannot disavow it, such as our place in geography and history, or our body, our past, and our relations with others insofar as they have already been established for us. We cannot choose the ground of our existence, but we can choose what to make of it by the way we open the possibilities it offers and the way we select from them to construct the world we will inhabit. Maisie’s epistemological struggles are an attempt to understand the ground of her freedom and, if possible, to reveal it in an enhancing light. We have seen, though, that she misleads herself about her possibilities when she fails to recognize the dismal limits imposed on them. The givenness that she must accept gives her little possibility for possibility. The prospects look grim, then, that Maisie could ever secure a meaningful freedom given such unpromising conditions.
Maisie could afford a larger faith in her possibilities if anyone cared about her freedom and ground other than herself. But she inhabits a world of rampant carelessness. According to Heidegger, care (or Sorge) is the founding structure of existence. The decision how to care for Being is, in his view, the fundamental choice at the heart of existence. We show care toward our possibilities and have various relations of care with our environment (Umwelt) and our world of others (Mitwelt).33 Maisie is thrown into conditions where such symbols of care as marriage and the family have lost significance and where divorce and separation reign, declaring that care has gone wrong. “With two fathers, two mothers, and two homes, six protections in all,” Maisie enjoys little actual protection; she even faces the prospect that someday “she shouldn’t know ’wherever’ to go” (p. 99) since fewer and fewer people really care what becomes of her. Elsewhere James laments “the exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn’t dear or sacred to somebody!”34 Childhood is an area where care’s fate is decided from generation to generation, since it is a time when a liberating solicitude should prepare the young to make choices, explore possibilities, and accept the responsibilities of existence. But no one carefully nourishes the ground of Maisie’s possibilities or encourages her freedom through care, and too many do just the opposite in disregard of anyone’s possibilities except their own.
The crisis in care that Maisie faces is an indictment of her social world. James does not write often or even particularly well on explicitly political themes. But the topics an author chooses do not tell much in themselves about the relation of his work to historical and social concerns. At deeper levels, regardless of an author’s themes, the patterns that govern the world of his art reflect and respond to his historical situation in a politically meaningful way.35 In James’s case, the private dramas he portrays nonetheless have wider social significance because they suggest much about the world on their horizons— the social circumstances that provide their setting, the general conditions of which they offer a particularly illuminating instance. Maisie’s situation may be unusual, but her dilemma is not simply her own. Her misfortunes cannot be written off to bad luck in the parents she has; the rampant carelessness with which she is treated, for example, is typical in its very uniqueness as a sign of breakdowns in the Victorian family. Unlike Dickens in Great Expectations or Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, James does not regard the family as a moral institution that is potentially a carrier of transcendent, ideal values. He views it as a setting for existential development and a way of organizing experience. Reversing the negative image that Maisie’s story presents, a positive family structure would provide a child with security and continuity in its early steps toward epistemological competence, a facilitative arena for testing possibilities, and a basis for trust and reciprocity in personal relations. As a social institution, the family is for James a conventional manner of arranging the various dimensions of experience—a structure that serves the basic conditions of existence either well or poorly. Maisie’s family relations do not serve her well, and her trials condemn the institutional structure in which they unfold.
The lies practiced on Maisie that we examined earlier as epistemological dilemmas reveal the bankruptcy of care in her world. The most fundamental lie—and the one aimed at Maisie most often— takes the form of a contradiction in care. “We care about you and want to care for you,” her parents and stepparents all claim on one occasion or another. But their behavior declares: “We don’t care one bit, or at least not enough to outweigh our other concerns.” Consider, for example, the elaborate subterfuge that Beale Farange tries to perpetrate on his daughter at the Countess’s apartment after his embarrassing run-in with Mrs. Beale at the Exhibition. With “foolishly tender” gestures intended to carry off the “awkwardness” (p. 180) of having showed so little interest in his daughter for so long, Beale pretends to exhibit solicitude for her welfare by offering to take her to America. But he seems more concerned even to Maisie with securing the convenience to himself that her refusal of this overture would bring. She feels “that this was their parting, their parting forever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other” (p. 186). He claims to be enabling Maisie to decide her future by picking freely from the options he magnanimously presents her. But instead of broadening the ground of her possibilities with a liberating solicitude, he narrows them in a manipulative deception to the single possibility he wants her to choose.
