Princess
Maggie Verver, the Princess bride to Prince Amerigo is at several times described as a “little person.” This phrase actually serves as imagery throughout much of the author’s novels, but it is especially fitting in this case. Maggie has lived in a suspended state of childish innocence in which she has only moved laterally from being her father’s little princess to the actual state of Princess through marriage. This imagery undergoes a transformation that marks Maggie’s movement from innocence to experience. Mrs. Assingham sums up the general attitude toward Maggie when she labels her a “various curious little person.” Once she learns of her husband’s infidelities, it is Maggie herself who turns the imagery on its head by referring to herself as “this much-thinking little person.” Ultimately, everything circles back to Mrs. Assingham who, having witnessed the change from naïve girl to master manipulator revises her characterization of Maggie to “such a deep little person."
Experience
Mrs. Assingham is a veritable font of keen observation. It is she who engages her husband in a conversation about how Maggie’s innocence will be tested. The Colonel is too dismissive of what lies in store for Maggie, asserting only that her senses will be forced to open to that which is very wrong. His wife minces no words in setting him straight by attesting to the full dimension of the situation: “To what’s called Evil — with a very big E: for the first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it. To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it.” This imagery is predictive and foreshadowing of the dramatic turn which essentially fuels the latter half of the book. Maggie’s innocence will indeed crumble away as she is forced for the first time in her life to confront darkness in humanity from which she had been spared.
Shading
The idea of shading is engaged as imagery throughout the entire book. This imagery moves relentlessly toward the encapsulation of its significance as Maggie—by this point already much-thinking and an innocent little person no more—uses the image to anoint herself and her husband with brand new titles. “She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades… but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too.” The imagery of shade up to this point is used in ways that continually convey a subtext of deception or, at the least, the possibility of interpretation. The very first use of this imagery occurs in the opening paragraph of the novel and from then on, the word becomes a kind of suggestive code. For instance, a hostess speaks with “a different shade of gravity” while another character later feels “just a shade humiliated” and the ever-present Mrs. Assingham is noted for “her sense of social shades.”
