SOURCE: "Reassembling Daisy Miller," in American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 232-54.

There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some of us are more striking personally, and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

William James

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, critics of the "New Woman" discovered in her the features of the androgyne—the person who "flirted with hermaphroditism"—their description might have applied just as well to the person who grew up alongside her, the male or the female adolescent. In this essay I argue that Henry James's Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) figures forth in Daisy the androgynous body constructed in popular nineteenth-century accounts of adolescence. If, as Frederick Winterbourne sees it, Daisy Miller oscillates between masculine and feminine identifications, she also oscillates between American and alien, savage and citizen, parvenu and natural aristocrat. Set in Switzerland and in Rome, Daisy Miller chronicles the behavior of Americans abroad. But it also depicts a displaced landscape of North American immigration and the nativist's anxiety about the American girl's intimacy with a handsome Italian. Although Daisy's "archetypal," near "mythic" influence has long been recorded, as has her migration from nouvelle to etiquette manual, no study has sufficiently accounted for her staying power as an American type. Part One of this essay begins to reinterpret Daisy Miller's impressive reach by suggesting that her story be read in light of certain transformations in education in the postbellum and post-Darwinian US. Part Two attempts a more detailed explication of Daisy Miller to show that as Winterbourne steps in to reeducate the flirtatious Daisy, she elicits anxieties about cultural difference (with "her mystifying manners"), sexual difference ("and her queer adventure"), and the integrity of the "American Man." Part Two begins with the controversy surrounding female flirtation into which James's "pretty perversion" was received.

1

Although William and Henry James agreed that the way to educate the American character was to become a person whose example works "contagiously in some particular," they appear to have disagreed over the methods of their own childhood education. In A Small Boy and Others (1913), Henry compares the flood of random impressions "picked up" while roaming unchaperoned among the "society, manners, type, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts" in Paris to the supervised Swiss schooling he was to receive in Geneva.

Such were at any rate some of the vague processes—I see for how utterly vague they must show—of picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and that that never is done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an education might, or should, in particular, have picked us up, and yet didn't—I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.

Henry's autobiographical reflection, like William's description of the psychology of imitation from his Talks to Teachers (1892) above, has its place within a greater transformation in the model of education in the US, a transformation chiefly associated in the antebellum period with the philosophy of Horace Mann, but strongly informed at a later date by the evolutionary science and social thought characteristic of the fin de siècle. As the education historian Lawrence Cremin reminds us [in his American Education, the Metropolitan Experience: 1876-1980, 1988], virtually every field of knowledge came under the influence of science in general and Darwinism in particular at the century's end, and pedagogy was no exception. Having abandoned the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity and its emphasis on conversion, and having adopted a meliorist vision of the plastic character of children, progressive pedagogical reformers incorporated neurological and physiological accounts of human evolution into their studies of the effects of nurture, instruction, and the environment on the developing child. In The Child and the Republic, Bernard Wishy identifies Jacob Abbott's best-selling Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young (1871) as a transitional text, one exemplifying specific changes in nurture books between 1860 and 1880 and legitimating child study by marshaling what seemed to be the "impressive evidence of evolution." While "bad tendencies" in children might stem from hereditary predispositions, "bad habits of action" followed from inadequate or unwholesome training. According to the neo-Lamarckian evolutionary doctrine informing much of the optimistic nurture literature, proper habits instilled in children through proper training would gradually be organized as instincts, ultimately passing by transmission to the next generation as permanent improvements. The nature of the child's future—and the perfectibility of "the race"—hinged on the process of the child's development, and no student of that process could now overlook either the body's inheritance or what, more crucially, the "young of the human species . . . first a young animal . . . then a young human" picked up.

Abbott's Gentle Measures precipitated many systematic and highly specialized institutional studies of the child.

The psychologist G. Stanley Hall, perhaps best known for his two-volume study of adolescence (1904), published the pamphlet The Study of Children in 1883, the popularity of which helped to foster local child-study clubs which gradually expanded into organizations like the National Congress of Mothers (1897). A national "child-saving movement," identified by at least one historian as a middle-class moral crusade, extended the child-reformer's power outside of the private home to rescue and restore "the spirit of youth" sapped by "the city streets." The child-savers, Anthony Platt informs us, whose targets were the "urchins," "wayward waifs," and "problem children" of the urban environment, borrowed from the medical profession the "imagery of pathology, infection, immunization and treatment," and constructed the categories of juvenile "dependency," "delinquency," and "deviance" with the assistance of the pseudoscience of nineteenth-century American criminology.

