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Stephanie Newman
Recovering the Pleasure of Play:
Game Theory and Thought Experiment
in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew
Stephanie Newman
Harvard College 2013
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Games, Symmetry, Structure
Henry James knew that he created an extraordinary character in Maisie Farange.
In the preface to What Maisie Knew, James suggests that his young protagonist holds
together the entire plot of his 1897 novel: she is the “ironic center” of all the action, the
“pretext” for the game played among her adult companions (22). It is no coincidence that
Maisie’s situation reminds us of game; in fact, Henry James first refers to Maisie as an
object of sport: “The wretched infant was thus to find itself practically disowned,
rebounding from racquet to racquet like a tennisball or a shuttlecock” (PR, i). Maisie
enters the novel as a badminton birdie, her divorced parents none other than the artful
“racqueteers” eager to take hold of the girl and then quickly disencumber themselves of
her. The novel’s game quickly complicates as characters multiply, alliances form, and
Maisie herself matures into a player. By equating the novel’s plot to game, Henry James
invites us to consider his text through the theoretical lens most pertinent to the study of
games: game theory. Game theory contributes to our analysis of What Maisie Knew in
two ways: 1) it provides us with a structural framework for the novel’s events, and 2) it
provides us with a psychological context for Maisie’s mind. Structurally, game
theoretical concepts like equilibrium and utility explain the social settlement of the final
scene. Though Maisie makes the surprising decision to accompany Mrs Wix to England,
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game theory clarifies why her choice is most advantageous. Psychologically, game
theory’s insights are more delicate. Game theory illuminates Maisie’s psyche by defining
her decisions as rational moves in a game. However, when Maisie’s emotions begin to
affect her decision-making, game theory falls under scrutiny. If game theory assumes
perfect rationality, how can game theory explain the “small strange pathos” that grows so
central to Maisie’s character? While common criticism claims that game theory
disregards players’ emotions, this paper argues for a more nuanced response: Maisie is a
stunning character exactly because she reconciles rational game-play and emotion. For
Maisie, becoming an increasingly rational player is a pleasurable process. Maisie’s
emotions thrive on rationality, and she enjoys honing her strategy—that is, until
rationality breaks and pleasure is replaced by painful bewilderment. Intriguingly, the
rationality of the game itself is inseparable from Maisie’s rich emotive experience.
While game theory has mathematical roots, the body of thought offers fertile
ground for literary analysis. Game theory carved its way into academia in 1944, when
mathematician and economist John von Neumann published his prominent volume
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Von Neumann defines his work as a
“mathematical theory of games,” involving multiple players who experience “parallel or
opposite interest, perfect or imperfect information, free rational decision or chance
influence” (Von Neumann, PR, xxvii). He hoped that applying mathematical rigor to
complex game-like situations would clarify patterns of interdependent human behavior.
Today, game theory is integral to economics, sociology, and even evolutionary biology.
In the literary world, game theory’s insights have been used to advance readings of texts
ranging from Cold War military novels to the Bible.i The relationship between game
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theory and early modernist literature, however, has only recently been showcased in
scholarly circles. In Philip Fisher’s 2002 book The Vehement Passions, the literary critic
alludes to the possibilities of game theory for the writing of Henry James, citing The
Wings of the Dove as fiction well-suited for game theoretical analysis. Critic Jonathan
Freedman uses Fisher’s allusion as a jumping-off point for his own 2008 essay, “What
Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic
Knowledge,” in which he applies game theoretical models to James’s late novel The
Golden Bowl.
In What Maisie Knew, game theory illuminates the logical structure that scaffolds
the plot of the story. Structurally, What Maisie Knew is based on the principle of
symmetry. Maisie is the novel’s ‘ironic center’ and the “little feathered shuttlecock”
batted back and forth between her divorced mother and father (22). Maisie travels
between two equally ironic poles: on one end is the anti-maternal Ida Farange, and on the
other end is the illusory father figure Beale Farange. The symmetry of this arrangement
doubles when each of Maisie’s parents takes on a new spouse. Ms Farange marries Sir
Claude, and to balance the scales, Miss Overmore takes her place alongside Beale as his
new wife. Now, Maisie travels not between two people, but two pairs of people. As
marriages disintegrate, the symmetry of the characters’ relationships still holds. Even as
symmetry is temporarily lost when Sir Claude and Mrs Beale break from their spouses,
symmetry is regained when the two stepparents reunite with each other. In the backdrop,
Maisie’s parents continue to act in symmetry as Ida’s affair with the Captain mirrors
Beale’s affair with the Countess. And so, for the bulk of the novel, Maisie navigates her
way through a tangled but curiously symmetrical set of circumstances.