However much accustomed to “rebounding from racquet to racquet” in the games of others “like a tennis-ball or shuttlecock,”36 Maisie tenaciously persists in caring about care. Finding herself “deficient in something that would meet the general desire” (p. 10), she desperately wants to discover means that might supply her the love she has never sufficiently received. “She was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender” if such a strategy would establish care: “To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own desire” (p. 182). She is willing to give her father anything he wants, since her diplomacy in playing along with his manipulation allows her to show that she at least loves him. Furthermore, by meeting his desire, she might even inspire him to care for her too out of appreciation for her self-sacrificing pliability. But her strategy is undermined by a fateful contradiction. Showing care by pretending indifference if he abandons her, Maisie can win his care in return only on the condition she forfeit it. By meeting the contradiction of his lie with a deception of her own to carry it on, she creates a volatile, contradictory situation bound to collapse—or to explode, as it does, when she breaks down and gives up her strategy, shortly to undertake a disordered, frantic retreat. Nothing Maisie can do on her own can get past the fundamental collapse of care that Beale betrays by failing to answer her plea: “I can’t give you up” (p. 192).37
Maisie’s quest for a care that has eluded her is part of her attempt to convert this episode in her history into an occasion for the freedom and possibility she has seldom enjoyed because the ground of her existence is so barren. Her compassion for Beale gives her “an extemporised, expensive treat” (p. 176) with “such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing more than this to make up to her in fact for omissions” (p. 180) that had deprived her so in the past. These omissions might deprive her in her current situation if she did not convert the awkwardness of their position together into an occasion for her own romantic pleasure. She discloses more congenial possibilities for herself by taking a storybook attitude toward her situation—”the Arabian Nights had quite closed round her” (p. 175)— than she might if she regarded her encounter with her father in a starker light. The same imaginative activity that we saw functioning before as a way of interpreting ambiguous signs also serves to assert her freedom. With the help of her imagination, Maisie can at least play at being a loving, dutiful daughter even if circumstances will not let her be one—although just those circumstances undermine her role as insecure and self-deceptive.
Because freedom can only strive from its grounded position, Maisie’s struggles for possibility and care have dire consequences whenever they ignore the limits of her situation. The hidden sides that we saw her imagination misconstrue earlier are, to move from the epistemological to the existential, part of her thrownness that Maisie’s projects either deny or do not comprehend adequately. The shocks that follow the breakdown of her diplomacy with Beale show that mere wishing for freedom and care ultimately closes off possibilities more than it discloses them.38 Maisie’s imagination paints her into a corner that she can only get out of by fleeing—by jumping into a cab and pretending that the “cluster of sovereigns” given her for the fare means “it was still at any rate the Arabian Nights” (p. 197). When she all too generously overlooks Beale’s selfishness and romantically exaggerates her own competence, Maisie constructs a narrow, extravagant castle in the air for herself that denies her the openness to change that a better grounded freedom would provide. According to Binswanger, people who live in such “ethereal worlds” only increase their risk of disastrous disillusionment because the ground they deny does not vanish but lingers on as a “tomb world” ever ready to rise up unexpectedly with haunting specters.39 The Countess’s hideous, even terrifying appearance has metaphoric value as an ugly specter insisting on Beale’s vulgar avarice and on the sordidness attached to any dealings with him, no matter what romantic yarns to the contrary Maisie might like to spin.
