The Crisis of Realism in James and Ford: Metaphors for textual interaction

The Crisis of Realism in James and Ford: Metaphors for Textual Interaction






What Maisie Knew and The Good Soldier are Modernist texts which seek to evolve the narrative form of the novel and challenge notions of interpretation. Both texts offer in their central protagonists, Maisie and Dowell (both of whom are faced with the task of ordering the world of their subjective experience, and establishing from those data a basis for judgements) a metaphor for the activity of decoding and encoding text, new demands upon the modern reader and writer. Both novels are products of an age of retreating authority, and the consequent vacuum (into which a new plurality of ideas was rushing), determines the narrative form and style of both novels, tempered by the authors' ambivalent feelings towards that retreat. Accordingly, both novels are formally governed by consistent compositional laws (to use James' term), devised to avoid the damning charge of arbitrariness. James and Ford shared a literary doctrine, that of Impressionism, albeit one which they interpreted variously.


Both thought literary Realism of the nineteenth century unrealistic and over-mediated, too often a vehicle for a simplistic moral vision. Whilst the late nineteenth century Realist novel was often pessimistic, it still implied an authorial solution to society's problems. In particular characters or across an aggregate of characters the author's voice could easily be heard. Though the narrative voice was becoming less obtrusive, readers were still furnished with background histories of character and place, reporting of events and conversation could be assumed to be accurate. Chronology was almost always linear, and character development was restricted to one or two central characters and depended on the premise of progression towards knowledge.


There are other justifications for selecting these particular texts for comparison. Both are novels which deal with the institution of marriage in crisis. As the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel had often culminated in marriage as structural Telos, these stories commence from a temporal point at which one marriage has ended in acrimonious divorce, and two have been annulled by suspicious deaths. Both texts present a contrast between the USA and Europe, the new world and the old, and a dichotomy in the American experience of Europe, the idealised cultural centre which appears dissolute. Europe and Britain are represented as financially destitute, America as the new centre of wealth; Maisie's father is bankrolled by his 'countess', and Dowell ends up displacing Ashburnham in Branshaw Teleragh. The traits of James' narrator (considered in more detail below) identify him with other of James' American characters, who, like James himself, were outsiders in Europe. This status makes for passivity and distance from the reported subject. Puritanical (but fascinated) American distaste for a shallow and materialistic Europe conditions the narration of the squalid proceedings in What Maisie Knew, though the narrator does not condemn explicitly. In fact most of the events are implied via their effect on Maisie rather than presented directly. It has been widely suggested that Dowell, another puritan American caught between admiration and disgust, and seemingly passive to the point of emasculation, is Ford's caricature of James. Finally, both novels feature central characters whose apparent innocence provides the ironic charge of the stories (though in both cases, this innocence is not straightforward).


For James in his later novels, a narrative form which was consistent and non-arbitrary was paramount. His theatrical preference for little narrative mediacy is widely known, preferring showing over telling, seeing the author who intrudes on the text to position the reader as inappropriate and outmoded. However, a degree of mediation is present. Michael Levenson describes James' impressionism as "psychologistic", stressing "the primacy of consciousness", as the "mere event" is mute. Events need active agents inside the text who can render them meaningful via their impressions. James wrote in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, which closely preceded Maisie, that the novel was not his "own impersonal account of the affair in hand but [his] account of somebody's impression of it." Levenson infers that consciousness is for James the ideal, the "repository of meaning and value". The majority of his longer works consequently select a focalising character (or characters) of relatively developed sensibility, via whom the action is presented. Some internal focalisation of these characters is allowed. Whilst James' formal narrative technique inclines away from false objectivity and towards subjectivity, a criticism could be made that it is overly dependent on the insertion in the story of characters with whom we have some identification, and demands forcibly our agreement with them on moral principles. James does not usually allow in his longer fiction focalising characters to speak to us directly. Although the first person does feature in James, usually in the short stories, elsewhere James condemns the "terrible fluidity of self revelation" entailed by its use. It is precisely this fluidity that Ford employs in The Good Soldier. Levenson stresses the links between the two writers, pointing out that for both, art was representation of the perceptible, combined with a subjectivity which imbues it with value.