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Symmetry is rendered game theoretical in its relationship to utility, the economic
term giving value to game-players’ moves. Characters in What Maisie Knew experience
increased utility when they benefit, or grow more satisfied, from a change in social
arrangement. For instance, Mrs Beale’s utility increases when she first marries Beale
because she initially benefits from the arrangement. Conversely, Mrs Wix’s utility
decreases when Maisie departs from Ida’s house because Mrs Wix becomes less satisfied
with the arrangement. At the very end of the novel, James creates a utilitarian outcome
that spreads utility evenly—symmetrically—among each character involved. In Colbey
Emerson Reid’s essay “The Statistical Aesthetics of Henry James, or Jamesian
Naturalism,” Reid draws a fascinating connection between utilitarianism and Henry
James’s fiction. Noting that Henry James makes heavy use of statistical language in the
preface of The Golden Bowl, Reid calls on historical explanations for the author’s
linguistic choices, suggesting that Henry James is “part of a disfigured chronology that
looks forward toward modernism by reaching backwards, out of James’s British and
American genealogy, into a midnineteenth-century French tradition” (Reid 4). The
tradition is European new liberalism, which leads European “statist” officials to become
“utilitarians,” or “practitioners of a moral calculus designed to promote the greatest
happiness for the greatest number” (Reid 2). The shift toward utilitarian thinking
resituates the individual as part of a social body, and accordingly, in What Maisie Knew,
utilitarianism asserts itself in the social arrangements that guide each individual
character’s behavior.
Utilitarianism is strongest at the novel’s end, when Maisie’s last move pushes the
game into an equilibrium that evenly distributes each character’s utility. Maisie finds
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herself in a social crisis, forced to choose a companion among many adult guardians. She
decides to remain with Mrs Wix despite her emotional attachment to Sir Claude. Maisie’s
decision is utilitarian because it represents the social arrangement that distributes utility
equally among each player: when Maisie chooses Mrs Wix, each character in the novel
finishes with his or her second choice of outcome. For example: Maisie desires first to
have Sir Claude all to herself, but she stays with Mrs Wix rather than sharing Sir Claude
with Mrs Beale. Sir Claude would have preferred for Maisie to stay with him and Mrs
Beale, but Maisie refuses to share him and he refuses to give up Mrs Beale, so he ends up
with his second choice outcome: keeping Mrs Beale alone. Mrs Beale might have wished
to keep Sir Claude and Maisie in order to preserve appearances of a family unit, but she
settles for keeping just Sir Claude by her side. And finally, while Mrs Wix does gain
possession of Maisie, she too must leave Sir Claude behind with Mrs Beale, and so she
ends up with her second choice outcome.
To observe the utilitarian effect of this ending, we can assign numerical values to
each character’s level of well-being at the resolution of the predicament. Any character
who emerges from the ending completely satisfied receives the number 2, any character
who emerges from the ending having compromised receives the number 1, and any
character who emerges from the ending completely dissatisfied receives the value of 0. In
accordance with utilitarian principles, we consider each character’s utility equally
valuable, and so we assume each point carries consistent value for each character. The
chart maps out as follows:
Actual Ending
Maisie: 1
Mrs Wix: 1
Sir Claude: 1
Mrs Beale: 1
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The simple utility and symmetry of this arrangement is striking. Not a single character
loses, and the total utility of the arrangement is spread evenly among the characters
involved. Everybody is spoken for: Mrs Beale and Sir Claude end the novel as a pair, and
Maisie and Mrs Wix finish as another pair. The symmetry that had been endangered
during Maisie’s stay in Boulogne is finally reconfigured.