We should now be better able to see what I meant earlier by characterizing Mrs. Wix’s vision of Maisie’s dilemma as not only epistemologically naive but also existentially narrow. The young girl’s only reliable—perhaps too insistently reliable—caretaker, Mrs. Wix shows a solicitude for Maisie’s welfare that does not liberate the child’s potentiality-for-Being.40 Rather, despite her well-meaning motives, she dominates the girl with much the same stifling effect as the manipulations practiced by others with less righteous aims. Mrs. Wix is “a mother,” which is “something Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was even less” (p. 24). But she answers Maisie’s needs just as little by smothering her with an allegiance that is likened to Mrs. Micawber’s as Ida does by “impatiently giving the child a push” to get rid of her (p. 23). When she grills Maisie about her “moral sense,” Mrs. Wix construes the “moral” not in an invigorating way that would facilitate freedom, responsibility, and care. On the contrary, she gives it a narrow, tyrannical definition that denies any possibility except the option of condemning or any freedom except the choice of a course of action that would advance her scheme of setting up an establishment with Sir Claude. Maisie’s moral dilemma in the broadest sense is an existential dilemma that Mrs. Wix hurts more than helps. A victim of her own weakness for the “great garden of romance” (p. 27), she cannot help Maisie confront her situation openly and suspiciously, without imaginative extravagance. Understandably anxious to flee from her own unfed, unhoused, and unloved situation, Mrs. Wix is hardly the one to encourage Maisie to face her ground squarely and pursue freedom resolutely in a world where fleeing and covering up prevail everywhere.
Maisie can trust no one but herself to rescue her from her plight. But she makes an inauspicious beginning in the way she starts toward the climactic scene that opens her eyes and sets her feet back firmly on the ground of her situation. Although she leaves France enlightened at the end, she originally arrives there in a heady mist of imaginative extravagance. As our reading so far should have led us to expect, Maisie’s commitment to a wish-world based on romantic interpretations reaches its most extreme in response to the most unsettling series of shocks and jolts. Maisie suffers the shock of confronting the Countess and fleeing in disarray, the upset of Susan Ash threatening a “revolution” in Mrs. Beale’s household, and the jolt of Sir Claude unexpectedly and without explanation whisking the maid and the child away. She responds by inferring wishfully that Sir Claude has finally decided to disentangle himself from his affairs with her mother and stepmother. She imagines him bravely undertaking a noble “sacrifice” for “the real good of the little unfortunate” girl that would fulfill “Mrs. Wix’s dream” that he care for both of them with “his errors renounced and his delinquencies redeemed” (p. 203). “Maisie’s light little brain . . . hummed away hour after hour and caused the first outlook” on her situation “to swim in a softness of colour and sound” that revived “the spirit of their old happy times” and foretold “a promise of safety” in “the far-off white cliffs” across the Channel (pp. 204—7). On reaching Boulogne, Maisie loses herself “in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life” (p. 231)—with the new horizons opened to her by the Continents possibilities reaffirming her trust in the possibilities for her existence opened by her flights of interpretation. Maisie little suspects the fragility of her revelations about what France and Sir Claude hold in store for her. Sir Claude’s silence about his motives forces Maisie to guess the meaning of the events overtaking her. But it also allows her to indulge in the wishful interpretations she loves to construct.
When Sir Claude declares “I’m free—I’m free” (p. 229), he mirrors Maisie’s state of mind and shows himself equally engaged in an extravagant denial of limits. His “freedom,” like hers, is not a consent to the necessity imposed by the conditions of his possibilities but a dream more wished for than secured. He may know more than Maisie about the reasons for their journey and the state of his affairs in London. But then he should know that his “freedom” is an escape—a flight from his involvements with Ida, Mrs. Wix, and Mrs. Beale, all women he was “simply afraid of” and “before whom he had undeniably quailed” (pp. 249-50). And indeed, “the agitation of his soul” (p. 230) when he insists he is “free” does hint at the weaknesses undermining his wishful declaration. He has good reason to feel worried because all of the dangers he is fleeing return to plague him. Ida asserts her still undiminished power by packing Mrs. Wix off to intimidate him, and Mrs. Beale then turns up to insist he has not seen the last of her either. These three women are all part of his thrownness because they represent past involvements that bear on his present situation. Together, they offer dramatic proof that our ground follows after us if we try to flee it. Maisie resorts to imaginative extravagance in a pitiably naive attempt to know her situation and embrace its possibilities, where Sir Claude resorts to flight in a better informed and more deliberate attempt to escape what he knows and to avoid possibilities eager to embrace him. Still, both make appropriate companions for each other because both are reaching for more freedom than their ground enables them to hold onto.