What Maisie Knew is a work in which James attempted to adapt the form of the novel in order to better express modernist concerns. In Maisie he created a register for the effects of irresponsible behaviour. I have remarked already on the significance of the novel's opening with news of a divorce, as a result of which the child is to be "divided in two" (in reference to the judgement of Solomon, here made ironic as no caring party intervenes to call halt to the division), which would have served to signal its modernity. The positioning throughout of the novel's focal viewpoint, its camera, is formally absolutely consistent. It never leaves Maisie, and the reader therefore is not present for any scenes at which she is not present. This creates an irony; James' narrative and so his reader stay with Maisie whilst her parents spend as little time with her as they can. The formal rules of the project appealed to James, who disliked the notion of arbitrariness, as he makes clear in his preface to the novel. It is appropriate that the reader is subject to the same forces which propel Maisie to and fro, "like a tennis ball or shuttlecock." (It is an odd point of comparison with Ford's novel that both Nancy and Edward both present the image of shuttlecocks in the contest of warring adult sexualities). However, the reader does have one important privilege over Maisie, that of experience, as she is naturally not fully able to interpret or comprehend her perceptions. In addition, the vocabulary used to render Maisie's sensibility is not that of a child. James thought this a necessary concession to artifice, though he intriguingly writes in the preface that he did consider making the story a first person account written in childspeak though it "became at once plain that [such a] project would fail". He justifies the concession, writing that "small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them", and therefore, restriction to those terms would not give a faithful impression of experience. Paradoxically, in introducing the vocabularising artifice he is able to be true to his subject. Dowell has a similar role in The Good Soldier, that of one who sees apparently without fully comprehending. Mark Schorer expresses that novel's controlling irony thus: "Passionate situations are related by a narrator who is himself incapable of passion".


Maisie also has a formal approach to the treatment of time, which is closely related to Maisie's consciousness, and relates to Bergson's notion of time as duration, non-regular intervals of sensibility. As consciousness develops and enlarges, the novel slows (and eventually halts). Maisie's initial periods with either parent pass in a few pages. Each transference across the divide forms a line, on either side of which she is present of increasingly large sections of text. It should be remarked that this is not only because of her expanding consciousness, but also because her (step)parents are increasingly reluctant to take her back.


James' novel employs conventional dramatic irony, in that the reader may make inferences Maisie cannot. There is also, however, much that is never revealed to us, and can only be approximated. An obvious example is Maisie's age as the novel progresses, a fact which the nineteenth century reader may have felt entitled to, but the laws of the novel do not allow James to make explicit. As the novel remains spatially with Maisie, so it remains temporally – we are not gifted information from the characters' pasts. The reason for this withholding of concrete detail may be that James is interested in typifying experience, establishing abstract governing rules behind behaviour. To be specific is to localise, which compromises the universality of the message. The reader of The Good Soldier, who must make do with Dowell's unreliable, disjointed, repetitive and contradictory (and so realistic) narrative, is in a still weaker position when it comes to inferring solid facts. This difficult procedure becomes completely impossible when we realise Dowell may be not just unreliable (as he freely admits), but deliberately disingenuous. The reasons behind the non-provision of information are not, however, the same as in James. For Ford, the whole concept of a novel carrying a message was problematic.


There is much evidence that Ford disliked many of the symptoms of Modernity, but unlike James he felt he lacked a stable basis from which to criticise - though it should be mentioned Ford read James as impartial: "an observer, passionless and pitiless". This reading of James may make sense if we take the narrator of Maisie as to be James himself, though to do so may be an error, a point discussed further below. If James' narrative hovers somewhere above Maisie, Ford felt that elevation, from which one might see life whole, impossible. It is consistent with this view that we should be grounded in Dowell's murky consciousness, with only indefinite clues with which to navigate. Ford also found invalid recourse to binary abstractions such as right and wrong, and disdained factual accuracy, stressing instead accuracy with regard to impressions, which are bound up with the notion of the contemporary. Dowell in his narrative has little interest in facts or research:

He had been twice recommended for the V.C., whatever that might mean, and, although owing to some technicalities he had never received that apparently coveted order, he had some special place about his sovereign at the coronation. Or perhaps it was some post in the Beefeaters'         

This passage is based on Nancy's account, which is informed by girlish acceptance of lies told to her by Ashburnham, but Dowell, who relates elsewhere that Ashburnham "was never a man of the deeds of heroism sort" is uninterested in establishing the truth or even making an organisational connection between contradictory aspects of his tale. Dowell therefore expresses Ford's highly subjective notion of the spirit of the age: confusion, or distorting, possibly malign mediation of narrative. Authorial comment is inappropriate because authority can no longer be claimed. Of course, Dowell mediates the narrative he feels compelled to relate to us, though his commentary is not always illuminating. Ford himself felt that taking a moral position was counter productive or perhaps impossible, though Levenson argues this is beneficial to his literary standing, as it liberated him to concentrate on modernist philosophies of form. Ford's notion of impressionism is of a technique which can give us "a frank expression of personality" because it comes from a character's subjective consciousness. Or, we can investigate focalising characters by studying their modes of perception. Dowell's statements about himself may be misleading, but from the method of his narrative we should be able to infer some of his character, and, by extension, we should be able to do this for any writer through a close reading of their work. Impressionism becomes therefore synonymous with realism. Ford's project at the time of The Good Soldier is unquestionably one of imitating the real, which is the only thing which is true. It seems that Ford has sympathies with the theories of his narrator, who describes his perceptions in a simile of pictorial impressionism, "like spots of colour in an immense canvas." He wonders whether to tell his story in a Realist, linear fashion, "like a story", which would be effectively to fictionalise the truth, though he ironically remarks it does culminate with a marriage. He often speculates on the traditional novel in which action is determined by arbitrary notions of form and genre, and "you take it for granted that characters have their meals with some regularity". Dowell, who discusses his meals at some length, is certainly aware he is no traditional writer; Ashburnham and Florence are the characters who read novels and consider themselves as literary types - and this inauthentic romantic sensibility contributes to their respective downfalls. Whereas James' novel contains a hierarchy with the inauthentic characters at the bottom, above them the "small expanding consciousness" of Maisie, above her the narrator, lastly coming to the author and his objective abstract morality, in The Good Soldier the strata disappear and all is mired in localised subjectivity; the author's task is mimesis.


Ford establishes criteria for producing such new works of realism: the avoidance of linear narrative and the celebration of disconnectedness and digression (for, as Dowell speculates, what is digression and what is integral?), only using short direct speech (as it is implausible that the character relating the story would be able to recall long passages; speech in The Good Soldier is imperfectly transcribed as Dowell's reporting clauses - "She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I can remember" – concede), the use where appropriate of colloquial, contemporary language, and not selecting words for their allusive or connotative literary associations. Dowell, then, is simultaneously Ford's presentation of a genuinely real character and his critique of the writer who cannot refrain from commentary. The concept of mimicry runs through the novel itself. Dowell comes to the conclusion that the secret of happiness is to place "absolute faith in the mask", to retreat into an inauthentic "perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful" existence. Behind the mask lies a fractured, unstable self. The notion of Dowell as a writer is important, as it provides a believable basis for the existence and the form of the text. Levenson suggests that Dowell's need to tell his story reflects Ford's own view that art was a production of the ego. Dowell's unedited and seemingly unconsidered account is conversational, punctuated by the use of the second person and questions; it requests agreement or validation. Like Maisie, Dowell is attempting to read a situation, construct a text, which is also a personality, which can then in turn be actively read or deconstructed by the reader. By creating a character who is an author (who has seemingly written a Modernist novel by mistake) Ford can effectively ignore accusations of artificiality. The structural divisions in the text make sense as occasions when Dowell has set his account (which he writes over six months, during the course of which he is altered by his discoveries) aside for a period of time, than as conventional chapter divisions. Dowell's attempts to rationalise himself are therefore complicated in that he is no longer the same person who participated in them. The account is not linear, and Dowell's project is autobiography, not the generation of suspense (though this is a by-product). The novel is therefore consistent in adhering to its particular compositional law.