Using the same system of numerical value assignment, we can illustrate other
plausible outcomes for the end of the novel, observing that these alternate endings would
have resulted in asymmetrical distributions of utility. Let us consider that Maisie had
remained with Sir Claude and Mrs Beale, leaving Mrs Wix to depart alone:
Alternate Ending #1
Maisie: 0
Mrs Wix: 0
Sir Claude: 2
Mrs Beale: 2
Sir Claude and Mrs Beale would have been completely satisfied with this arrangement—
both their criteria of keeping each other and keeping Maisie are fulfilled—but neither
Maisie nor Mrs Wix would have been at all satisfied. Staying with both her stepparents is
clearly Maisie’s last choice, as she would rather remain with Mrs Wix than share Sir
Claude with her stepmother. This alternate arrangement is similarly disastrous for Mrs
Wix, who keeps neither Maisie nor Sir Claude but must return to England without a
companion. The utility of this arrangement disproportionately favors Sir Claude and Mrs
Beale, and the symmetry of the outcome is undermined because the four characters are
split in a three-to-one ratio.
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As another alternate scenario, let us consider that Sir Claude sacrifices Mrs Beale,
and that Maisie stays with him alone:
Alternate Ending #2
Maisie: 2
Mrs Wix: 0
Sir Claude: 1
Mrs Beale: 0
This alternate ending is the least desirable of them all. Now, not only does Mrs Wix leave
the novel without a companion—so does Mrs Beale. Even if this arrangement appears
more symmetrical than our first alternate ending in its assertion of at least one pair of
characters, the total utility of the outcome has decreased, and the utility that remains is
distributed least evenly among the players. After examining these two alternate scenarios,
we conclude that the original ending is the most utilitarian.
Maisie’s “Small Strange Pathos”
The resolution of Maisie’s dilemma is utilitarian, but the emotion attached to the
dilemma sheds most light on Maisie as a player. If the actual ending of the novel is
clearly beneficial for everybody, then why are there tears and harsh words and hurt
feelings? In confronting the complicated relationship between emotion and rationality in
What Maisie Knew, we realize that game theory does not ignore Maisie’s emotions but
rather inspires them.
A chief complaint about game theory as a body of thought is that game theory
assumes the rationality of humans involved in any game-like situation. In his pioneering
book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, mathematician John von Neumann
acknowledges that the very purpose of his text is to provide a simplified model for
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rational human behavior—which, for a discipline such as economics, is useful and highly
desirable.ii In applying game theory to literature, however, the assumption of rationality is
a significant complication. The majority of book-length fiction presents purposefully
nuanced characters. Certainly, the complex personalities of fictional characters draw in
readers and critics alike. We find it fascinating to witness a character’s development, to
watch that character behave in all sorts of circumstances, and, depending on the narrative
approach, to gain access to his or her mind. Confining fictional characters to a model of
perfect rationality is problematic not only because it oversimplifies what is ordinarily
complex, but also because it runs contrary to one aim of literature altogether: to represent
the human experience as richly as possible. What makes Maisie an astonishing
protagonist is that rationality actually adds emotional dimension to her character.
We encounter Maisie’s complex emotions when we study the girl as a gameplayer. At times, her rational behavior is so cultivated that her mind appears a sort of
machine, constantly observing, calculating, and arriving at strategic decisions. Maisie
must act as this type of game-player when choosing which information to reveal to her
parents, her stepparents, and her governess, and finally when she decides whether to stay
in France with Sir Claude and Mrs Beale, or to permanently part with them and return to
England with Mrs Wix. Critical analyses of Maisie’s character often claim Maisie to be,
as James himself refers to her, “a register of impressions,” collecting empirical data and
then using her knowledge to make strategic decisions (PR, vii). Jamesian critic Geoffrey
Smith champions this view, writing that Maisie “depends, necessarily, upon her empirical
sense of her environment,” observing that she “must adapt, uninstructed, to new
conditions” as she “becomes conscious of the rules of adult games” (Smith 224-225).
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Here, if Maisie is not perfectly rational throughout the length of the game, she runs a
trajectory of increasing rationality: her mind matures and information about her adult
companions becomes more perfect.iii Smith asserts that Maisie is able to attain peak
rationality at the end of the novel because by the time “Maisie faces her final choices in
Boulogne, she has an accumulation of reliable behavioral data to support her decisions”
(Smith 227). Maisie comes into her own through an ever-refined method of knowledge
accumulation and strategic behavior. She becomes a rational game-player.