How do those so precariously overextended rescue themselves and then begin to establish a more grounded freedom? One starting point is the experience that existential theorists call “Angst” or “dread”— an anguish that confronts us with our thrownness by making us feel guilty for neglecting the claims of care and the responsibilities of freedom.41 Maisie experiences an ultimately saving anguish when her dreams about Sir Claude and the Continent collapse. When Sir Claude puts it upon her to decide her fate—“Can you choose?”—she finds in “the coldness of her terror” that “she was afraid of herself” just as he was “afraid of himself” (pp. 338, 326). Maisie’s “terror” is not “fear” in the strict sense of the word. According to Sartre, “fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself.”42 Fear is directed toward an external object, and we may quite appropriately decide to flee the object of our fear in defense. Maisie’s “terror” is “anguish” because she herself is the object of her own anxiety. “Afraid of herself,” Maisie feels anguish about her ability to exercise her freedom by choosing how to care for herself and others. Unlike fear, if we respond to anguish by fleeing, we are only deceiving ourselves because the object of our anxiety necessarily comes right along with us. In their anguish, Maisie and Sir Claude face a crisis that calls upon them to confront the responsibilities for deciding their existence with a new seriousness.
Sir Claude, of course, wants to flee his anguish by letting Maisie decide for him between the claims of Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix. He seems to hope that she will agree to abandon the governess and go along with her stepparents. But such a scheme would hardly fulfill Maisie’s dreams of living happily ever after under the safety of his care, undisturbed by the manipulations directed at her or him. The choice Sir Claude presents her with would rob her once again of her freedom to choose. By accepting either of its alternatives—staying with Mrs. Wix or joining her stepparents—she would continue to allow others to decide her future for her while retaining for herself only the freedom to accommodate herself to what they have chosen. She would retain little more than her by now much discredited freedom of imagination. Still, what can Maisie choose that would fulfill her demands for freedom, possibility, and care without extravagantly exceeding what her situation offers? She had decided earlier that she would settle for “him alone or nobody” (p. 309). But how can she expect Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale to react to this stipulation, and can she trust herself to bear the consequences of making this demand?
With no clearly adequate choice before her, Maisie understandably prefers to avoid forcing a crisis that might permanently dash her hopes—a crisis that would confront her with the unpromising conditions that her wish-world had tried to evade. “If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn” (p. 342) where the potential crisis revealed by their (but particularly her) anguish awaits them in the persons of Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix. But as Maisie and Sir Claude roam restlessly about town, postponing the dreaded confrontation, their anguish is brought back to them at the railroad station when the child says “I wish we could go” on the Paris train; then, realizing that this wish might offer an escape route for following her dreams, Maisie urges Sir Claude to take her away: “Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!” (pp. 344-45). “You have chosen then?” Sir Claude asks, thinking she had agreed to Mrs. Beale’s terms. But Maisie wishes to be swept off to Paris on the original terms she imagined herself under. She wants, without being forced to choose, to be carried along by events in a flight that would avoid the crisis she feels unable to meet. Still, unlike Sir Claude, she comes to realize the futility of such escapes as an answer to her anguish about herself and her situation. After the train leaves without them, Maisie understands that “she had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone,” although Sir Claude’s was not (p. 345). After a final flight of wishful thinking, Maisie understands the hopelessness of dreaming away troubles instead of confronting her situation with the resoluteness her anguish demands.
Maisie meets her crisis by embracing it as a turning point for her existence. With “fine appreciation” for a courage he lacks, Sir Claude exclaims over how Maisie “made her condition—with such a sense of what it should be! She made the only right one” (p. 356). Her “condition,” of course, is that she will give up Mrs. Wix as he asks if he will give up Mrs. Beale. Instead of allowing herself to be chosen for by accepting the alternatives he had presented, Maisie asserts her freedom to choose for herself by proposing her own alternative—one that transcends the limits of his original proposition and thus comments on its inadequacy. Moreover, instead of dreaming idly about reaching some safe haven of care and freedom with Sir Claude, she shows by disclosing her “condition” that she is willing to struggle to see whether such a goal is a possibility within the limits of her situation, since pretending it is has not made it so. Eschewing the extravagance of imaginative interpretations, she presents her “condition” as a test of what she would like to believe possible for Sir Claude, whose weaknesses she is learning to recognize but also seems willing to accept if he will stop fleeing from situations and commit himself seriously to her. Maisie does not seek to dominate him; rather, she proposes a liberating, mutually reciprocal relation when she offers to choose him if he will choose her and to care for him if he will care for her. Maisie’s offer would put an end to Mrs. Beale’s and Mrs. Wix’s practice of manipulating her choices for her and his choices for him. Her “condition” asserts the freedom of each to choose for herself and himself.
