SOURCE: "Winterbourne and the Doom of Manhood in Daisy Miller," in New Essays on Daisy Miller and the Turn of the Screw, edited by Vivian R. Pollak, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 65-89.

1

Henry James is like the modern jazz masters in this: He begins with the simplest romantic themes, then builds intricacies upon them until the once-clichés speak to all the subtle richness of social existence. With Daisy Miller and her reluctant suitor Frederick Winterbourne, the theme is no more than "opposites attract," and the trick is that one pole of that opposition is so constructed as to make the attraction deadly. "Stiff" Winterbourne brings doom to Daisy and a different doom to himself; through him, James tallies the evils of a misconstructed masculinity.

It's a multifaceted opposition between the failed lovers, but at base simple as motion through the world. Daisy Miller moves. She "goes on," "goes round," "goes too far," well over a hundred times in the text. "She goes on," a particular persecutor remarks, "from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age." No enthusiast of the dynamic, Mrs. Costello "can imagine nothing more vulgar." Too blithely regardless, alive, American, and unknowing amidst the miasma of history, "strolling along the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions," Daisy comprehends her life principle lightly and perfectly: "If I didn't walk I should expire" she tells an inaptly named Mrs. Walker. Mrs. Walker, representative of a society of parlors, never does walk, but chases Daisy in her carriage to persuade her against walking. "If I didn't walk I should expire," says the girl of gardens and the vibrant moment, surprised into opposition; and when she cannot walk any longer, she dies, a latest Roman sacrifice to a world of rooms and rules.

These too are simple, her perfect understanding and her nasty doom. Daisy begins simply, fills out only to defend that simplicity, and expires into mythy apotheosis: the "most innocent" of all young ladies by the account of the cured opportunist Giovanelli, whose judgment is unimpeachable in an assessment that holds no stakes for him. James, amazed that readers followed Winterbourne in making Daisy's innocence a point of dispute, ever after seconded the Italian's judgment.

Daisy's continuing and finally ennobled simplicity is not what we usually expect from fiction, where characters generally complicate themselves in the course of their experiences. But James means for us to see Daisy's complexity as not inherent. The terrible ambiguity, the vexing mystery of her status as innocent or vixen, have nothing to do with her inherent quality, simple as a Daisy can be; they are all evoked by Winterbourne's misshapen assessment. It is not really her story but Winterbourne's, and there the complications are killing.

Frederick Winterbourne does go on or go too far, as he too accuses Daisy of doing. After his first words with Daisy, "He wondered whether he had gone too far; but he decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat." But his advances are half-retreats, and he vacillates throughout: hesitating to visit Daisy on his arrival at Rome once he hears of her as "surrounded by half-a-dozen wonderful moustaches" or running comic opera between Mrs. Walker's carriage of imperial respectability and the scandalously free-walking Daisy. Progressively in the second, Roman half of the tale, Giovanelli succeeds Winterbourne as active suitor, and Winterbourne, retreating or receding, supplants the protective courtier Eugenio as eugenic guardian. Finally, spying Daisy with Giovanelli at night in the Colosseum, "as he was going to advance again, he checked himself; not from the fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from cautious criticism. He turned away," seeking secrecy for his hideous emotion, relief that now he can find surcease from his vacillating movements in the sure (but wrong) knowledge that Daisy is corrupt. Her goading causes him to turn again and advance, but only to scold Giovanelli, for Roman fever is potential in the dank night air of the ruins. This prudential warning is not so gallant, given that he had meant to retreat a last time before issuing any such warning, leaving Daisy to possible death—which he then goes on to cause, killing her spirit by his dismissal.

After Giovanelli's disclosure, Winterbourne confesses, "I have lived too long in foreign parts," the last and most shocking of many sexual puns in the tale. But then he goes round. "He went back to live at Geneva," where the contradictory rumors by which James's narrator introduces him are renewed, "a report that he is 'studying' hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a foreign lady."