Crucially, the process of becoming increasingly rational is, for Maisie, an
inherently pleasurable activity. She enjoys being able to refine her method; she enjoys
playing the game. This fact is easily overlooked in character studies that preoccupy
themselves with what Maisie knew but not adequately with what she felt. James notes, in
reference to Maisie’s final encounter with Beale, “What there was no effective record of
indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with
knowledge and so directed to diplomacy” (144). The author hits quite the right idea. Even
James’s acknowledgment of Maisie’s “small strange pathos” occurs within a passage
“saturated with knowledge” and “directed to diplomacy.” The girl’s interaction with
Beale takes the form of a game-in-miniature as the father and daughter sit together on the
couch trying to discern each other’s purpose. Maisie’s whole being is focused on
understanding her father’s frame of mind and acting accordingly. She follows her “little
instinct of keeping the peace,” consciously deciding what she can say, what she can do,
and what her strategy should be in order to “give a better turn to the crisis” (145). Maisie
realizes that she is ready to surrender to her father, but she also constructs the terms of
her surrender, deciding that she will give up everything besides Sir Claude and Mrs
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Beale. When her father tells her that he is headed to America, she conjures up what she
believes is “the right answer to make,” telling Beale she will go anywhere with him
(146). She absorbs knowledge as it comes to her and uses it to inform her responses to
her father, but she experiences a “small strange pathos” along the way.
Maisie’s pathos is “small and strange” because it exists only as a kernel of
emotion inside Maisie’s strategizing psyche. Her pathos comes to us in glimpses—in the
cab ride when Maisie feels a throb of emotion at her father’s trembling, or at the
Countess’s house when Maisie is affected by the “mere miraculous pleasantness” of
spending time with her father (139-142). Importantly, Maisie’s moments of pathos arise
through the process of becoming more knowledgeable. In the cab, she experiences a pang
of empathy for her father because it strikes her that he is scared and “agitated in a way he
had never yet shown her” (139). The rise of this emotion parallels an increase in Maisie’s
knowledge; as she becomes “strangely conscious” that her father has a purpose for
pulling her into the cab, she simultaneously feels “impressed and rather proud” of him
(139). Similarly, her arrival at the Countess’s home is filled with new discoveries.
Maisie’s pathos is touched by the realization that she has grown for her father into “much
more of a little person to reckon with” (143). When Beale comes out with “a vague
affectionate helpless pointless ‘Dear old girl, dear little daughter,’” Maisie finds tears of
joy filling her eyes (143). The time spent with her father in the Countess’s home is “mere
miraculous pleasantness” because the experience leads Maisie to a better understanding
of her father and his relationship to her. Maisie expands her pool of knowledge, uses this
knowledge to improve her strategy for the game, and unforgettably, derives pleasure from
the entire process.
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For Maisie, however, being a player is only fun until it gets hard. The process of
knowledge accumulation is pleasurable for Maisie only until she learns too much. Just as
her affection toward Beale intensifies, she recognizes the ugly strategy her father is
playing: He wants her to let him off the hook, to tell him he can go to America without
having to worry about his daughter’s well-being. Maisie has uncovered a new piece of
knowledge, one that is more appalling than gratifying, and her game-play goes into a
state of crisis. Maisie finds herself “bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with
[Beale] about her wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick to
him,” and she is so confused as to the correct strategic route that she lamely blurts out,
“Oh papa—oh papa!” (148). When Beale transitions into a conversation about Sir Claude
and Mrs Beale, Maisie finds the knowledge he imparts even more difficult to accept.
Beale tries to explain to Maisie that her stepparents will eventually “cease to require” her
and that they’ll “chuck” her after their game is through. Maisie grows bold at this
opposition; in a “flicker of passion,” she cries out, “‘They won’t chuck me!’” (150). The
pleasure of collecting knowledge has evaporated because Maisie has more information
than she can handle. She is saturated with knowledge to the point of overflow, and she
finds herself pained by her confusion.
