ヘンリー・ジェイムズ『メイジーの知ったこと』に関する一考察

This novel is about a small unselfish girl, Maisie and the ways in which she is victimized by adults, due to her parents' divorce settlement. Each of her child-hating parents, in an arrangement made out of spite, agrees to keep her for six months at a time and then her back to the each other. The parents take lovers, each parent remarries, new spouses take an interests in their step-daughter and then in each other, and finally the step-father and step-mother become lovers. The natural parents have gone to new attachments. Maisie is at last compelled to choose her future. But Maisie, the heroine grows, changes without being corrupted by indecency of adult's world. We, readers witness 'the death of childhood and spiritual growth'. Henry James noted his first idea in 1892. A year later he returned to his Notebooks and elaborated a bit. In his Notebooks entry for Dec. 1895 he set out the structure of the story in detail. His Notebooks are full of the ruminations on Maisie, and as a result we know more about its composition than any of his other novels. This novel is highly patterned and orderly. He tried to see how symmetrical a story it was. He saw the core of the drama as strange, fatal action of the child's lovability, considering the powerful material and the incidents: every important acction or word in the novel would take place in the child's presence. Love, warmth, brightness or humanity are possible to exist due to the presence of Maisie. James succeeded in articulating control within the dramatic presetation, using 'the scenic method'. The success lies in its absolute faithfulness to the limited and innocent vision of Maisie. Every event and action of the novel is seen only by and through her immature mind, every articulated thought is hers, even though she herself is not the narrator of the novel. Such full and consistent use of the reflector, foreseen in earlier novels but never before so thoroughly exploited, provides the technical innovation of the novel.

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identifier:KJ00004180483