With Daisy, Winterbourne advances and retreats, recedes, and finally reverts. But without her he is motionless, he sits, he idles. That is how we find him in the garden of the hotel at Vevey, until Daisy's brother and then Daisy interrupt his stasis. In his very first description as "a young American," Winterbourne seems something other, a European idler; like one of Conrad's tropical emigrés, little is known about him. It is startling what we do not know about Winterbourne. Who are his parents? Has he siblings? We are told that he has many friends in Geneva, but only one male friend appears on the scene and that briefly, with information of Daisy at the Doria. Daisy is from Schenectady, her limitation but not her fault, but where is Winterbourne's hometown? Why, really, is he in Geneva, or in Europe at all? Where does he get the money to do nothing? What does he wish to do? He has been in bed with a woman, perhaps many, but has he ever loved? And what is he "studying" other than sex in Geneva and Daisy in this narrative?³

I think there are answers to some of these questions and answers to why we do not know the answers to others, awful disclosures about this "young American" who to Daisy "seemed more like a German." The answers have to do with such matters as cash and class, labor and idling, sexuality and something that is its reduction and defeat. I am sorry the answers have to do with these subjects, so predictably present are such matters in the interpretation of books at our own cultural moment. But James knew his cultural moment, knew himself in it, too, and Daisy Miller is one of his many attempts to state the moment and to free himself from it.

I do not mean to deny the international theme that readers find in the tale but to sharpen it. James is certainly telling a story about cultural bigotry in which an American man who has neglected his origin has an opportunity to educate an American girl all too provincially limited, and by this interchange has an opportunity to go not "on" or "round" or "too far" but home. The necessary aging of young America is at issue. Daisy's death dramatizes a worry that the new nation cannot grow up into a world of vicissitude; and as all of Daisy's accusers are expatriate Americans, not one of them the real thing, James is warning, much as Mark Twain would do in limning the pretensions of the Mississippi River culture in Huckleberry Finn, of an American attempt to become culturally mature the wrong way, by grotesquely aping the nightmare aspects of European sophistication. When Mrs. Costello speaks of "the minutely hierarchical constitution" of New York society, America appears feudal. In all this there is the sense of missed opportunity, not only for Daisy and Winterbourne, but for America and Europe to form that Jamesian compact in which American vitality and European knowledge and manners would combine to save the West. Yet there is something beyond the international theme, something that makes even Winterbourne's self-blame, put in the "lived too long in foreign parts" lexicon of that theme, half a misnomer and a rationalization, and I want to get at what it is.

2

Our questions about Winterbourne may resolve into a single, gigantic problem: What is it to be a man? In the American decades before the Civil War, a new definition of manhood was getting fashioned, and with a rapidity possible only in a new nation formed at a late stage of Western civilization. Industry, and the changes it effects in social organization and individual personalities, came pell-mell upon an America just learning to know itself. "Here, as in a theater," wrote James Russell Lowell, "the great problems of anthropology . . . are compressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few hours." An extremely insecure aristocracy, for instance, is barely established before it finds itself rudely jostled. "The older ideologies of genteel patriarehy and artisan independence were being challenged by a new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism," writes David Leverenz [in Manhood and the American Renaissance, 1989], adding, perhaps a bit too simply, "The new middle-class won, and its ideology of manhood as competitive individualism still pervades American life." The significantly absent Mr. Miller is one such winner, remaining behind in what Winterbourne imagines his Italian rival would consider "that mysterious land of dollars." But Winterbourne's confusion over Daisy suggests that commercially energetic America is a mystery to him as well, for Winterbourne is one of the losers in this redefinition of manhood. We know that he had been "put to school" in Geneva by his parents at about the age of Daisy's brother Randolph. Familial wealth is the implication, supported as well by the circumstances and snobbery of Winterbourne's aunt. That is, Winterbourne comes from a shaky displaced aristocracy that has found a shaky home in Europe. In England, Leverenz notes, "a similar class conflict . . . had ended with the gentry reestablishing control by 1870," and although we might wish to complicate this assertion—labor certainly has some claims on an approved manhood in Victorian fiction—the defeat of the many socialist revolutions across Europe by forces of royalty in the 1840s did make the continent a more comfortable site for monied lassitude. America, Fenimore Cooper had written decades earlier, "possesses neither the population nor the endowments to maintain a large class of learned idlers," idlers such as Frederick Winterbourne, lifelong "student."