The Metaphorics of Maisie’s Development
The reconciliation of knowledge and emotion in What Maisie Knew appears in
many layers of the novel, embedded in etymology and conjured by metaphor. When
James writes of Maisie, “What there was no effective record of indeed was the small
strange pathos on the child’s part,” he chooses his vocabulary well (135). The word
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“record” is itself a fascinating blend of knowledge and emotion. “Record” derives from
the Latin recordari, which combines the prefix re- (meaning “restore”) and cor (meaning
“heart”). In its earliest use, the verb form of “record” signified the phrase “to get by
heart.”iv The etymology of the word points us to the linguistic relationship between
knowledge and pathos by placing memory alongside emotional understanding. Memory,
in its metaphoric reconfiguration, grows in the heart. In a series of his own metaphoric
passages, James illustrates that Maisie values knowledge in both her mind and heart.
Looking to the passage where Maisie meets Sir Claude, we see that social knowledge,
and especially knowledge of affection, is most meaningful for Maisie:
Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame [Maisie] discerned through the blur Mrs Beale
seated there with a gentleman who immediately drew the pain from her predicament by
rising before her as the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she
looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever made her gape,
and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took hold of her and kissed her, as
quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride in him, a perception of his making up for her
fallen state, for Susan’s public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that,
in the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone, she was bored
with not having (54).
Sir Claude emerges in almost magical form, rising up as from the very photograph
preserved in Maisie’s memory. Even before Maisie’s stepfather stands to meet her, he
gains the tremendous power to erase any traces of humiliation from her summons to the
drawing-room. The child is overcome with emotion, profoundly moved by her
stepfather’s atmosphere. Maisie experiences pleasure not only in seeing Sir Claude, but
also in knowing that he picks her up to kiss her. Her pleasure, essentially, is rooted in her
knowledge of his action. Amidst her rich emotional experience, Maisie tucks away the
discrete knowledge that Sir Claude has demonstrated an act of affection. The act isn’t
inherently pleasurable for Maisie, but the consideration of it is, and so we observe again
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that knowledge makes way for joy to form. Maisie’s little seed of certitude regarding Sir
Claude quickly grows into “strange shy pride” in the man, a meek and curious emotion
much like the “small strange pathos” that alights in her breast during her final visit with
Beale. Maisie appears most overjoyed when Sir Claude takes her hand and tells her that
“he had come to see her now so that he might know her for himself” (55). Maisie
anticipates that Sir Claude will compensate for all her missed school lessons, implying
that the social knowledge acquired through spending time with others is most appealing
and useful.
The recognition of social knowledge as Maisie’s greatest asset gives new meaning
to important the window-pane metaphor that James employs later in the novel. This
metaphor also takes form during an interaction between Maisie and Sir Claude. In
fulfillment of Maisie’s anticipation, Sir Claude becomes an integral presence in the girl’s
schoolroom; ironically, he is also the one to eventually explain to the girl why her official
schooling has all but ceased. When he tells her that classes are really too expensive to
afford, Maisie feels “henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard windowpane of the sweet-shop of knowledge” (113). As a child presses her forehead onto the
display window of a candy shop to look at the sweets inside, so Maisie seems to peer
through glass at the knowledge she yearns to acquire. Though the windowpane is the
barrier separating Maisie from knowledge, the glass also provides the view through
which Maisie can see her “goods.” The windowpane, then, is as much a tool to Maisie as
a barrier, for we know that social knowledge comes to Maisie in the form of observation.
Her mind itself is similar to a pane of glass onto which the world is reflected.
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But knowledge is only sweet for Maisie until she “overeats.” When James tells us
that Maisie’s innocence is “saturated with knowledge,” we almost can picture the tabula
rosa of Maisie’s mind coloring with overwhelming empirical information. v In yet another
passage filled with metaphor, James reveals that Maisie’s education is a fearful process
for both the child and Mrs Wix:
She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs Wix, had been the successive stages of her
knowledge, so the very climax of the concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at
which the knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,
how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her in fact as they sat
there on the sands that she was distinctly on the road to know Everything….She looked at
the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she should soon have learnt All…By the time
they moved homeward it was as if this inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense
cord, twitched by a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
neatly strung (216).
Maisie muses that her knowledge has advanced through a series of stages, and she
imagines that the final stage of knowledge will be climactic. Maisie envisions her
knowledge swelling until it eventually spills over—and she knows all too well what
happens when her knowledge exceeds her holding capacity. Accordingly, Maisie seems
mildly afraid of her own proposition, referring to her fate as a type of condemnation. Her
fear is borne of the implicit understanding that her knowledge will soon confront its
ultimate limit. Once Maisie reaches the state of knowing Most and knowing Everything,
it will literally be impossible for knowledge to carry her any further. She will enter into a
state of crisis similar to that which occurred during her final encounter with Beale.