The rhetoric of the child-saving movement drew attention to the role of the body in contracting the "contagion of character." But the physical image of character-building as contagion carried within it certain liabilities, among them the possibility that those who are "effectively contagious," those in a position to "inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards," may mistakenly pick up a "vicious fashion or taste." James's protestation to his brother Henry that an education should "have picked us up" reveals his reliance on the intervention of the sufficient, and the sufficiently charismatic, model. Abbott too had already recorded that it was "not the arguments" that affected the impressible child "but the person who led them"—the person, progressive philosophers G. H. Mead and John Dewey would later agree, the child "wished to resemble." But, as Karen Halttunen points out [in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870, 1982], undesirable individuals were no less infectious or imitable than those considered proper models; "evil influence" was publicized by some antebellum moralists as endemic to urban settings and so potent "that a young man could be contaminated merely walking the streets." By the end of the century, analogies drawn from medical science offered an "increasingly plausible idiom in which to formulate . . . almost every aspect of an inexorably modernizing world," from prolonged exposure to industrialization to the effects of immigration. [In Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, 1958], William James and his colleagues concluded that modern American subjects had unprecedented opportunities to form "bad habits," "bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models"—like the bad habits that had already produced in "our characteristic national type" an appalling "absence of repose." Prescribing an antidote to the "wear and tear and fatigue" of American life, James also offers his more general formula for the mechanism of social evolution in the absence of desirable models: "Become the imitable thing." If calm is your ideal, and if you seek "harmony, dignity and ease," then "individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person." If you do, then "you may depend upon it, that a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake."

But the kind of orderly human improvement psychologists like James were describing suddenly faced a more unpredictable obstacle in the impressible students themselves, more specifically, adolescents. Although Hall's two-volume work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) was, his biographer reminds us, probably the first systematic study of puberty in the modern world, the components of Adolescence were already considered commonplace at the time of its publication. If childhood was characterized by a great plasticity in psyche and physiology, a self "susceptible to drill and discipline," adolescence was considered a volatile stage of development, a stage Hall associated with the changes determined by evolution. While in Hall's recapitulationist scheme the child "comes from and harkens back to a remoter past," and between ages nine and twelve relives an "old and relatively perfected stage of race maturity," adolescence (from about fourteen to twenty) interrupts this time in "paradise." The adolescent is "neo-atavistic," and in him or her not only do the "later acquisitions of the race," like the social instincts, "slowly become prepotent", but male and female within an individual body and psyche "struggle for prepotency."

This process has a peculiar resolution with startling implications: where boys pass through puberty, girls never entirely leave adolescence—or its gender struggle—behind. Woman, "at her best, never outgrows adolescence," and, in turn, adolescence is so identified with femininity as to be classified the "feminine stage." Arrested in her development, a woman is something of an immature man; this, Hall believed, links her to the members of the "adolescent races," for example, Indians and blacks, who "in most respects, are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size." Adolescence is ineluctable, but this does not mean that it always unfolds according to plan; the storm and stress of female periodicity in particular, understood in terms of disequilibrium and physiological crisis, demanded special surveillance. Thus Hall contributed his influential voice to an argument favoring sexual segregation in education and a unique curriculum for girls that took the dynamics of the menstrual cycle into account. He also called for the rehabilitation of maternal care and supervision, having noted that the American daughter has been left to pick up "her cue" on her own. Criticizing mothers and daughters both, Hall addressed at least three historical changes in modern American life: the increasing presence of mature, native-born, middle-class women in extra-familial occupations and professions; the demand for identical educational opportunities for the sexes; and the novel appearance of adolescents as an independent social group in urban environments, a group whose members posed a challenge to their elders' authority. As historian Joseph Kett observes [in Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present, 1977] the group typically embodying the greatest threat to the established order was a group of adolescent boys ("lads from fourteen to twenty-one" are the "busiest instigators" of lawless conduct). Yet much attention was paid to the potential of wayward female adolescents to jeopardize the future of "the race," which inherits its tendencies from them.

Studies like William B. Forbush's The Boy Problem: A Study in Social Pedagogy (1902) or The Boy and his Gangs (1911), by J. Adams Puffer, (two texts introduced by Hall) do reveal a vocational investment on the part of child-savers—particularly the so-called boys-workers—in the psychodynamics of the masculine experience of adolescence. Yet at least part of this interest remained in the feminization implicit in the adolescent process, a feminization suffered by "street arabs" and the James brothers alike. At stake in the James brothers' debate about the methods of their own European education is the issue of the dangers posed to unsupervised males at the stage in their development when "cohesions between the elements of the personality loosened" and "perversions multiplied." What risks are run when the evolving human male himself passes through adolescence, the "feminized stage" of development? What consequences are imagined, for Henry James, in pursuing an education in Paris "splendidly 'on my own'" (Autobiography)? If Richard Poirier is right that William James's advocacy of culturally marginalized subjects (mystics, mental patients, saints) reflects the psychologist's attempt to "release himself, and the rest of us, from any settled, coherent idea of the human," we might ask how the figure of an unsettled, incoherent gender identity complicates this attempt. Or, as it is expressed in Daisy Miller: A Study (1878), how does an adolescent American flirt affect an American man, who, in attempting to reeducate her, is reacquainted with the marks of a familiar struggle?