Thus Winterbourne's permanent vacation in Geneva is a choice; he has chosen not to enter into his own time and into the fray of "competitive individualism." This gives particular point to Daisy's characterization of Winterbourne's speeches as "formal" and "quaint." Winterbourne's lectures to Daisy on the nature of who is and is not a gentleman add to the anachronistic lexicon by which he seeks to assert his class superiority.

Winterbourne is willing to compete only by standards that rely on a code of behavior closely allied with inherited caste. He refuses free market competition and this refusal has everything to do with his romantic behavior. When Winterbourne abandons Mrs. Walker's carriage, apparently enlisting in Daisy's cause, he spies her with Giovanelli behind the same parasol prominent in his own first flirtation with her at Vevey, and the narrator's phrasing implies a major moment in Winterbourne's advance-retreat scenario: "This young man" (and the epithet focuses the issue of manhood) "lingered a moment, then he began to walk. He walked—not towards the couple with the parasol; towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs. Costello"—where he can take his revenge in the sure condemnation of Daisy she will provide. He had done just the same on his arrival in Rome when he heard of Daisy surrounded by the moustaches; he will do the same differently when he hears of Daisy and Giovanelli in company again, retreating more aggressively to tell momma, informing Mrs. Miller that her daughter is "going too far." When he does confront Daisy directly, it is as a parent, not a lover, lecturing her on propriety to the point that Daisy for once evinces resentment. She notes that Winterbourne has failed to offer her tea as a gentleman suitor should; and to his "I have offered you advice," Daisy rejoins, "I prefer weak tea!" suggesting the degree to which Winterbourne dilutes his romantic presence by his learned condescension. In the Colosseum, when Winterbourne indicates to Daisy his condemnation, he does so by opting out of competition, telling her that "it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not." Daisy, echoing the phrase, soon says "I don't care . . . whether I have Roman fever or not." In the tale's sentimental causality, Winterbourne's renunciation of interest in Daisy causes Daisy's renunciation of life. As he enters the Colosseum Winterbourne recalls Byron's description of it in Manfred, but he might better have recalled Manfred's confession that he killed his beloved, "Not with my hand but heart, which broke her heart, / It gazed on mine and wither'd." Winterbourne would rather kill than compete, and his response to challenge, tallying with the response of his class in arenas other than the romantic, is refusal and disdain.

"You needn't be afraid. I'm not afraid," Daisy tells him when he is forced to admit that Mrs. Costello will not meet her, and we sense that Winterbourne fears more generally. Yet it is unanswerable whether he takes his aristocratic stance because he is afraid—of a world of change, of impulses in himself that would force him to choose against his lifelong choice of class—or whether he is afraid because he has chosen an aristocratic stance that demands the loss of what he calls "instinct."

This is not to argue that James is, by contrast, glorifying the ascendancy of the mercantile class in America. As many readers have noted, the disorder of the Miller family, and forms of naiveté that approach the callow in Daisy herself, serve James as a harsh critique upon this class. Mr. Miller's absence from the family journey suggests a gendered distinction good for no one, as the man remains home making more money while the wife and children "get culture" (though never getting it at all). The son, Randolph, is "hard" as the lumps of sugar he criticizes, charmless, uncontrollable, and oddly "aged" with a voice "not young." Europe to Daisy is "perfectly sweet," the Colosseum "so pretty," all with a reductive condescension that is the sweet echo of Randolph's jingoist convictions that American candy and American men are "the best." Their mother suffers from a bad liver that is the equivalent of Mrs. Costello's headaches, these figures of opposing classes both substituting a narcissism of the body as pain for healthful purpose. The Millers too display a familial entropy that is a low result of the democracy that has advanced them. Mrs. Miller "is always wearing my things," Daisy laughs as her mother appears wrapped in Daisy's shawl, but it's a significantly unfunny inversion of roles. Daisy is as much an unofficial orphan as Winterbourne, and the absence of appreciation and authority in her own family may well draw her to the paternalistic, culturally authoritative, and quaint Winterbourne.