Although not equal to such existential heroics himself, Sir Claude does show care for Maisie by protecting her from the vengeance of the two women her “condition” defies—that is, by “facing the loud adversaries” and insisting that “she’s free—she’s free” (pp. 358-59). Perhaps secure in the realization that Maisie’s choice, since it cannot bind him, allows him to continue fleeing his own anguish, Sir Claude nonetheless recognizes as no one else does that “something still deeper than a moral sense” was showing itself in the child’s heroics: “I don’t know what to call it—I haven’t even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever met—it’s exquisite, it’s sacred” (p. 354). His insistence on the beautiful sacredness of Maisie’s freedom differs from his own feeble declaration of freedom earlier; she, unlike him, takes freedom as a task that demands struggling with adversity. Although she fails to win the terms her “condition” had desired, she succeeds in clarifying her situation by forcing everyone to declare the degree of their willingness to accommodate themselves to a choice of hers and by forcing herself to consent to the necessity imposed by these declarations. She thus overcomes, at least for the moment, the mystifying opacity of the Other that we saw at work before. She loses Sir Claude, but her hope for him was simply “the last flare of her dream” (p. 352). Without dreams and without illusions, “she was afraid of nothing” and found that “bewilderment had simply gone or at any rate was going fast” (pp. 352, 357). Maisie can feel self-confident and no longer anguished because she has freely chosen to decide her own future by seriously questioning the limits to her possibilities and by resolutely resigning herself to what that questioning discloses.
Now admittedly, Maisie’s horizons do not look particularly bright when she crosses back over the Channel with Mrs. Wix at the end. Mrs. Beale cannot be completely denied when she questions the meaning of the freedom Sir Claude claims Maisie has won: “Free to starve with this pauper lunatic?” (p. 359). Sir Claude cannot be trusted to carry out his promise to keep a watchful, caring eye on Maisie. Still, in a world where care has lapsed, consenting to the necessity that hardly anyone cares may be a necessary condition for confronting one’s own responsibilities for taking care of one’s own potentiality-for-Being. By leaving Maisie en Fair at the finish, with the question unresolved of what the child will make for the future of the crisis she has experienced, James shows that no one can determine in advance what will become of us since the task of deciding our existence is one we are never finished with. Maisie certainly will not let Mrs. Wix appropriate any more of her decisions for her. By demonstrating the courage Mrs. Wix lacks to “look back” at the balcony for Sir Claude and to accept that he has deserted her because “he wasn’t there” (p. 363), Maisie has firmly established the ascendancy of her resolve and her understanding over that woman’s timidity and blindness. “What Maisie knew” is that she holds her existence in her own hands and that she must not follow Sir Claude in trying to avoid that burden. Having taken a critical stance toward her ground and having learned to brave the worst it could impose on her, she goes back to London more open to her real possibilities than she was when she came to France dreaming of unreal possibilities. For Maisie, knowing the worst with certainty is the epistemological triumph that gives her existence a firmer foundation than it has ever had before.
