Both What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw leave everything of the children's subjectivity completely in the dark. The reader is never given conclusive evidence of what the children see, or how much they understand, and in my head, it rather makes child psychologists look intollerably hubristic. It's one thing to understand a child's neurological functioning - the science, that is - but an entirely different prospect to think you can understand what a child is thinking, or what they would say, or whether they are lying.
Okay, all children lie. Rather, they experiment with trust. Why shouldn't they? Grownups lie to them all the time, about almost everything. Stupid grownups. Perhaps the only way to adjust to the trauma of learning that you've been given false information is to learn the skill yourself, to protect yourself.
So what are we doing when we think we understand children? I suspect, related to my previous post, we're empathizing through our own childhood memories, if we have them. So what is Henry James doing by denying all of that empathy? And why is his syntax so damned unparsable? Is he trying to confuse grownups so they feel as lost in a conversation as children do? Well congratulations - I got lost.
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