Winterbourne cannot meet the challenge, however, for he and his female advisors are part of a fragile, essentially nouveau, American aristocracy that is not real aristocracy at all any more than these expatriates are real Europeans. The problem is less class division and prejudice than it is class confusion and anxiety. Winterbourne and his ilk make hyperbolic any true European conventions in order to stake a nervous claim to beyond-Miller status. "Real" Europe is problematic in itself as, in a commercial age, filthy lucre makes embarrassing appearances amidst the leisure of the European upper class. As early as the second sentence of the tale, the narrator notes of Vevey that "the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place." The highest status hotel in Vevey, where the Millers reside, was built on the site of an old castle, both a reason for its status and a sign of the capitalist transformation of society. An actual establishment, its name, the "Trois Couronnes," implies both nobility and coins. The mishmash of the commercial and the aristocratic in Europe is one reason why its poetry-inspiring history is portrayed in the tale as dead-in-life, miasmic, not so much informing the present as sickening it.

Winterbourne too is financial, however much he wishes to disdain the world of economic struggle. As Ian Kennedy points out, when the narrator tells us that Winterbourne "had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one's aunt" just after he has described Mrs. Costello as "a widow with a fortune," James uncovers the savage, selfish underpinning of the Genevan ideal of duty and of Winterbourne's fidelity to it and to his aunt. In a sense, attendance upon his wealthy aunt is Winterbourne's job.

He has yet another, and Daisy points to it when, at Chillon, she senses that Winterbourne is returning to Geneva because of a liaison. Bravely turning her hurt to a sally, she taunts, "'Does she never allow you more than three days at a time? . . . Doesn't she give you a vacation in summer? There's no one so hard worked but they can get leave to go off somewhere at this season, I suppose.'" No champion of freedom like Byron's Bonnivard, this prisoner of Chillon yet shares that hero's terrible adjustment to the loss of liberty.

Even this momentary intimation of Winterbourne as prostituted makes his contempt for Giovanelli broadly hypocritical. On meeting the Italian, Winterbourne decides that "he is only a clever imitation" of a gentleman and he makes this claim in terms of labor: "He is a music-master, or a penny-a-liner, or a third-rate artist." Winterbourne himself is, by occupation, no more and something less; and if Giovanelli indeed has "practiced the idiom" of speaking in English "upon a great many American heiresses," one expects that Winterbourne has had to adapt to a few adopted idioms himself: "He had known, here in Europe, two or three women—persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands—who were great coquettes—dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn." Who is the imitation of a gentleman? Giovanelli, by the unemployed Winterbourne's account, turns out to be a "perfectly respectable little man" who is in fact a cavaliere avvocato, and this gentleman lawyer ends by entering a plea for a true perception of Daisy's innocence. Just as the Italian takes Winterbourne's resigned place as amoroso in the narrative, though never in Daisy's affections, so too he takes Winterbourne's place finally in the reader's regard. Giovanelli is not Winterbourne's gigolo opposite so much as his double, and finally his better.

This then is the economic Winterbourne: an emigrant out of fear of practicing the American ideal of equal competition, an unemployed idler whose sense of aristocratic breeding is prostituted by fortune hunting. We must recall that Winterbourne is no confirmed villain, at least not until the final words of the tale when he refuses the true illumination, the grace of understanding his own character that Daisy's death has afforded him. His very attraction to Daisy is proof of a residue of possibility in him and of a desire for a non-Genevan self-reformation. But the forms this attraction takes have everything to do with the class alliances Winterbourne had made; and when we ask, given such choices, what kind of manhood emerges, the answers constitute an encyclopedia of misogyny.