The itinerary of Daisy, who explicitly "'picks up'" not only a "good-looking Roman, of vague identity" but also a particularly "terrible case of the perniciosa" as she travels unchaperoned in Rome, dramatizes the "vague processes of picking up an education" that the novelist recollects, and his brother repudiates. A product of his boyhood schooling in Geneva and now a resident alien of that city, the "American man" Frederick Winterbourne determines that the "name" of American flirts of the Daisy variety is "incoherence." "She was composed," he notes, "of charming little parts that didn't match and that made no ensemble." Daisy Miller is alternately "innocent," "ignorant," "uncivilized," and "crude." She suffers from a "want of finish," but Winterbourne flatters himself that she comes to Europe, and to him, as to a finishing school. Daisy's little brother Randolph, an "urchin of nine or ten," must also be saved. Although with his "pale complexion" and "poor little spindle-shanks" Randolph resembles an urban beggar—"'Will you give me a lump of sugar?' he asked in a small sharp hard voice"—Randolph is not a criminal but a victim. Like his sister's, Randolph's education has been unsystematic and peripatetic; he has been subjected to a broken string of "foreign" tutors when he has not been left to get his lessons "in the cars." With a voice "immature, and yet somehow not young," the small boy exhibits all the symptoms of an unwholesome precocity. With a mother who embodies a "very different type of maternity" from that of the matrons to whom Winterbourne is accustomed, the uncivilized Miller children are metonymically linked to a number of types he regards as sinister—the parvenu, the alien, the savage, to name only three—and they possess strange manners and customs. But as long as he reads in even "so 'strong' a type" as Daisy not intractable difference but negligible training ("it was only her habit, her having no idea whatever of form . . ."), he remains committed to the project of Daisy's improvement. When he concludes that Daisy is, after all, perverse, and of a "perversity" pathogenically represented as a "black little blot," he retreats to Geneva.

The potential illegibility of cultural or national or class affiliation makes characters like Winterbourne anxious. He is introduced in the promiscuous international setting of a comfortable Swiss resort that could pass for an inn at Saratoga, where German waiters resemble "secretaries of legation," Russian princesses mingle with Polish tourists, and he himself is mistaken for a German by Daisy, unpersuaded that he is a '"real American'." But it is less the apparent portability of class or national or ethnic characteristics—the possibility that anybody, even the ignorant Daisy, can pick an identity up and assume it in masquerade—than the instability of gender that confuses the American man. Daisy's European tour is the rite de passage of an aspiring young woman of her class. This rite of conspicuous acculturation loses none of its significance as a passage into adult sexuality: for not only does the tour prepare her, like a regimen of etiquette lessons, for a well-made match, but Daisy's itinerary also obliquely represents what Freud would later describe as the "difficult development to femininity"—before the libido, that is, has "taken up final positions." To suspect that Daisy Miller is as yet incoherent or incomplete is to suspect that the "charming little parts that didn't match and that made no ensemble" are not only the parts of her dress or speech. "We may not know exactly what sex is," Havelock Ellis would conclude [in The Psychology of Sex, 1933], "but we do know that it is mutable, with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex, that its frontiers are often uncertain, and that there are many stages between a complete male and a complete female." Winterbourne's suspicions help to explain his "odd attachment" to the "little capital of Calvinism" and his ultimate preference for a hermeneutics in which a "perversity" of Daisy's order can have no ambiguous gray "shades."

