Beale Farange

Character Analysis

We learn very little about Beale Farange—which makes sense since he's barely in the picture for Maisie. Still, what we do learn we don't like. The guy is a capital-L Loser who falls short every chance he gets. Having abandoned Maisie, he starts cheating on her stepmother and then abandons both Maisie and Mrs. Beale to shack up with a wealthy American.

This American, who's called the "Countess" (and controversially described as a hideous "brown lady") is Beale's sugar mama. And James's other characters find it despicable that he's willing to rely on a woman for support in this way.

How so? Well, just as Ida is unladylike, Beale is unmanly. And James hints at his inability to live up to society's expectations of a respectable gent as early as What Maisie Knew's preface, where we read that "contemporary history had somehow had no use for him, had hurried past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly" (Preface.7). "Piccadilly" here refers to a party destination in the center of London, where Beale wastes his adulthood away.

Think of Beale as a Victorian-era man-child, a dude who spends his time locked away in a Victorian-era man cave, playing the Victorian-era equivalent of video games all day long and falling asleep with half a pizza as a blanket and a pillow made out of beer cans he's crushed on his forehead.

So both of Maisie's parents show us James's take on the decline of the traditional family, which the author thinks of as dangerous to kids like Maisie, who are neglected as a consequence of new party-going ways and shifting gender roles. But aside from that Victorian stuffiness, just think of Maisie's parents as deadbeats.

It's ironic, then, that Maisie's two parents are cut from the same irresponsible cloth. Given how much Ida and Beale hate each other, you'd expect them to have nothing in common. But their treatment of Maisie reveals just how much they have in common: both are selfish losers, to put it bluntly. Neither is fit to parent.

As with Ida, James gives no backstory whatsoever for Beale. In fact, the novel tells readers even less about Maisie's father than about her mother. He's a mysterious figure, absent for most of the time. And there's no moment corresponding to Maisie's conversation with the Captain (when the possibility is raised that her mother may not be as bad as she seems) about her father. The moment that might at first seem like it does correspond—when Maisie meets the Countess—doesn't lead us to feel any sympathy toward Beale at all.

He's just who he is. Beale will be Beale. Which means that Maisie is better off without him.