3

One of Henry James's great surprises is his occasional penchant for broad effects. I began by insisting that his basic plots are often melodramatic, and his naming of such characters as Daisy and Winterbourne is obviously allegorical. Noting such effects often makes James's reader queasy, and this is most true as regards the sexual puns. Can the Master, the writer's writer who provides the "sense of the sense," actually be thought to indulge in such adolescent double entendre? The answer is affirmative, for James will exploit the whole register of meaning making. The character always intends the more or differently figurative meaning of such words, the socially sophisticated meaning; but James intends all meanings, including those that betray the character's unsublimated self.

The words that attach to yet another of Winterbourne's alter egos, Daisy's brother Randolph, offer such a case. Unsettlingly older than his age, Randolph's voice is "sharp, hard," his eyes "penetrating." He carries a long alpenstock, "the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that he approached—." He "poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne's bench," calls the sugar Winterbourne has afforded him "har-r-d," and then "got astride of the alpenstock. He speaks again in "his little hard voice," and converts his alpenstock finally "into a vaulting pole."

Daisy's "small, slippery brother" at times seems something of a walking penis; his aggressive energy—remeeting him in Rome, Winterbourne compares him to "the infant Hannibal"—represents everything in American competitive manhood that Winterbourne had fled. Yet Winterbourne is not so apart from these tendencies and this phallicism as we first think.

Shortly after Winterbourne "wondered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at about this age" Daisy appears, and Winterbourne is described as "straightening himself in his seat, as if he were preparing to rise." Much later, in Rome, Daisy on four occasions criticizes Winterbourne as "stiff." The social meaning of the adjective seems to oppose the romantic, as when Winterbourne tells Daisy he does not dance and Daisy replies, "Of course you don't dance; you're too stiff." But I want to argue that the phallic condition of "stiff" opposes romance as well. The dance of respectful courtship demands flexibility and motion; the sexual love of women and men requires an appreciation of the entire person, not a stiff, phallic reduction of the Other. Daisy is right beyond her knowing when she refuses Winterbourne's request to "flirt only with me" because, in her words, "You're too stiff." Just as Winterbourne attempts to live apart from his commercial age and thus becomes almost a fortune hunter, so in fleeing American competitive manhood and his own American "instinct" as he calls it, Winterbourne reduces his sexuality to the state of Randolph's, preadolescent and yet ever so hard.

James labors to establish Winterbourne's trouble at the outset, in Winterbourne's first meeting with Daisy, as he dramatizes Winterbourne's leaking libido in terms of an extended act of perception. This is how Winterbourne views the girl:

They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair country-woman's various features—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analysing it; and as regards this young lady's face he made several observations.

It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate Winterbourne mentally accused it —very forgivingly—of a want of finish.

In three sentences, James packs seven overlapping kinds of inhumanity, seven deadening sins. The first I would term exploitative or acquisitive perception. Winterbourne itemizes Daisy's features in such a way—her eyes, her teeth—as to make her an object or himself a horse trader. His "relish for feminine beauty" is resentable too. It suggests a practice of connoisseurship, an emotional distancing both affectedly aristocratic and somehow prurient, pornographic.

Seeing through the eyes of others is yet a third form of Winterbourne's blindness. Does the face lack a finish?, Winterbourne worries, and we worry that someone else is setting the standards. Note as we approach the passage that Daisy's glance is "perfectly direct and unshrinking" yet not "what would have been called an immodest glance." Discrimination is a Jamesian essential, and naming is as natural as Adam, but this is the world's postlapsarian naming—"what would have been called"—not Adam's.