Dowell exists in a state of flux, he sees the same events from differing physical locations, temporal points, and mental states. Dowell prefixes an adjective indicating sympathy, "poor", to Leonora. Within the space of a few pages, he sees her "lashing" at Ashburnham "like a cold fiend", sympathy apparently forgotten. On another occasion, Leonora speaks with "fierce calmness", the oxymoron more indicating Dowell's unstable perception than the conflicting aspects of her character. Dowell exists in challenge to earlier novels' assumptions of fixity of character. Apart from Maisie growing progressively older, James' novel depends on this fixity; it is impossible for Beale to change. Dowell's narrative seems to surprise even himself as he relates it. When discussing his wife's apparent suicide, Dowell says:

And then Leonora came to me and it appears that I addressed to her that singular remark:

'Now I can marry the girl'            

The notion of dislocation is important here, Dowell seems unsure that the 'I' in question is indeed him, and it only "appears" that the remark was made. As is often the case in the novel, the narrative declines to give us tonal information which we feel we need to assess sincerity. The episode is highly ambiguous, not least because we do not know how much Dowell's desire for Nancy has been his motivation, nor do we know immediately, frustratingly, Leonora's reaction to this bombshell, which we feel is of critical importance. When we finally hear her reply, Dowell gives us to believe he had not heard his own question, one of several instances of characters being surprised by their own words. The word "singular" could mean odd and out of place, or may be an assertion of Dowell's first person singular passion for the first time. The point of Ford's novel is that these questions remain open, and the ambiguity means various interpretations of the novel become possible. In fact, The Good Soldier both invites and rejects interpretation, questioning the reader's need to arrive at a view which corresponds with that of others. One such unresolved issue is the extent to which Dowell and Leonora's religious differences influence the action, there are many others.


James' narrator, who does not actually participate actively in the plot, and is indeed never physically embodied at all, is not however the omniscient heterodiegetic author-narrator of the nineteenth century novel. He displays characteristics that would be superfluous in such a purely functional construct: a mixture of sardonic irony, Puritanism, dispassionate asexuality, and ultimately, confusion. The opening compound "The litigation had seemed interminable and had in fact been complicated" serves to illustrate the dual function of the narrative, to relate subjectively ("had seemed") and to at least attempt objectivity ("had in fact been"). The persistent sardonic tone of the narrator, who can talk of the portions of the child as being "tossed impartially to the disputants" is a clue that his identity is not straightforward. The tone is reminiscent of the narrator of Oliver Twist, except that there is at times a marked lack of sympathy, bordering on perverse enjoyment towards the tale he relates. He seems to have characteristics which can be inferred from the modes of his narration, which no standard, unobtrusive narrator would have. Like Dowell, his subjective impressions make him realistic in Ford's sense, paradoxically the most realistic character in What Maisie Knew, a novel populated by types and caricatures.


It is as though the narrator is of that variety usually found in James' shorter fiction, one who introduces himself and then recounts a story he has had from some source, in which he may play a minor role, and may not be entirely disinterested. Whilst the narrator is never thus embodied, he does seem to have been physically within the terrain of the novel. We are told Mrs Beale's "complexion was intensely remarked" in court, and this seems not so much the voice of an impartial observer, but rather that of a prying haunter of proceedings and devourer of gossip columns. The introduction of such a perverse narrator is an innovation, yet seems appropriate as much of the pleasure in reading What Maisie Knew, especially for a contemporary reader, would have been guilty, that of eavesdropping on a scandal. Whilst this is true of many novels, it is unusual that an author provide a mischievous critique of the reader in the invisible figure of the supposedly impartial narrator. That the narrator possesses characteristics can be shown by applying Barthes' test for internal focalisation to the novel; it cannot be rewritten using personal pronouns (ignoring the problem of Maisie's inevitably childish vocabulary) without drastically changing the effect. The humour of the novel then, serves two possibly contrary functions: the obvious first is to throw into pathetic relief Maisie's tragic situation. The other is to highlight the morally ambiguous position of the reader, who, James implies, is inevitably implicated in the text via his interest in it. The most telling point in the novel arrives when Maisie is at the exhibition, and the narrator signals his inability to focalise, using the first person: "I may not even answer for" Maisie's emotion. The narrator has lost omniscience; Maisie, who from the outset has practised concealment of her emotions, is now so adept at this she can even hide from her own narrator. Maisie's consciousness has become by this point too complex, she has grown out of the text, transcended her containment as a character, as a device in the author's moralising play.