Daisy's physiological riddles and contradictions are complemented by her "fearful, frightful" flirtations. In Daisy's particular case, the oscillations and indirections of flirtation correspond to what Ruth Bernard Yeazell refers to [in the Yale Journal of Criticism, 1989] as the "imagined indirections of female desire," moving always, in Ellis's words, "in a zigzag or a curve." According to Yeazell, the courtship plot that structures certain nineteenth-century English novels also informs the findings of Charles Darwin and Ellis, who would discover "inscribed in Nature a familiar narrative of courtship—a narrative about female resistance and female choice." For Darwin and Ellis, Yeazell explains, feminine courtship behavior is dictated by the "sexual modesty of the female animal," a modesty rooted in her "sexual periodicity" and expressive of the (biological) fact that the "time for love is not now." If we leave behind momentarily the sexologists' evolutionary explanation to seek a more local motivation for Daisy's oscillations, one presents itself not in the organic changes in the maturing female body but in the cultural demands those changes occasioned in the nineteenth-century US. [In Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1976] Barbara Welter has already recognized in Daisy the "archetype of American adolescent girls" reluctant to submit to the initiation into adult womanhood sometimes referred to as "'breaking the will' of the wayward tomboy" by curbing her behavior and "calming her down" around the time of menarche. Poised, like Louisa May Alcott's Jo March, on a liminal threshold, Daisy Miller resists the forfeiture of an unchaperoned autonomy as a single American girl for what she suspects is the "dreadfully pokey time" of a married American woman.

But in Winterbourne's eyes, Daisy oscillates not so much between two gendered roles as between two gendered bodies. It is to sexual difference or, more properly, the failure of sexual difference that Winterbourne's gaze returns, reinforcing Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that gender is the linchpin of the social and political, as well as the psychical, organization of the democracy, a preventive of promiscuous mergings. In studying Daisy (he was "addicted to noting, and, as it were recording, her nose, her ears, her teeth"), Winterbourne adds to, as he himself evinces, a "girl fetish" in the postbellum US, the widespread cultural project Martha Banta has defined as "imaging American women." There is of course more to this project than fetishism. But in responding to Daisy's adolescent incoherence by attempting to assemble her "charming little parts," Winterbourne does seem to seek reassurance that his own coherence—imagined as a final sexed subjectivity—is unassailable. '"It is well for the world,'" William James noted, '"that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again'." Mr. Winterbourne, Daisy says of the twenty-seven-year-old man, has "no more 'give' than a ramrod." His completeness is here marked, as I have said, by a fixed sexed subjectivity. But to begin to question that fixity, as the mere appearance of the apparently mutable Daisy seems to, is to begin unsettling his identity with respect to more than sex. As Randolph Miller vivaciously inquires, '"Are you an American man?'"

With the publication of Daisy Miller: A Study, Henry James contributed indirectly to changing conceptions of education in the US by emphasizing both the role of the evolving body in the educational process and the volatile character of the adolescent experience. Daisy Miller is of course better remembered for its contribution to the controversy surrounding the cultural practice of flirtation in modern urban environments. As Daisy Miller dramatized the pedagogical problem of picking up influential, imitable models, Daisy Miller was appropriated by numerous social critics as a negative model of the American girl who flirts with "any man she can pick up." Flirtation, like education, operates in the manner of contagion, as Daisy "picks up" a lethal case of Roman Fever along with Mr. Giovanelli. Flirtation puts the body at risk of exposure to noxious influences, literalized in the malaria ("bad air") to which Giovanelli is immune. Although it takes place in Europe, James's narrative of 1878 offers a setting for examining the cultural conditions in the metropolitan US, when the opportunities for multiethnic or interracial affiliation and amalgamation—expressed in Daisy's presumed flirtation and eventual "intimacy" with the Roman man—radically increased. So, too, in the context of the Woman Movement, did the opportunities for public exercises of a potentially autonomous feminine will. It was not that coquetry had been previously unequivocally regarded or that it was not perceived to have (sometimes fatal) consequences. It was, rather, that near the end of the nineteenth century the imagined content of those consequences changed, and female flirtation, like female education, became a subject worth studying.

2

In the early twentieth century, sociologist Georg Simmel considered flirtatious behavior a form of power and devoted an essay ("On Flirtation," 1909) to flirtation's contemporary significance. Simmel cites an anonymous French sociologist who argues that flirtation might derive from the "ancient . . . phenomenon of 'marriage by abduction,'" or it might be the novel product of the "advance of culture," wherein the "large increase in the number of provocative phenomena"

[has] produced an erotic repression in men. It is simply not possible to possess all of the attractive women—whereas in primitive times, such as [sic] abundance of attractive phenomena just did not exist. Flirtation is the remedy for this condition. By this means, a woman could give herself—potentially, symbolically, or by approximation—to a large number of men, and in this same sense, the individual man could possess a large number of women.

Men engage in flirtation, but to flirt means to be able to refuse and concede at once, and "refusing and conceding are what women, and only women, can do in a consummate fashion." After Darwin, we can understand flirtation as the "consummation of the sexual role that belongs to the female throughout the animal kingdom: to be the chooser." The "oscillating impulses" of the female of the species betray her reluctance to close the deal, for in the act of making the deal women are, momentarily, the "masters." This mastery is temporary and its contradictory logic—"saying no and saying yes"—is a kind of temporizing.