Winterbourne's obsessive categorizing, his classificatory zeal, is another function of his hand-me-down mentality. Earlier, when Daisy first appears, "she" is immediately made a "they" by Winterbourne: "How pretty they are," and later, he questions, "were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also a designing, an unscrupulous young person?" Winterbourne will not allow women to be, will not grant them an integrating wholeness, will instead dissect and categorize. And when they don't fit, when humanity refuses such reduction—agreeing to Winterbourne's accusation, Daisy responds, "I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?"—he will dismiss them brutally, as he does at the Colosseum. Under an ominously "waning moon." Daisy is revealed to him, all falsely, as unscrupulous indeed and he experiences his unbecoming exhilaration "by a sudden revulsion from cautious criticism." The cautious criticism is dehumanizing in itself, the bipolarities deadening. James has his final joke on Winterbourne when, after implying the gross inadequacies of the either-ors, he allows Daisy an innocence even in Winterbourne's dichotomizing terms. Winterbourne's "cautious criticism" of categories and types is his attempt to halt experience in aristocratic, hierarchical stillness; his final revulsion from it, itself fearful in a refusal to live with mystery, is less a refutation than an extension of it.

This categorizing has yet another aspect that constitutes his fifth sin of perception, one that we might call testing. In the early description of Daisy, Winterbourne tests her against various ideals of socially respectable appearances; and soon, in a moonlit scene that anticipates the finale in the Colosseum, Winterbourne suggests a boat ride to Chillon, primarily to see how far Daisy will go. Acceptance of the invitation would doom Daisy in Winterbourne's opinion and rid him of the bothersome ambiguities of his own creation, but for this pathetic relief he must wait upon Rome.

A sixth form of inadequacy in the early passage coexists with all the others, together constituting the sins of the spectatorial. As John H. Randall III writes, Winterbourne "sees life through the spectacles of the picturesque. What he responds to is a guidebook view of life, not life itself [American Quarterly, 1965]. This marks him a cultural parvenu in his comments on the sights of Europe. When, for instance, he quotes Byron on entering the Colosseum, he reminds us of all those nineteenth-century American anglophiles who are described nicely by Benjamin Goluboff [in American Studies, 1990] as "the alluder on the landscape," insecure travelers from the raw New World taking "a sort of examination in cultural literacy." Winterbourne flunks the more crucial exam of understanding, for he is about to exemplify the final lines of Byron's Colisseum description, "The dead but sceptered sovereigns who will rule / Our spirits from their urns." Just so, when Mrs. Costello requests that her nephew bring her Paule Méré, she seems unaware that the Cherbuliez novel, published in Geneva, concerns the victimization of a brave woman, an older Daisy, by a weak husband reminiscent of Winterbourne and by a society much like Mrs. Costello's own.

When Winterbourne directs this same effete, meaning-emptying appreciation toward Daisy, it bespeaks that removal from life that is also a removal from self. This self-removal provides another reason for Winterbourne's wish to visit Chillon with Daisy: "[H]e had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful girl." The sophisticated but crude "freighted" underlines once more the dehumanizing of Daisy, the "fresh and beautiful girl" the categorizing tendency of this collector of experiences. But there is also here a sense of Winterbourne, if you will allow me an anachronism, watching a motion picture of his own life. He can produce such a movie even when he is not present in a particular scene, as when he arrives in Rome and is discountenanced by the news that Daisy is surrounded by moustaches, "a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive." This is uproariously self-flattering—Winterbourne Studios is consistently partial to its owner-star—but it is also self-negating, for one cannot live a life while obsessively observing it. Such self-consciousness even harms those attempts at manipulation that always undercut Winterbourne's moments of empathy. When he senses that Daisy is hurt by his aunt's refusal to meet her, Winterbourne decides it might be "becoming in him to attempt to reassure her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be very approachable for consolation." Winterbourne imagines unstiffening—though only in a most becoming way and only to get what his stiff self desires—but by the time Winterbourne Studios has produced the scene in his head, Daisy's mother appears and his bad chance is lost. Life is for Daisy; it is always about to be for the screening room hero, though perhaps this is fortunate given his designs on it.

But Winterbourne is not a public actor, and if he creates his own scenes, he does not wish upon himself the eyes of others. He is secretive, and guilty privacy is his seventh sin. In the passage in which he itemizes Daisy's features, he is looking but his thoughts are not seen. This privacy is apt in a man who lives his only vital life behind closed doors and at absolute odds with the social manners he espouses so recklessly. James takes an early revenge on this hypocrite gossip by having his narrator speak of him in the falsely respectful, secretly savage voice of the society to which Winterbourne belongs:

[W]hen his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at Geneva, "studying." When his enemies spoke of him they said—but, after all, he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked. What I should say is, simply, that when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself. Very few Americans—indeed I think none—had ever seen this lady, about whom there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there as a boy.

