Defining the "Sum of All Knowledge" in What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw Anonymous College

In his essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), Henry James writes ‘the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting’. Here, and elsewhere in his writing, James eschews the constraints of textual form, and advocates the novelist’s freedom, as an artist, to experiment in their work. This experimentation, so important to James, is clear in his novels What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). Although these texts were published just one year apart, their narrative styles differ greatly. This contrasts to the stylistic homogeneity of the ‘old fashioned English novels’ of Dickens or Eliot. ‘What Maisie Knew’ is a third person narrative, primarily focalised[1] through the character of Maisie, who grows from ‘young infant’ to a ‘precocious adolescent’ over the course of the novel. ‘The Turn of the Screw’, conversely, utilises first person narration, with the Governess telling her own story. Added layers of narrative complexity are created by the fact that the account has been retrospectively written by the Governess, and is now being recounted, following her death, by the character of Douglas. In both texts, the key focalisors (Maisie and the Governess) are striving to...