The open ending of the novel also calls for reflection about Maisie’s social world. By returning his heroine to England and casting her adrift there to fend for herself, James encourages his readers to imagine for themselves the conditions that lie beyond Maisie’s horizons— conditions that extend indeterminately but ominously beyond what his ending specifies. Maisie’s bleak prospects remind us that such aspects of experience as knowing, freedom, and care, although universal in structure, are always situated in particular social and historical circumstances. The child’s isolation, attenuated only by the cold comfort of companionship with Mrs. Wix, emphasizes what the novel has suggested from the beginning—that the conventions and institutions in her social world do not perform well in their fundamental function as mediators designed to hold people together despite their differences and their mutual opacity. The conventions of marriage provide a way of structuring the relation between Self and Other, institutionalizing a collectively sanctioned mode of care. Even the laws and procedures of divorce are an exercise in mediation—an attempt to regulate the conflict between selves and to restrain its potential violence. In Maisie’s world, however, mediation seems to fail as often as it succeeds. Although not the total anarchy that the absence of all mediation could bring, her world is constantly threatened by battles for power and self-interest; these battles use the conventions governing marriage and divorce as occasions for conflict and weapons in their strategies and not as means for preserving the community. Maisie herself has often served as a mediator between her parents and stepparents. As a “shuttlecock” accustomed to bounding back and forth between contesting parties, however, Maisie is usually a negative rather than a positive mediator, helpless to create the conditions of care she longs for because she is employed as a means in the selfish schemes of others. Although she has finally extricated herself at the end from the battles that have devastated her childhood, her liberation gives her not harmony and love but loneliness and isolation. As the novel closes, the question remains whether the world beyond her horizons will allow her to find the care she has sought for so long.
James the epistemological novelist and James the moral dramatist complement and complete each other because, as Maisie’s story shows from beginning to end, dilemmas with knowing and existential trials are inseparable. Again and again, epistemological dilemmas that we first explored from the perspective of phenomenology reappeared in existential form when we turned our attention to the crises she faces in freedom and care. This recurrence demonstrated the inextricable unity of knowing in James and his “moral” concerns—concerns that reflect a deep awareness of the dilemmas involved in such areas of existence as freedom, limitation, and our relations with others.
A moral vision deeper than Mrs. Wix’s moral sense emerges in Maisie at the end. As we saw, Mrs. Wix understands ethical responsibility as the duty to condemn whatever violates certain principles of good and evil. But as we also saw, Maisie’s difficulties are not confined to the challenge of learning to make ethical judgments. Her “moral” trials include the dilemmas of discovering how to find a meaningful freedom within the limits that bind her and how to establish caring relations with others in a world where care has lapsed. Maisie’s epistemological struggles also have a moral dimension, inasmuch as learning how to know her bewildering world adequately is an integral part of discovering how to conduct herself properly. These are still ethical dilemmas where normative standards can be applied—where right and wrong can still be judged if only because, as Maisie gradually finds out, some ways of approaching her difficulties with knowing, freedom, and care are more appropriate than others to the problems and possibilities inherent in those areas of existence. Mrs. Wix invokes an extrinsic set of norms that prescribe rigid criteria for proper conduct. But the normative standards that apply to Maisie’s epistemological and existential trials are intrinsic rather than extrinsic because they derive not from a fixed set of principles but from the conditions that the structure of experience sets for adequate knowing, responsible freedom, and genuine care. These standards are flexible rather than rigid, inasmuch as they will vary with the circumstances of every individuals project of being-in-the-world. This variability is the source, indeed, of much of the moral complexity and ambiguity for which James’s novels are so well known.
Amplifying and refining the view of James suggested by my reading of Maisie, the chapters that follow will chart in greater detail the relations that join his epistemological and moral concerns. Carrying further my inquiry into James’s understanding of consciousness, Chapter 2 will focus on “The Art of Fiction” in order to examine the “impression” as a way of knowing and to consider its implications for his theory of the novel. The analysis of Roderick Hudson in Chapter 3 will explore further James’s awareness of the wonders and dangers of the imaginative extravagance that Maisie often succumbs to. My study of her difficulties in establishing a well-grounded freedom gave a preview of the more extensive examination in Chapter 4 of the relation between possibility and limitation in The Portrait of a Lady. The theme of the analysis of The Golden Bowl in Chapter 5 will be the epistemological dilemma of intersubjectivity and the existential crisis of care. Power, mediation, and the relation of individual experience to its social context will be the main topics in my reading of The Spoils of Poynton in Chapter 6.
The organization of my study reflects what I consider the five major aspects of experience for both James and phenomenology—again: consciousness, the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and our relation to social history. We could, however, draw different lines across the field of experience. Existence does not divide itself naturally into separate compartments. I have therefore marked out categories deliberately with an eye toward James’s major concerns. These divisions identify issues and themes that his many readers agree, often with the support of James’s own testimony, figure prominently in the way his work organizes itself. Moving from the private realm of consciousness outward toward the public stage of politics and society, the categories I have chosen describe the range of James’s vision as an epistemological novelist and a moral dramatist. But these five aspects of experience also represent major concerns of phenomenology that might suggest themselves independently. They are areas of inquiry that assert their importance for phenomenology by the frequency of their recurrence in its meditations on our experience as knowing and doing beings.