For when a woman flirts, Simmel writes, she flirts with freedom and power: "[0]nce she has decided, in either direction, her power is ended."

Simmers "On Flirtation" contributed to an ongoing conversation about the place of flirtation in the history of female oppression, a conversation sustained in part by feminist intellectuals. In one view, flirtatious female behavior strategically resisted, however temporarily, male prerogatives; from another vantage point, flirtation indicated a pernicious social condition. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1898 evolutionary analysis of the white middle- and leisure-class woman's "sexuo-economic" position assumes that flirtation and self-ornamentation—women's speech, body language, and dress—are the products of our "peculiar inversion in the usual habit of species," in which the "males compete in ornament and the females select." Flirtation is not the mark of the female's role as the chooser, but an indication that her role has been usurped. Where once men and women were equals in the economic relation, women are now kept by their mates. Coquetry, outré self-ornamentation, even the fetishization of such body parts as the ankle and foot—these are all the means to the female's end of attracting the male on whom she relies for her very survival. Gilman's commitment to Lamarckian evolutionary thought led her to the conclusion that the feminine weaknesses which arose from these conditions would pass through maternal transmission to the next generation, gradually degrading the entire race. Gilman's solution was economic independence for the female of the human species, her full participation in the industrial market outside the "painfully inadequate limits" of the private home. It would follow from this that the self-supporting female of the future would redefine femininity itself. Thus the women of the Utopian landscape of Gilman's Herland baffle the visiting bachelors who find them not at all "provocative"; their ornamentation and dress, the male narrator notes, "had not a touch of the come-and-find-me element."

Daisy Miller's behavior exhibits either the self-determination of the flirt ("'I've never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me or to interfere with anything I do'") or the illusory nature of her mastery. James's study of the "specimen" Daisy appeared to some grateful advice-givers to be prescriptive; it inoculated "innumerable" American girls, who "learned more from it than they would through a volume of well-intentioned maxims." Although William Dean Howells notes with regret that by 1880 Henry James had wiped all the charming Daisys off the face of Europe ("In 1870 you saw and heard her everywhere on the European continent; in 1880 you sought her in vain"), the author of Good Manners for All Occasions, Mrs. Sherwood, was unsentimentally relieved to report two decades later that Daisy Miller is "almost an extinct species."

But identifying Daisy's genus and educating by her bad example was not the only cultural work Daisy Miller performed; it also offered instruction in the classification of other differences as readers studied along with Daisy something like an ethnography of human types. In her salon Mrs. Walker collects "several specimens of diversely-born humanity" to serve as the "text-books" in Daisy's training, in hopes that the American girl will soon "instinctively discriminate" against the "unmistakably low foreigners" among whom she now ignorantly selects. If Daisy hears Winterbourne refer to Giovanelli as "that thing," the reader knows the Italian as an "it"—"it had a handsome face, a hat artfully posed, a glass in one eye and a nosegay in its buttonhole"—or sees him segmented, almost zoologically, into parts: "flashing teeth, all manners and a wonderful moustache." But here the naturalist's voice is interrupted by the language of manufacture; so consciously assembled are the Italian's traits that he can be "set . . . in motion," as if wound by a key: "[H]e curled his moustaches, and rolled his eyes, and performed all the functions of a handsome Italian at a dinner party." Like ethnic markers, the grammar of class seems easy to read; the description of Daisy's garrulous mother owes something to the phrenological system, and it anticipates Thorstein Veblen: her "unmistakable forehead" is "decorated with thin, much-frizzled hair" perched above a "dead waste of temples," and she wears "enormous diamonds" in her ears. Daisy is introduced to the arcane and silent symbolics of the ladies of Mrs. Costello's expatriate Protestant tribe. Mrs. Costello's sick-headache and Mrs. Walker's cold shoulder are daily lessons: "'They'll show you the cold shoulder,'" Winterbourne explains. "'Do you know what that means?'" The reader is initiated immediately into an anthropological approach to a character's subjectivity through Winterbourne's tutelage: "'How pretty they are!" he says to himself when he first spots the solitary American girl. But if his habit of scanning bodies for the marks of their national or class or even species specificity is a defense against accidentally mingling with alien life forms, his totalizing gaze is ultimately disconcerting. To record Daisy's teeth, well-shaped ear, and habits of speech, or Giovanelli's eyeglass, motions, and moustache, can only reflect the arbitrary assembly of the American's own identity and unmask its prosthetic quality.

