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Henry James' notebooks, letters, and prefaces exhibit constant consciousness of what he was doing, his intention of being (as no American precursor had been) a Master of his art; and his characters—Isabel, Strether, Fleda, and Maisie, to name a few—give the illusion of conscious control over their destinies.
Most critics and scholars have read James through his own eyes, seizing upon the qualities of consciousness as the way into his world: perception, the search for esthetic and moral identity, the problem of knowledge. In addition to satisfying the terms of James' art, these qualities of consciousness have also been substantially consonant with the terms used by critics and literary historians to characterize American literature: the moral education of Nick Carra way, Joe Christmas's quest for identity—these in the service of consciousness. So that in the context of James' intentions and the main drift of American criticism, it has been difficult to see unconscious and mythic elements in James. The purpose of this analysis is not to repudiate the conscious, moral vision or the journey towards self-knowledge, but to qualify the sense of this moral vision, to bring it into focus with James's use of myth.2
The mythic elements in James's What Maisie Knew can be illuminated by reference to Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.
“Summarizing the essentials of the hero myth, we find the descent from noble parents, the exposure in a river, and in a box, and the raising by lowly parents; followed in the further evolution of the story by the hero's return
I would like to acknowledge the critical responses of Professors John W. Aldridge, Sheridan Baker, and Austin Warren to an earlier version of this essay.
A rather extensive bibliography surrounds What Maisie Knew. Much of it supports the view that the novel deals essentially with Maisie's moral development: see, e. g., , Henry James: Man and Author (Boston: 1927), p. 123. Those critics who reject the theme o
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I would like to acknowledge the critical responses of Professors John W. Aldridge, Sheridan Baker, and Austin Warren to an earlier version of this essay.
A rather extensive bibliography surrounds What Maisie Knew. Much of it supports the view that the novel deals essentially with Maisie's moral development: see, e. g., , Henry James: Man and Author (Boston: 1927), p. 123. Those critics who reject the theme o