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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 5, 2007

OGIC: Thank heaven for little girls

December 5, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I had to laugh reading Carrie’s post last week about a young, precocious reviewer taking Louisa May Alcott to task for, among other sins, this cardinal one:

We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover.

J-whatmaisie.jpgThe spectre of some of James’s future novels, notably What Maisie Knew, looms a bit smirkingly over this sweeping pronouncement. And the spectre of his yet later preface to the New York edition of Maisie? Pretty much rolling around on the floor in hysterics. It’s in the preface that James finds ample good reason to center a story on a little girl, especially of the precocious variety:

My light vessel of consciousness…couldn’t be with verisimilitude a rude little boy; since, beyond the fact that little boys are never so ‘present,’ the sensibility of the female young is indubitably, for early youth, the greater, and my plan would call, on the part of my protagonist, for ‘no end’ of sensibility…
[Maisie] has the wonderful importance of shedding a light far beyond any reach of her comprehension; of lending to poorer persons and things, by the mere fact of their being involved with her and by the special scale she creates for them, a precious element of dignity. I lose myself, truly, in appreciation of my theme on noting what she does by her ‘freshness’ for appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough. They become, as she deals with them, the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art; she has simply to wonder, as I say, about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects, solidities, connexions–connexions with the ‘universal!’–that they could scarce have hoped for.

I know, I know–not only does this come decades later, but it comes in the thick of James’s experiments with point of view, and his enthusiasm is accordingly at least as much for the technical challenge he faced in the novel (and met, if he does say so himself) as for the endlessly rich potential of little girls as subjects for novels. But it’s still fun–and fitting–to provide Alcott with a little vindication.
I wrote about Maisie a while back here, noting that the character is a favored Jamesian type: “Small children, working-class men and women, the ill, the dispossessed: when such characters crop up in James, they tend to share this combination of heightened receptivity–a marked capacity for taking things in, for knowing–and an instinctual or strategic disinclination to be known. A form of self-protection, the latter.”

OGIC: Fortune cookie

December 5, 2007 by ldemanski

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard metal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.”
Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

TT: Almanac

December 5, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Art is a conservative power, the strongest of all; it preserves spiritual possibilities that without it–perhaps–would die out.”
Thomas Mann, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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