Each of the narrator's false hesitations to disclose something unpleasant constitutes a cut. The unseen lady—foreign, then older, finally singular in the stories told of her—is also Winterbourne's unseen life and suggests a reason for Winterbourne's interest in "coming off" with Daisy to Chillon secretly. He can thus deny her freshness and the jolt it might give to his pornographic, musty self. Winterbourne associates the libido with the hidden—that is why he despises meeting Daisy in the hotel hall (not simply because it is vaguely vulgar) and it is why, once they arrive at Chillon, he bribes the custodian to leave them alone, yet another act that characterizes his economic cheating. It is also why he cannot believe in Daisy's appearance of innocence, because his own appearance is so unnaturally fashioned to disguise what resides in Geneva and in himself. What Winterbourne half wishes is to make Daisy taboo, for then she can enter his dirty little world and he will not have to leave it. That he also half wishes to leave it is what saves him a measure of sympathy. That he decides against this second chance is what ends all sympathy and dooms his manhood, as I will suggest a bit later, to a fate literally worse than Daisy's death because it constitutes damnation.

4

There is one element of Winterbourne's first long description of Daisy's appearance and of his entire encounter with her that is so obvious as to be hidden. It is best expressed in a law Leverenz constructs for Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil": "My wish to invade his privacy is an evasion of my own." Winterbourne's invasion of Daisy's privacy, his dressed-up, vulgar desire to know, as Cathy Davidson puts it [in the Arizona Quarterly, Winter, 1976], "'Does she or doesn't she?'," is a way to evade questions about his own capacity for love. Troubled, frightened, Winterbourne runs from the world of male competition and surrounds himself with two kinds of women: the adultresses in Geneva and the prudish widows in Vevey and Rome. These two kinds are really one kind, halves of a determined double standard whereby, in Mrs. Costello's words, "a man may know everyone."

Our major reaction is to exclaim against the women's society that castigates Daisy for wholly inoffensive and open actions while allowing for Winterbourne's hidden profligacies, "not morality but conformity," as William E. Grant writes [Studies in Short Fiction, 1974]. And certainly we feel the force of female self-punishment: "[W]omen characters uphold the system which restricts them," Louise K. Barnett notes [Studies in Short Fiction, 1979]; and Davidson rightly calls these women "misogynous," adding that women like Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker "will seek to be men" and take on their authority. But my main interest is in the degree to which Winterbourne submits to them. He "acquiesces in their power," writes Susan Koprince. He is, in Motley Deakin's summation, "the captive of women" [Henry James Review, 1983].

He is the captive of both kinds of women. That he experiences the adultresses in Geneva as "dangerous, terrible" suggests a fearful subordination, suggested as well by Daisy's taunt that his present lover in Geneva will not even give him, her employee or servant, more than a few days off. Winterbourne thus does not appear sexually potent even in the gossip of his liaison with this woman about whom singular stories have been told. However wild the unnamed woman may be, he is emasculated by the relationship. Just so, when Winterbourne runs to Mrs. Costello or Mrs. Walker to discuss Daisy, curl his moustache as he may, he seems a woman himself. With Daisy alone, he becomes traditional male lawgiver; but Daisy, the one relief in this chaotic environment of misgendering, refuses him this authority: "I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."