In an environment in which identifying marks are easily discarded, adopted, or traversed, sexual difference guarantees distinctions. But even sexual difference is less reliable than it first seems, at least during the polymorphic stages of adolescence. Sexual difference is legible only as it manifests itself (and is thereby shored up) in traditionally gendered forms of social conduct. As Hall observes in Adolescence, "both sexes have within them the germs of the other's quality," and this fact "makes it incumbent on each to play its sex symphony with no great error." Thus it is an "important office of convention, custom and etiquette to preside over this balance between the relationship of the sexes at large." Modesty, for example, fulfills this important office neatly, for modesty is "at root mode, and woman is its priestess." In identifying modest behavior with femininity, Hall echoed the findings of contemporary sexologists who concluded, as, again, Yeazell reminds us, that modesty had its evolution in an instinctual response rooted in the sexual periodicity of the female, who could be judged "her own duenna" and trusted to "venture out into the world alone." This may help us to explain Leslie Fiedler's peevish intuition [in his Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960] that Daisy Miller is "innocent by definition, mythically innocent," but it renders unaccountable Daisy's explicit immodesty—the fact that she makes a spectacle of herself, as Mrs. Costello puts it, or that Daisy, like the rest of her family, is "bad enough to blush for." But Hall answers this contradiction readily: "while boys in general are more prone to the overt forms of showing off, they often incline in early adolescence toward modesty, and girls, usually a little more retiring at this period, now become for a time less so." This "initial forwardness of girls may be a rudiment of the age when woman was the active agent in domesticating man and developing the family father." A young woman's immodesty may be explained away as an atavism, the exception that proves the rule of a characteristic female modesty. But the reappearance of such a rudimentary trait calls for careful guidance through the adolescent passage, for not only is the individual female's acquisition of a proper gender identity at stake, but so too is the balance between the sexes at large. Daisy's crash course in manners, morals, and modesty, then, is meant as an inducement to play her "sex symphony with no great error."

But the expression of modesty, understood at once to articulate and to guarantee sexual difference, also prevented undifferentiation of other kinds. Daisy Miller engages in what a few American social critics called "public flirtation," about which public opinion was divided: while such flirting constituted an "innocent promiscuity" by most US standards, one observer records with disapproval that in "Barnum's Museum couples strolled around the galleries with their arms intertwined; and in the small dark museum theatre they could be observed embracing." Like Barnum's immodest couples, Daisy and Giovanelli exhibit in the dusky spaces of St. Peter's and the secluded nooks of the Doria Palace a liaison better reserved for the interiors of private homes. Mrs. Walker is alarmed at the education Randolph Miller is imbibing from his sister's intrigue, as if her conduct might excite in him a dangerous precocity. Daisy threatens to erode the distinctions between private and public spaces further when she elects to "walk about the streets of Rome" or, rather, as she protests to Winterbourne, about the Pincio, which "'ain't the streets.'" To walk, or as the ironically named Mrs. Walker tellingly puts it, to "prowl" unchaperoned at twilight will ruin Daisy's reputation. In so saying Mrs. Walker echoes a turn-of-the-century rule of thumb among members of her class that a "lady was simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets in the evening or eating alone," that such acts were in themselves potentially fatal forms of exposure.

In the US, debates about the need for chaperones revolved around the perception that "the innate propriety of the American woman and the chivalrous nature of the American man" no longer erected a barrier against strangers who "might be wolves in sheep's clothing." This perception responded to the appearance of the confidence man in modern urban settings, but it also evoked the image of the alien species (the wolf disguised as a sheep) or "foreigner," as the American colonists in Rome insist on referring to natives like Giovanelli. Thus the American girl's blithe interaction with "third-rate Italians" also conjures the picture of cross-cultural or interracial mixing, of undifferentiation of a vaguely criminal kind. This displaced American spectacle helps account for the expatriates' repeated anxiety that Daisy Miller will be "carried off or "carried away" by the wonderfully moustachioed Giovanelli, a phrase suggestive of a marriage by abduction or a selling into white slavery, as well as of Daisy's own "'lawless passions.'"