The Good Soldier is concerned with instability; of character, of language, of cause and effect, of place. Its subtitle, A Tale of Passion, is telling: sexual passion is the disrupting, though natural and instinctive, influence. Inauthentic social convention exists in opposition to authentic passion just as (in Ford's view) in the novel, literary formal convention distorted the presentation of reality. When Leonora acts on instinct "for the first in her life", Dowell wonders whether this means she has lost herself (as social construct) or found herself (as authentic self, previously suppressed by society). The sex instinct as the main motivation behind human behaviour is a concept which had not previously found much expression in the novel. Language is unstable, we are asked to accept the proposition that the characters in the novel are "good people" when the evidence is against it; goodness is repeatedly defined by Dowell in utterly superficial terms. Language becomes a conventional, repressive influence, authentic expressions of frustration or desire break though as groans or gurgles. Leonora makes a happy second marriage, though Dowell is convinced it is happy only because it assumes mutual complicit deception. So, oddly, convention can be liberating. A further complication is presented in that passions have their own conventions. Ashburnham's affairs are "logical in their progression upwards"; Leonora is associated with arranging, she even arranges herself for suicide. Dowell's feelings towards his own bizarre fate, condemnation to an asexual existence with a madwoman, are highly ambiguous. He certainly seems unable to take any action to resolve his situation, though his real degree of passivity is questionable. Interestingly, passivity is suggested in his name, meaning a peg which holds in place a wooden structure (although it could be read as do-well, implying good intentions). Sometimes Dowell's passivity amounts effectively to an activity, from which he benefits, such as his not preventing Ashburnham's suicide. By the presentation of the paradox that giving in to passion is a more severe constraint on liberty than conforming to a social model designed to propagate the normal, Ford is neatly expressing concern about the transition to Modernity, where the conspicuous absence of moral values may not be positive.


It is suggested by D.W. Jefferson that Maisie is a Jamesian focalising character in prototype, that she will certainly attain the characteristic sensibility and discrimination in later life. This reading of Maisie is problematic and reductive as it assumes that Maisie has not been corrupted by her experiences. It is perhaps doubtful that this conclusion would be so widely drawn if it were not for the humour of the novel, which stems from the absurdities of the characters and most importantly from the idiosyncratic narrator. Maisie's behaviour is conditioned and probably therefore tainted by her experiences of neglect and both psychological and physical abuse. The earliest example comes when Maisie "mimicked her mother's sharpness" when speaking to her doll. Afterwards she feels ashamed ("though as to whether the sharpness or the mimicry was not clear"), implying an opinion on James' part that something unlearned, an innate moral force, resists self-evidently wrong behaviour. It is clear though, from the existence of all the adult characters, that this initial resistance can be overwhelmed. At various other points later in the novel Maisie copies poor adult behaviour, though without mention of shame afterwards. Sir Claude and his coincidence with the awakening of Maisie's sexuality complicates matters, causing her to act in a grotesque coquettish fashion. The ending of the novel is far from obviously positive. In choosing Mrs Wix, who is dependable precisely because she has no wealth of beauty or money, Maisie has made a mature decision, though one which still amounts to taking the least worst option – and Mrs Wix (whose Victorian "moral sense" makes her an anachronism) has a vested financial interest in Maisie.