For both James and phenomenology, all of these aspects of experience are unified because they participate in the dynamics of transcendence that underlie existence as a whole. Heidegger calls existence fundamentally transcendent because we are always beyond ourselves—always “sich vorweg” in his terms, always outside and ahead of ourselves as we project ourselves toward our worlds and anticipate our future in the process of becoming ourselves.43 Following Heidegger, Sartre identifies this process of “going beyond” as the factor that distinguishes the “for itself” of human existence from the rest of Being—from what he calls the “in itself” because it cannot transcend itself.44 Husserl’s dictum that all consciousness is consciousness of something means that acts of knowing always direct themselves toward an object. Because the thing-itself eludes the grasp of our intentional acts, we can have an object only in a certain “aspect”—that is, from a single position at one moment which reveals that object in a particular, partial perspective. Knowing involves transcendence not only spatially but also temporally, then, since consciousness points beyond itself toward its objects and ahead of itself to future acts that will confirm or deny our expectations about their hidden sides. Perception may be “sich vorweg” but then the imagination is so even more. We are never further ahead of and beyond ourselves than when we leave our real, everyday worlds to enter the unreal world of the imagination where we can exercise freely our powers to create meanings and project possibilities, unconstrained by the resistances of actuality.
Like consciousness and the imagination, freedom is essentially transcendent. Although our possibilities are limited by the situation we find ourselves in, they are what they are—potential rather than actual—because they lie beyond it. We have possibilities because we enjoy the ability to transcend our current conditions and project ourselves into the future, if always on the basis of constraints inherited from the past. Transcendence and its limits similarly contribute to the vicissitudes of personal relations. The Other is somewhat opaque to me because his world lies beyond my horizons. I know him from the outside, according to his Self-for-Others, but not from the inside, within his Self-for-Himself. We can still move out of ourselves toward others, though, through acts of understanding and sympathy that can reduce the gap between us even if they cannot eliminate it. Finally, our relation to social history is defined by transcendence as well. We are social beings because our engagement with the world involves us with groups beyond our individual existence. As we study the various aspects of experience in James and phenomenology, we shall be examining various forms that transcendence can take in human existence.
The aspects of experience that are particularly significant for James and phenomenology can also be regarded as James’s “intentional foundations” because of their importance in the way his artistic world organizes itself. This term does not refer to what James had in mind self-consciously when he wrote his fiction and criticism. As I pointed out earlier, the phenomenological notion of intentionality does not coincide with the customary understanding of “intention” as someone’s deliberate purpose. A work of art bears witness to the subjectivity that originated it, but it does not offer direct, unmediated access to the consciousness of its author. James’s works do not necessarily tell us about his biography. Rather, the worlds of his works testify to and form part of the world he inhabits as an artist—that world of his art as a whole whose consistent pattern of meanings and values enables us to recognize different works as part of the same overall project, at one with itself even over changes that mark the evolution of his career.
