Henry James's work is not only a book about bad parenting, as it is not a book about relationships. It is about a fragmented and decadent society where normal values, such as caring for your child and offering her a loving home, become relative. This relativism of values leaves the character without a norm and without intrinsic knowledge about doing what is right.
Maisie's parents are not necessarily bad people in a complex meaning of the concept of "bad," just as Mrs. Wix, no matter how much the reader gets attached to her because of the way she adores Maisie, is not a sublimely good person. At least, despite developing interesting characters, James's objective is not to define good and bad and categorize his characters accordingly. I believe his goal is to see what the characters are doing and how they are behaving in a particular societal context, namely that of the end of the Victorian era.
Before developing this thesis and analyzing how Henry James develops character decadence in relation with the societal ambient through the use of blending the character's speech with the narration itself (Sethi, 2010), it is useful to look at how this technique is used throughout the book. One of the best examples is at the end of chapter 3, where Maisie is relating, in her thoughts, what had happened between Mamma and Miss Overmore, particularly the insults, Miss Overmore's private convictions, and particularly the "public opinion."
This paragraph (the very last of the chapter) shows how James is putting thoughts in Maisie's mind to (1) narrate (the reader understands here how Miss Overmore had a fight because of her relationship with Beale and how she was thrown out of the house by a mad Mamma/Ida), (2) show Maisie's own evaluations and (3) define character, in line with the proposed thesis of...
The other qualities of a superior being remained forbidden thus making the reality of their imperfect world even more difficult to bare. Borges used the invisible reality in his short stories to speculate on some themes that were on people's minds since the beginning of human civilization. He used his writing skills to create a work of fiction that made the world of existential questions possessing men's minds became real
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