It is explicitly in terms of an immigrant appropriation of the American woman, a woman figured as the "conservative storehouse" of a homogeneous American culture, that Henry James addressed the members of the graduating class of Bryn Mawr in 1904, appealing to each to fortify herself against the incursions of alien cultures and the temptation to pick up alien ways. Her best protection rests in resisting any such innovations by learning to emulate instead the "proper" speech, manners, and customs of former models until they are acquired as a "second nature." In this commencement address (later published as "The Question of Our Speech") and in the essays assembled in The Speech and Manners of American Women (1905), James betrays his suspicions not only about the heterodox mixing of cultures and customs at the turn of the century but also about the seemingly unstable nature of female character, as I have argued elsewhere. Daisy's desire to walk the streets links her to another nineteenth-century female "lost to modesty," the urban prostitute. More American men than American women reported themselves the victims of street crime. Thus, it seems less for the sake of female education than for that of male protection, when, as if paraphrasing his brother William's "Talks to Students," James urges his women listeners to transform themselves into models who transmit a "beneficent contagion." like the "early Victorian and mid-Victorian [governess] of English girlhood." The English governess is extinct, but the modern woman can become like her in becoming a "closed vessel of authority," closed against "sloppy leakage." But this image is remarkable even for James, who ends his address at Bryn Mawr invoking martyrdom and heaven, suggesting that there is something costly, because moribund, in so thorough an internalization. Under its terms, the model woman resembles Mrs. Costello, constantly smelling camphor in order to stem contamination from others. The model metropolis looks like the Protestant cemetery near the wall of Imperial Rome, the ultimate cordon sanitaire between American and foreign bodies.

It is not the familiar foreign body, however, that threatens American integrity; Giovanelli, as Mrs. Walker proves, is easily studied. Not so the unfamiliar, adolescent American girl, whose polluting powers, and whose vitality, are aptly articulated by the color red. Daisy's debut in Vevey is heralded by Randolph, who precedes his sister dressed in red stockings and a "brilliant red cravat." When Winterbourne first reunites with Daisy in Rome, she is once again associated both with the small boy who precedes her and with a shade of red: "An instant later his pretty sister crossed the threshold" of a "little crimson drawing-room." Although Daisy's coming to Italy and coming of age initially strike Winterbourne as the right occasions on which to exert a kind of tribal claim on the "pretty young daughter of English race," Daisy's arrival arouses in Mrs. Costello an almost apotropaic response. To her, Daisy Miller is a "little abomination," and Mrs. Costello's vigilance in keeping herself out of Daisy's pernicious orbit carries within it the authority of taboo: "'I wouldn't if I hadn't to, but I have to.'"' If the American colony must cordon itself off from the adolescent, it is less because Daisy's intimacy with Giovanelli flirts with the possibility of mixture than it is because she already plays host to apparently incompatible categories and identities. As if taking their cue from Mrs. Costello, James's readers generally agree that Daisy, or "Annie P. Miller," as it says on her cards, is the "improbable sister to the hard-riding, hard-shooting, sometimes cigar-smoking heroines of the dime novel, related through Molly Wopsus of Joaquin Miller to Annie Oakley." Crossing the threshold into Mrs. Walker's salon, the girl from "that land of dollars and six-shooters" crosses the border between genres, between the American western and the Continental nouvelle. Perhaps in this gesture James's story also suggests that the pedagogical authority of Mrs. Walker's well-mannered agenda, and of the novel of manners behind it, is about to succumb.

But perhaps Daisy Miller works instead to alert its audience to the different disciplinary requirements of the adolescent, in whom male and female "struggle for prepotency." Assessing the symptoms of the urchin Randolph's inadequate training—his sleeplessness, his craving for sweets, his spotty schooling—Winterbourne's attention eventually fastens on the small boy's peculiar likeness to his big sister. Randolph, a precocious nine-year-old, and Daisy, about eighteen, are together in the adolescent struggle. More than the color red links brother to sister—she also shares his phallic traits. Where Randolph thrusts his "long alpenstock" into the "flowerbeds" or "trains of ladies dresses," Daisy flaps the "largest fan [Winterbourne] ever beheld" as she pokes her nose into numerous houses. Put simply, Randolph is his sister's "telltale appendage," and in a vision capturing Daisy's erotic androgyny, even her polymorphic perversity, Winterbourne watches her descend a staircase while "squeezing her folded parasol against her pretty figure."

As if to orchestrate Daisy's femininity in the midst of such confusion, Daisy Miller resuscitates a familiar nineteenth-century plot, even to its sentimental conclusion of the (perhaps voluntary) death of the young woman betrayed in love. As the suggestions of both seduction and miscegenation develop, Daisy assumes an unambiguously gendered place in a plot generically inflected by the captivity narrative and the gothic novel. Daisy seems "carried away," whether in a cabinet of the Doria Palace seated not only with Giovanelli but also, as if the cabinet were a confessional, in the "papal presence" of Innocent X, or on her visit to the Palace of the Caesars, where Giovanelli "glowed as never before with something of the glory of his race." Observing the couple in this setting, Frederick Winterbourne "inhaled the softly humid odors and felt the freshness of the year and the deep antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in deep interfusion." The "deep interfusion" of Old World and New is apparently sealed later one evening in the "villainous miasma" of the Colosseum, where the American again encounters the immodest two-some. Although he had admitted to shifting visions of Daisy's nature, Winterbourne now sees merely a "black little blot," an image expressive of the peculiarly Calvinist account of the soul, the indication of a pathology, and the mark of amalgamation. The rush to get Daisy, like Cinderella, home before midnight suggests her imminent physical transformation.