“Intentional foundations” are the assumptions and rules of operation that govern the creation of meaning in an artist’s world. The intentional activity of consciousness, although inherently free, does not occur haphazardly but instead follows certain patterns that we can identify after the fact. We develop certain habits of thinking and acting as we generate meaning in our worlds. These “intentional foundations” form the “intentional arc,” to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, which supports and unifies our worlds.45 We have unified worlds to the extent that the assumptions and rules of operation in one area of our existence imply and agree with the assumptions and rules of operation in other areas. This further explains the unity of knowing and doing that we have already demonstrated on other grounds. James has a unified view of the aspects of experience not only because he understands experience as a unified field but also because he himself has a unified world—because, that is, his epistemological assumptions imply and agree with his assumptions about the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and the politics of our experience as social beings.46
The conceptual framework that guides my study of James represents a departure from traditional approaches to his canon. But the issues that this framework hopes to clarify—the unity of knowing and doing in James, the relation between his fascination with consciousness and his moral vision—belong to the mainstream of the critical heritage. A list of critics of consciousness in James reads like a history of great moments in the appreciation of his achievement: J. W. Beach on the relation between James’s concern with the inward life and his ethical considerations, Percy Lubbock on “point of view,” F. 0. Matthiessen on “the art of reflection” and “the religion of consciousness,” and Leon Edel on psychological realism.47 Equally eminent moral critics like F. W. Dupee and Dorothea Krook have acknowledged the epistemological foundations of Jamesian ethics.48 If this is an obvious and well-trodden area of inquiry, that is only because it is so important. These and other critics who will be acknowledged as we proceed have helped set the tasks this book undertakes. It seeks less to blaze new trails for James criticism than to help us move a bit further down paths already charted. What will matter is whether a phenomenological perspective can help illuminate concerns already well established as important by the critical tradition built up around James—by describing his understanding of consciousness more fully, for example, or by establishing more systematically the relationship between knowing and doing in James’s world.
Precedent already exists for taking a philosophical approach to James. It is a mixed precedent, though, which shows the dangers as well as the justification of such an approach. J. H. Raleigh, for example, goes so far as to contend that James is more a “metaphysician” than a psychologist, that “his characters are not human beings but meaning-functions” in a “system” based on “certain theoretical assumptions.”49 Raleigh then claims to show that the philosophical assumptions of John Locke and the British empiricists provide the key that unlocks the elaborate metaphysical metaphor that constitutes James’s achievement. There is also Quentin Anderson who has pictured James as the poet of his father’s theology and has discovered a unified Swedenborgian allegory in the three great novels of the master’s major phase.50 Raleigh is guilty of the reductionism that threatens all interdisciplinary approaches if they fail to restrain their method with a respect for the aesthetic integrity of their subject. Although the characters in a novel are not incarnate, ontologically autonomous human beings, they have nonetheless been endowed with a kind of quasi-subjectivity that we as readers bring to life by animating their worlds with our own powers of consciousness. Anderson is too sensitive a reader to commit Raleigh’s error, but he shows the danger of a similar one-sidedness in the exaggerated claims he makes for his reading.
Both of these critics do show, however, that a philosophical approach can illuminate an artist’s place in his cultural, literary, and intellectual history. We can, no doubt, better understand James’s overall significance if we understand his relation to British empiricism and to his father’s theology, with its connections in turn to New England transcendentalism and other intellectual movements of the period. By the same token, understanding James’s relation to the phenomenological tradition should contribute to defining his place in cultural history.51 The relations between texts are as legitimate an area of inquiry as the texts themselves. Furthermore, because understanding is inherently diacritical—a process of determining what something is by defining what it is not—intertextual study can often help to illuminate the specific identity of the work in its own right. The belief that extrinsic approaches necessarily detract from intrinsic considerations is an unwarranted prejudice.
Unfortunately, asking philosophical questions of Henry James strikes some as suspect. Their doubts would seem to draw support from James himself, who found his own mind “as receptive ... of any scrap of enacted story or evoked picture as it was closed to the dry or the abstract proposition.”52 Krook rejects the value of a philosophical approach to James, for example, because she denies that his “view of reality and its essential logic” derive
from anywhere, or anybody, in particular: neither from Hegel, nor F. H. Bradley, nor from his brother William’s Pragmatism, nor (least of all) from his father’s Swedenborgian system. I have supposed he took it from the ambient air of nineteenth-century speculation, whose main current was the preoccupation with the phenomenon of self-consciousness.53
Krook seems justifiably concerned with the dangers of reductionism and exaggeration that threaten interdisciplinary approaches. She seems concerned too, and rightly so, that James’s intellectual debts and relationships not obscure his unique identity and achievement. These are reasons for proceeding with caution, of course, but not for abandoning philosophy altogether. James himself noted that “imaginative writers of the first order always give us an impression that they have a kind of philosophy.” And he claimed that “the great question as to a poet or a novelist is, How does he feel about life? what, in the last analysis, is his philosophy?”54 Existential phenomenology can help us answer that question about Henry James.