In Maisie James is most obviously showing us a series of events in the life of a young girl, who sees "too much". Maisie is the "register of impressions" made by these events. We are supposed to infer ironically from the unarguably reprehensible behaviour of the adults in well-behaved Maisie' life a moral, and we can also derive some of James' views on, for example, the nature-nurture debate, as mentioned above. Maisie, like Dowell, also acts as a metaphor for the trinity of author, text, and reader in an age of instability and false appearances and authorities. Maisie's task is to construct meaning out of a world of raw material of the senses, biased, corrupted, confused, incomplete or misleading reports, and misleading euphemisms and baffling idioms. Like the modern reader, she has no recourse to objective truth, rather conflicting subjectivities which seek to preclude each other. James in the preface makes it clear she is both passive, as a "register", and active in the task of interpretation, referring to her "notation" of experience, implying her construction of a pseudo-musical language which is internal to her, bearing an arbitrary, coding relation to the words she hears. In the ironic discrepancy between Maisie's interpretation and the reader's inferences lies the novel's power. For example, pathos is generated via the episode in which Maisie remembers that she has been promised, in a typically vague phrase of Sir Claude's, "the real thing" with regard to her musical education. When some cheap sheet music arrives belatedly in the post, Maisie "rejoiced at the sacrifice" she believes Sir Claude has made for her. That Maisie enjoys the notion of sacrifice on her behalf shows she has been affected already by aesthetic romanticism, and her deep (and for the reader, poignant) need to be valued. The basis from which she can construct meaning is not therefore stable. This leads to an individualist philosophy of language where words have varying meanings and connotations for everybody, according to individual experience, which is close to that of Ford. Despite this, increasingly, Maisie's interpretations and definitions are accurate. The subtlety of the judgement Maisie is able to make at the end of the novel contrasts with the arbitrary, conventional, unconsidered one of the judge at the opening.


The modernist must not passively consume but actively investigate, drawing inferences. The key question is not what does Maisie know, but how? How does she construct true meaning from her unstable experience? Paul B. Armstrong states "To know and how to know, that is the question for James the epistemological novelist." Bellinger suggests the inadequacies of Maisie's education are productive in that they are contradictory. Therefore, conventional 'good' families and educations are not requisite in the formation of sensible individuals – Maisie is told lies and therefore liberated from trust in her parents. She also, crucially, has no religion, whose influence makes Nancy so fragile. According to Armstrong, James' morals are not simply given abstractions, but truths which the sensible can discern from their experience. Maisie can define concepts via their absence; she can infer the concept of love as that which she does not possess. She uses techniques employed in textual interaction: observation, role play, and analogy. That Maisie observes is obvious, what is remarkable is that she learns not to trust appearances, testing her suppositions employing the other methods. Though her "unsuccessful experiments" and hypotheses of character, based on the romantic fairy stories she hears, too often prove disenchanting, she does not derive nothing from them; just as, paradoxically, unsuccessful experiments are as valuable for the scientist as successful ones. She therefore learns, like Dowell, for so long enchanted by the conventional aspects of 'good' people, that the social self is not the true self. Since Maisie's questions, are "almost always improper" – James employs reported speech to the effect of implying a multitude of awkward voices deterring Maisie – and unwilling to become a conduit for her parents' antipathy, she remains silent, feigns stupidity. She becomes a text which her parents misread. She tests the effects of this and other assumed roles first with Lisette, then on the other characters, as she tests words and phrases (including heard unpleasant expressions and euphemisms, the impropriety of which she can then discern) in different contexts. She forms analogies between her experiences. The imagery in the novel is often, though not exclusively, drawn from a child's store of experience - Maisie can see foolish adult behaviour as like the game of puss-in-the-corner.


The development of the imagery as the novel progresses suggests her "expanding consciousness", of, for example, her financial situation. Eventually, Maisie can draw on imagery from outside of her direct experience, feeling unease akin to receiving the wrong change from a sovereign while the adults intrigue around her. Other imagery is the author's / narrator's own. Adults frequently smoke around Maisie, symbolising contamination. Maisie is like a vessel in which the "biting acids" of parental hostility are mixed. The image suggests no neutralisation as might tellingly have been implied by the mixture of an acid and a base, implying Maisie will be corroded, or that her natural ingredients will be displaced. Her innocence will not survive wholly intact. James' use of imagery, according to Levenson, reveals his desire to interpret the individual, which is akin to his typification of experience, which has already been discussed: "Both formal principles look beyond the particular local case; metaphor seeks a resemblance, typification seeks a category. Both disregard the quiddity of the ego." Imagery and irony reveal James' authorial moral; the reader feels this when Maisie needs genuine nourishment and Sir Claude provides her with an enormous cake.


