Maisie’s Spasms: Transferential Poetics in Henry James and Wilfred Bion

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a reading of Henry James’s midcareer novel What Maisie Knew (1897) as a study in group psychology. Maisie, James’s child heroine, is at the center of an expanding and transforming family group that includes various governesses as well as her divorced parents’ multiple new partners. I set James’s novel beside Bion’s Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1961) and its Kleinian approach to the continuities and discontinuities between individual and group experience. Rather than insisting (as Freud tends to) only on a narrative of individuation and adaptation, Bion emphasizes the necessity and difficulty an individual inevitably experiences in making contact with the emotional life of the group in which she lives. James casts the frustrating necessity of group experience in entirely theatrical terms, figuring Maisie from the start as a spectator to, and eventually an active participant in, the affective circuits of those around her. In my reading the transferential poetics of James and Bion make available the affective, transindividual nature of knowing as a contingent activity that takes place between persons and other objects. The essay concludes by unfolding some of the surprising televisual aspects of James’s late style.

Acknowledgment

This essay was previously published in slightly different form in Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015).

Notes

¹ On this projection of gender and other questions of the ethics of reading, see Miller (1990, p. 72).

² The “Committee” here is the Professional Committee of the Tavistock Clinic that encouraged Bion to explore his techniques of group therapy.

³ For a discussion of a transpersonal space of thinking in James, see Cameron (1989), especially pp. 63–76 on Maisie. Cameron’s concern here is with “tension arising from the shifting barrier between consciousness and repression” (p. 64), whereas my reading orients not toward a classical psychoanalytic understanding of repression but toward an object-relations approach to phantasies of the group.

⁴ These observations arose in the graduate seminar Affect, Print and Film held at the University of British Columbia in the fall of 2005. I am grateful to the seminar participants: Kate Hallemeier, Matt Hiebert, Matthew Kennedy, Victoria Killington, Rachel Kruger, and Peter Sun.

⁵ Harvey (1991).

⁶ See Novick (2000) for a useful alternative to Leon Edel’s (1985) version in Henry James: A Life.

⁷ For an example of a reading that proposes that James rejected the theater for the novel’s more intimate one-to-one relation to audience or reader, see Rosenbaum (2006). But see David Kurnick’s much different and, to my mind, more interesting way of accounting for James’s relations to theatricality in “‘Horrible Impossible.’” Kurnick (2005) argues that The Awkward Age (James, 1899) should be read as “a sustained exploration of the possibilities of resisting” the form of the novel of psychological depth and suggests that James “demur[s] from the idea of interiority in favor of a model of group consciousness” (p. 110). I am exploring one such model here, although not one that is opposed to interiority. I will return to Kurnick’s argument about Jamesian theatricality and his late style at the end of this essay.

⁸ See also Levy (1957).

⁹ See Eric Bentley’s (1964, pp. 195–218) discussion of melodrama as “the quintessence of drama.”

¹⁰ Thanks to Michael Moon for this observation.

¹¹ For another assessment of the central place of both shame and theatricality in James, see Sedgwick (2003).

¹² The chapter titled “Henry James’s Awkward Stage” includes material from an essay on The Awkward Age (previously cited) as well as Kurnick, “What Does Jamesian Style Want?”

¹³ The Golden Bowl was directed by James Cellan Jones and dramatized by Jack Pulman.

¹⁴ Kurnick (2012) also explores James’s stage directions (specifically in the play The Other House [1909]) to make a related point: that they refer to “a reality conscious of its status as performatively constituted, a space in which the boundary between actress and character recedes into indistinction” (p. 124). In this way James’s stage directions anticipate televisual reality, which works precisely to render indistinct the difference between actors and characters (as in the genre of reality television, itself based on the earlier game show genre). In my understanding this is primarily a consequence of the peculiar spatial scale of James’s stage directions.

¹⁵ While the recent film adaptation What Maisie Knew (2012), directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, succeeds in capturing aspects of James’s experiments with a child’s perspective (especially by using complex sound spaces to offer unusual angles on adult conversations), it leaves out those aspects of the novel that address Maisie’s changing relations to the adults around her over time. It would be challenging for film to span the six or eight years of the novel. I have not seen either the 1968 BBC television adaptation or Babette Mangolte’s 1976 art film adaptation of James’s novel.

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Adam Frank

Adam Frank, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of English and Co-Chair of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has written Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015), co-edited, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press, 1995), and is currently producing the Radio Free Stein project (www.radiofreestein.com).