Mrs. Wix shares Maisie’s fear of the girl’s accumulated knowledge. The
metaphor of Maisie’s knowledge originates from Maisie’s attempt to imagine how Mrs
Wix sees Maisie’s growing mind. The inevitability of Maisie’s continued learning is, for
Mrs Wix, a “long, tense cord” onto which pearls of knowledge are strung. The metaphor
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of the cord in this passage recalls an earlier moment in the novel when Maisie sees her
attachment to Mrs Beale as a “cord she must suddenly snap” to return to her mother’s
house (81). The cord is a medium for knowledge accumulation, but it is also a symbol of
social attachment. Once again, James unites knowledge and social experience through
metaphor. It is no wonder that for Mrs Wix, such a cord is “twitched by a nervous hand”
(216). The taut cord must be handled with extreme care—for if it snaps, Maisie will lose
track of her carefully collected knowledge and her social allegiances. Quite contrary to
knowing All, the girl would find herself utterly lost.
And Maisie does find herself utterly lost. In the final scene, Maisie desolately
declares, “I feel as if I had lost everything” (268). As the girl surveys “the immensity of
space” for “the idea of a describable loss,” we sense the daunting vacuity that Maisie
stares into. The girl who always, to preserve her own well-being, feigned a “vacancy
beyond her years,” now finds herself swallowed whole by a much greater vacancy: the
vacancy that remains as knowledge slips from her grasp. “I don’t know—I don’t know,”
she pleads to Mrs Wix, who fires questions at her about her “moral sense” (268). Maisie
doesn’t know. Maisie’s body experiences the “spasm” of “something still deeper than a
moral sense,” and we wonder if this is indeed the twinge of the cord being snapped.
Maisie’s knowledge has broken, and in its place sprouts bewilderment and pain.
Mrs Wix lashes out at Sir Claude, accusing him of interfering with Maisie’s moral
development: “You’ve nipped it in the bud. You’ve killed it when it had begun to live”
(268). But Sir Claude sees what Mrs Wix is too preoccupied to notice. He replies, “I’ve
not killed anything…on the contrary I think I’ve produced life. 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,
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it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever met—it’s exquisite, it’s sacred” (269). What Sir
Claude refers to is Maisie’s coming-of-age. He knows that the game has ended. He turns
to Maisie, telling her, “You’re free—you’re free” (269). And here, something miraculous
happens. The game ends, Maisie’s bewilderment fades, and she is left with a clear view
of the right answer. There is neither strategy nor choice involved in the matter anymore.
There is only one place for her to go: with Mrs Wix back to England. Sir Claude picks up
Maisie and places her next to her governess. When Maisie and Mrs Wix board the ship
and set sail, they spend half the trip “letting their emotion sink” (275). The game is over,
and so is the pleasure and pain of being a player. Mrs Wix makes one last observation
about Sir Claude and Mrs Beale: “He went to her,” she tells Maisie, who doesn’t hesitate
to reply, “Oh I know!” (275). Maisie’s “long, tense cord” has broken, but she has
managed to pick up her scattered pearls of intelligence. In an incredible last moment, we
realize that Maisie leaves the novel and the game with knowledge intact.
What Maisie Knew & Thought Experiment
We close the cover of James’s novel, leaving Maisie to sail away with her
recollected knowledge. But what of ourselves as readers? It seems we undergo an
identical process to Maisie’s. Maisie observes other characters’ behaviors, considers the
possibilities of the game she inhabits, and emerges all the more knowledgeable for it. In
reading the novel, we too observe fictional characters’ behaviors, consider the textual
game they inhabit, and finish the book more knowledgeable. The last part of this
statement is perhaps the most contentious, as it summarizes in an especially simple
manner the rich ideas of philosophic epistemology and cognitive science, which extend
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from Plato upward to contemporary philosophic and scientific discourse.vi For our
purposes, we look specifically to thought experiment as an answer to one compelling
question: How do we as readers gain non-fictional knowledge by engaging with fictional
texts such as What Maisie Knew?
