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Chapter 24
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What Maisie Knew, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Innocence and Corruption
Money and Society
Hypocrisy
Perspective and Understanding
Summary
Analysis
Just as Sir Claude promised, Maisie and Mrs. Wix live luxuriously in the French hotel, eating well and taking long excursions around the town. Maisie observes Mrs. Wix’s inability to refuse these pleasures in order to hold onto the moral high ground, and slowly her mood improves. Still, the situation with Sir Claude is never out of mind for either of them. One day they are sitting on the old castle wall when Maisie suddenly asks Mrs. Wix why all four of them—Maisie, her governess, her stepfather, and her stepmother—can’t all be together. Mrs. Wix responds that decent people like Maisie and herself shouldn’t cover for immorality. She suggests that Maisie accepting Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale’s relationship would mean abandoning Mrs. Wix.
Mrs. Wix is unable to personally completely live up to the morals she professes all the time. In this sense, she too is hypocritical, although less so than many of the other characters in the novel. Still, Maisie notices this and wonders how moral norms can be treated as absolute when everyone betrays them at some point, and why abstract ideas like marriage are more important than real love. Maisie’s questions make Mrs. Wix uncomfortable, and she is unable to explain to Maisie why her sense of right and wrong is correct.
Active
Themes
Mrs. Wix argues that Sir Claude’s most moral act—taking Maisie away—was moral precisely because he chose her over Mrs. Beale, and that Maisie knew it. Maisie counters that she never wanted to be taken away from Mrs. Beale, who she loves and thinks is beautiful. Mrs. Wix asks if Maisie hates her and thinks she is ugly, and if Maisie wants to live with her stepparents “in sin.” Maisie replies that Mrs. Wix knows what she wants, and Mrs. Wix declares that what Maisie wants is for her to be bad like them, and that Mrs. Beale is as bad as her father—that, like Beale with the Countess, she uses Sir Claude for his money. Maisie angrily points out that Sir Claude pays Mrs. Wix too, prompting her governess to storm off and Maisie to burst into tears.