Had Ford agreed with Levenson's view, he may have found it a shortcoming in James. When Dowell tries to come up with a simile to describe his feelings towards being cuckolded, he says "it feels like nothing". This is not the same as saying Dowell feels no emotion. But there is no analogy; the emotion is uniquely local and not at all typical as it would be in James, because all analogy or association is artificial and born from a false premise that reality is shared. Other imagery of Dowell's is childlike. He sees Ashburten as "an older brother, robbing the orchards", whilst Dowell watches, passive. The image of the forbidden apple is potent for the puritan Dowell, who discovers that consciousness comes at a price. At other times, his comparisons are odd, to say the least, seeming to reveal a disjointed mind. After Leonora's death, he describes the voices of the three officials, one as "dropping out like so many soft pellets of suet", another is "like five revolver shots", the third is "that of an unclean priest reciting from his breviary in the corner of a railway carriage." Dowell himself feels the incongruity of these similes, but insists, like Ford, on their reality, saying simply: "That was how it presented itself to me". Elsewhere, Dowell asks his reader for analogous agreement, as in his presentation of Ashburnham's eye for women: "You know the man on stage who throws up sixteen balls at once and they all drop into pockets […] Well, it was like that." Whether the reader does "know" this man is questionable; again the image tells more about the faculties, requirements for validation and assumptions in Dowell's character than it does about Ashburnham. Dowell also speculates Florence would have "acted the proper wife" to him had he not "acted that part of the Philadelphia gentleman", implying people select roles from an available store of types.


Maisie represents a future of rationality founded upon instability, but James avoids drawing a reductive pessimistic or optimistic conclusion. The extent to which she has been damaged is left an open question, but arguably she has realised new interpretive powers with which to (de)construct the world, created a new epistemological morality that transcends the old given morality (of Mrs Wix) and does not arbitrarily condemn. Dowell is an expression of the fragmented self in constant flux, who reveals himself only in his attempt to create meaning. Both novelists have attempted to develop the novel to accommodate the new, both have attempted to express the real. For Ford, who has no available moral platform, this reality is mimesis, for James, it is universality of experience. James clings to abstract principles, and while he ultimately concedes uncertainty, he asserts the right of the author to moralise implicitly, through presentation of irony and image.

[1] A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.21

[1] The Spoils of Poynton [1897], (London, Macmillan, 1908),  p.xii.

[1] A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.21

[1] Henry James, Preface to The Ambassadors [1902], (London, Macmillan, 1909), p.xix.

[1] A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.20

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.17

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.1

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.9

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.9

[1] An Interpretation, in introduction to Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier [1915], (New York, Vintage, 1951), p.x.

[1] Henry James, (New York, Albert and Charles Boni, 1915), p.47.

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), pp.90-91

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.157

[1] A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.54

[1] On Impressionism in Frank McShane, ed. The Critical Writings of Ford Maddox Ford, (Lincoln, Uni.of Nebraska Press, 1964), p.42.

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.20

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.19

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.109

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.6

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.100

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p102.

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.226

[1] "Justification, Passion, Freedom: Character in The Good Soldier.” in: Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.119

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.185

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.191

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.195

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.103

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.17

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.17

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.17

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.146

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.203

[1] Michael Levenson, "Justification, Passion, Freedom: Character in The Good Soldier.” in: Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.107

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.58

[1] D.W. Jefferson, Henry James (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), p.72

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.37

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.25

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.6

[1] Preface to What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.9

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.101

[1] The Phenomenology of Henry James, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p.3

[1] Modern Novelists: Henry James, (London: Macmillan, 1988), p.90

[1] The Phenomenology of Henry James, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p.4

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.102

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.49

[1] What Maisie Knew [1897] (London, Penguin, 1966), p.18

[1] Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.34

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.49

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.227

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.103

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.33

[1] The Good Soldier [1915], (London: Penguin, 1946), p.80