The answer, wonderfully, is rooted in game. Here, game takes the form of
Gedankenexperiment: thought experiment. Thought experiment is defined as an
experiment of the mind, a process whereby we consider hypothetical situations and their
hypothetical consequences, leading us to real-world conclusions. The exact definition of
thought experiment is much debated and varies across disciplines from philosophy to
cognitive science. In his volume Thought Experiments, Roy Sorensen considers the crossover between philosophic and scientific thought experiment. We will be referring to
Sorensen’s account because he elaborates on the possibilities of literature for thought
experiment. Literary fiction, which prompts the mind to closely consider imaginary
events in narrative sequence, is Gedankenexperiment at its best. Thought experiment in
literary form can again be traced back to Plato, who asks readers in “The Allegory of the
Cave” to imagine men chained to a cave wall, seeing only projected shadows as their
reality. Henry James asks us, in fact, to do the same with young Maisie, who first sees her
world as “phantasmagoric—strange shadows dancing on a sheet” (10). The novel as a
whole is a thought experiment that we undergo, a book-length experience equivalent to
game that is played this time not among characters of the novel, but between Henry
James and his reader.
Henry James certainly seems to view the project of his novel as a type of game.
He produces an astounding number of game theoretical terms in his preface to What
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Maisie Knew as he speaks of his characters, himself, and his reader. After disclosing the
process by which he constructed the novel’s plot, James asks rhetorically, “How could
the value of a scheme so finely workable not be great?” (PR, vii). He calculates his plot
with particularity, hoping to create just as particular an effect on his reader. James is
acutely aware that he is guiding his reader through the thought experiment that is the
story of What Maisie Knew, and he is attentive to the reader’s experience and takeaways
throughout the game. James’s guiding principle appears to be “satisfaction of the mind,”
and so James decides Maisie’s consciousness must not be spoiled by her troublesome
childhood, but rather preserved and made special by it (PR, v). James’s craftsmanship of
Maisie involves the reader directly:
To that then I settled—to the question of giving it all, the whole situation surrounding her, but of
giving it only through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her attention; only as it
might pass before her and appeal to her, as it might touch her and affect her, for better or worse,
for perceptive gain or perceptive loss: so that we fellow witnesses, we not more invited but only
more expert critics, should feel in strong possession of it (PR vii).
There is thus “a perfect logic” behind James’s narrative choices. He wishes to depict
Maisie to his reader as accurately as possible, paying careful attention to what a
developing child would perceive. All the while, he pulls his reader along by keeping the
reader’s level of knowledge one grain above the protagonist’s. The value of James’s
scheme is that the reader will always consider himself to have an advantage in the
game—to understand the novel’s situation more fully than Maisie, but less carefully than
the author controlling each character’s move. James engages in a game with his reader, a
game held together by precise novelistic craft and driven by the promise of its prize:
knowledge.
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We can classify the types of knowledge that arise from What Maisie Knew with
two terms Sorenson puts forth in Thought Experiments: “Transformation” and the
“Homuncular System.” Through the process that Sorensen calls Transformation, we
project ourselves onto the characters of the fiction we read; by honing our own responses
to the hypothetical scenarios they encounter, we are able to transfer our new insights back
into everyday life. The Transformation process is most efficient when the fictional world
of the thought experiment resembles reality. As a realist writer, James recognizes the
value of lifelike fiction. In the Art of Fiction, James writes, “The only reason for the
existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (James 5). The great asset of
this view is that James builds his readers a realistic fictional world, and so the beliefs we
develop within the realm of What Maisie Knew (about childhood development, morality,
consciousness) are easily shifted back into the real world. Sorenson’s Homuncular system
is a more technical model of knowledge acquisition. The Homuncular system is based on
the principle that knowledge resides in distinct compartments of the brain that do not by
default communicate with each other. Sometimes, however, these various compartments
can be put into conversation. Sorensen considers the imagination to be a tool that helps
pass pieces of knowledge from one compartment to another.vii Literary devices such as
metaphor allow writers and readers to better process and recall knowledge. viii Though
metaphors do not introduce any new information, they couple two disparate ideas into
one, thus offering a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. In What Maisie Knew,
James uses metaphor to deepen our understanding of Maisie’s development. He compares
Maisie’s knowledge to sweet-shop goods and to pearls on a cord, and as we have seen,
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these figurative representations of Maisie’s knowledge lead us to a more profound
understanding of the girl’s mind.