Daisy Miller's death, arguably the result of her association with the Roman Catholic Giovanelli, paradoxically certifies the certain "indispensable fineness" she was assumed all along to lack and admits her to the elect Protestant colony, albeit by way of the Protestant cemetery. It will take a final confession from Giovanelli that Daisy was "naturally! the most innocent young lady" he ever knew to persuade Winterbourne that he had misinterpreted Daisy's behavior and that perhaps she might, as he modestly puts it, have returned the American's "esteem." Perhaps Daisy's black little blot is actually the diacritical mark of the blind spot in Winterbourne's reading of the pretty American flirt and not the sign of her innocence lost, like the "X" that follows the notorious Innocent's name. But in light of the ambiguity in Giovanelli's confession (how innocent is the "most innocent" young lady in his acquaintance?) and in the context of the cultural conditions out of which James drew his study, the conditions not only of Daisy Miller but also of The Golden Bowl, we might argue instead that this story ends by underscoring Winterbourne's blindness—blindness to the mixture inherent in any past or future construction of American identity, even that of his own settled and coherent ensemble. It follows, then, that Winterbourne's suggestive characterization of Daisy's burial mound, a "raw protuberance" in a bed of flowers, reassuringly reflects the firmness of his own subject position as an American man. Or that, on second glance, her grave is to him a prosthetic specter, and he was well counseled to ward her off.

3

She looked at him a moment, and then let it renew her amusement. "I like to make you say those things. You 're a queer mixture!"

Daisy Miller suggests to Frederick Winterbourne the possibility of his own androgyny and of his own assembled or reassembled identity as an American man. When, with Mrs. Costello, he questions Daisy's virtue—"It was impossible to regard her as a wholly unspotted flower"—it is a way of stressing as well Daisy's far from unspotted genealogy, her hybrid or mongrel identity. For Mrs. Costello, no less than for her nephew, Daisy is a revenant reminder that the "deep interfusion" against which she protects herself has already long taken place—perhaps not only in North American history but also, as her surname suggests, in the course of Mrs. Costello's own life. Her discomfort in Daisy's presence stems not from the fact that the girl is incorrigible but rather that she learns only too easily how to emulate and to replicate the likes of Mrs. Costello: the speech, fashions and customs, the manners and morals, of Mrs. Costello's hierarchically organized and tidily transplanted Forty-Second-Street clan. Indeed, Mrs. Costello quickly grasps the American girl's capacity to pick up and repeat Winterbourne's little lessons, when she remarks to her nephew that Daisy possesses "'that charming look they all have. I can't think where they pick it up. And she dresses in perfection; no, you can't know how well she dresses.'" We might go so far as to say that '"dying to be exclusive'" in the manner of Winterbourne's irreproachable aunt, Daisy proves a quick study when she enters the Protestant colony near the wall of Imperial Rome. It is less Daisy's difference from than it is her uncanny ability to resemble Mrs. Costello that requires the aunt's almost ritualistic response, adding a gothic dimension to James's comedy of manners. For even Mrs. Costello's own granddaughters, as it turns out, are rumored to be '"tremendous flirts.'" What looks at first like difference—the differences among the "specimens of diversely-born humanity" studied in Mrs. Walker's salon—looks, on closer inspection, like family.

This essay has focused, with Mrs. Costello, on the numerous dangerous individual bodies Daisy Miller comes to resemble in the course of her flirtatious passage though James's narrative of 1878. But my focus exposes its own blind spot to the emergence of a very different body both on the Continent and in the US, what we might call the collective body of the coalition. The public spectacle of an organized labor force would have been impossible to ignore after 1877, the year of the Great Strikes. This is not to conclude that Daisy Miller is the figure of the union organizer—not a Molly Wopsus, after all, but a Molly Maguire. But it is to suggest that what might be at stake in Daisy's flirtations—flirting with anyone she can pick up—is the possibility of affiliation across the constructed borders of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, with or without the relaxation of bodily boundaries. Mrs. Costello had seen immigrants in New York, the nouveau riche in Swiss resorts, and even American Girls in Rome before, and she knew one when she saw one. But she had never seen coalitions of interests, and if she refused to learn to recognize them, maybe they would all go away.