Jamesian metaphors show us that Maisie derives pleasure from accumulating
knowledge. Pleasure is as much a component of Henry James’s game as of Maisie’s. Just
as Maisie experiences pleasure in becoming a more rational game-player, Henry James
recognizes the inherent pleasure in writing the novel—a pleasure that is rooted in the
“perfect logic” he follows for its construction. He says, in fact, that the perfect logic of
his plot “supplied the force for which the straightener of almost any tangle is grateful
while he labours, the sense of pulling at string intrinsically worth it” (PR, ix). In writing
the novel, James even engages in a little thought experiment of his own, considering the
various forms that Maisie’s character could have taken. James speaks directly to the
reader when he notes, at the end of the preface, that Maisie as a character “would have
done comparatively little for us” had her circumstances been any less taxing. He muses,
“A pity for us surely to have been deprived of just this reflexion” (PR, xii). James leads
his readers through his novelistic game, hoping they will leave the experience having
enjoyed Maisie’s character along the way.
The realism of Henry James operates not only in the context of plot and character
construction, but also in the minutiae of sentence structure. James displays exceptional
effort toward sentence-level exactitude, though his method favors completeness of detail
over economy of language. In What Maisie Knew, James hands us adjective after
adjective, clause after clause, as though placing each to lead us closer to the truth of the
description. Maisie must not appear “coarsened, blurred, sterilized”; Sir Claude speaks in
a “pleasant fraternizing, equalizing, not a bit patronizing way”; Maisie has the “faintest
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purest coldest conviction” of Sir Claude’s deceit (PR, iv; 71; 244). James works to
convey “the finer, the shyer, the more anxious small vibrations” of his subject in order to
capture the reality behind it (PR, xi). And yet, for such meticulousness, there is even
pleasure in this process, which in itself is a game at the microscopic level of syntax and
diction. As Roland Barthes notes, the writer himself is “never anything but a plaything”
in the linguistic realm; similarly, the reader plays the game of the sentence, trying to
navigate his way through to the finish line, where meaning becomes apparent.
Of course, James’s realism is not perfect, and there are certainly moments of
discontent.ix When James succeeds, though, the rewards are high. In his stylization of
precise language, James appears to fulfill one of Barthes’ criteria for textual pleasure:
“To re-establish within the science of language what is only fortuitously, disdainfully
attributed to it, or even more often, rejected: semiology (stylistics, rhetoric, as Nietzsche
said).”x In What Maisie Knew, Henry James reaches for reality with an eager hand, but he
also manages to take hold of a unique style, one that plays with his readers. He leads us
toward reality, but he ensures our amusement and satisfaction along the way. In the Art of
Fiction, James writes, “The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle”
(James 4). For James, the logic of his prose is inseparable from the pleasure it produces.
He presents What Maisie Knew as a perfectly formulated game, held together by careful
craft but made vital in the pleasure of its play.
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22
Endnotes
1
In 1980, Steven Brams applied game theory to the Bible in Biblical Games: Game
Theory and the Hebrew Bible.
2
John von Neumann, Theory of Games & Economic Behavior, pg. 8-9.
3
Joseph Hynes promotes a similar view in his 1965 essay “The Middle Way of Miss
Farange: A Study of James's Maisie.”
4
Etymology taken from The Oxford English Dictionary.
5
In “How Maisie Knows: The Behavioral Path to Knowledge,” Geoffrey Smith refers to
Maisie as a tabula rosa, pg. 225.
6
Prominent thinkers who have studied and written about knowledge include philosophers
from David Hume to Bertrand Russell, psychologist Stephen Pinker, cognitive scientist
Douglas Hofstadter, and linguist Noam Chomsky.
7
Roy Sorensen, Thought Experiments, pg. 95.
8
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
9
Vladimir Nabokov is one to debunk James in a 1941 letter, criticizing the author’s
imprecise description of a cigar and concluding that “Henry James is definitely for nonsmokers.” The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and
Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971, pg. 53
10
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, pg. 33.
23
Stephanie Newman
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