Winterbourne is castrated once more, but by Daisy less than by himself. He has taken this parental stance toward her, as I argued earlier, to avoid real competition. Indeed, Daisy's whole attempt with Winterbourne is to help him locate his manhood. This is the motive for all her teasing and taunting, to persuade him to behave as a man toward her but via love rather than authority. Thus when she is buried doubly inaptly—a Daisy dying in the spring, buried in cultural loneliness in the small Protestant cemetery in the world capital of Catholicism—James has his narrator describe her grave as a "raw protuberance among the April daisies." Davidson sees here an Easter resurrection, with Daisy becoming "the patron saint of a repressed sexuality." But Daisy's fate is Christlike only twistedly. When James earlier recalls the Resurrection by employing the phrase "On the evening of the third day." he is referring to Mrs. Walker's party, where Mrs. Walker's snub makes Daisy look "with a pale, grave face at the circle near the door." And the "raw protuberance" of Daisy's grave suggests a swelling in two ways ironic. As a female swelling, it is an image of death in the place of pregnancy, new birth, all that Daisy's youth and vitality promised. As a phallic protuberance, it suggests death's cause and Winterbourne's stiff loss.

Indeed, Winterbourne has entered forever the deadening, emasculating creed of what we might call the women's religion in Daisy Miller. I mean religion almost and terribly literally, for the expatriates' hellish code has usurped the place of the church. There is in fact a scene in St. Peter's where

A dozen of the American colonists in Rome came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat on a little portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The vesper-service was going forward in splendid chants and organ-tones in the adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her friends, there was a great deal said about poor little Miss Miller's going really "too far."

In this ugly scene, the women have taken to themselves the heavenly judgment that is St. Peter's office. And in the same paragraph Winterbourne hears from his friend of Daisy and Giovanelli viewing the portrait of Pope Innocent, a portrait the misnamed Pope himself called troppo vero, as the renowned Velazquez painting reveals a cynic of worldly intrigue. The Pope's name underscores Daisy's own innocence while his face in the portrait, as Adeline Tintner writes [in Essays in Literature, 1979], makes for "a vivid contrast" between the worldly head of state and "the secular, free-wheeling, free-thinking American Protestant girl who doesn't hesitate to turn her back on his Holiness and his so-called 'shrine.'"

James gives us something of an encapsulated history of Western religion in this slight tale of Geneva, "the little metropolis of Calvinism," and "the cynical streets of Rome." With its accusatory conviction of innate depravity and its ability to live down to it, Geneva begins a process of destroying Daisy that Rome, city of ordained convention and the pernicious leavings of pagan and Christian history, completes. The attitudes of the expatriates who paganize the Church are yet the direct result of a long misprizing of the religious spirit by religion itself.

Entering the Colosseum, Winterbourne spies Daisy seated in the shadow of "the great cross in the centre" and, in Daisy's light words, he "looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs." But this is only the culmination of a process in which the expatriates translate religious and moral idealism into Victorian aggression devoid of real principle. Winterbourne finally adopts his aunt's view that "one does one's duty by not—not accepting" such Americans as the Millers. For Mrs. Costello, deep ethics is pretension: "Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question I leave to the metaphysicians." Mrs. Walker, who wishes to conventionalize Daisy rather than exclude her, does make metaphysical the socially conventional: She theologizes "Thank heaven I have found you," and, with "her hands devoutly clasped," attempts to persuade Daisy against walking in the company of men. "Extremely devoted" by the account of "certain persons" to the lady in Geneva, "awfully devoted" to Daisy in Daisy's joking phrase, Winterbourne finally takes his vows in the priesthood of the expatriates. Again, it is worth emphasizing that this is a choice, for Daisy, no metaphysician herself, has come to represent an alternative. Refusing Mrs. Walker's invitation to join her in her victoria for some moral instruction, Daisy says, "I don't think I want to know what you mean. . . . I don't think I should like it"; and the simple relativism of her "People have different ideas!" gains a resonance against this creed of absolutism bom of ennui and worse, a creed well defined by the narrator when he characterizes Winterbourne's thought of consoling Daisy as "a perilous mixture of gallantry and impiety." But this emptying of the spirit succeeds in the world, leaving Daisy's memory and Henry James alone in opposition.

5

That is where Winterbourne ends, and in a moment we will name the place, but where does he originate? We do know Winterbourne's place in a literary sense, for this man of categories himself belongs to a category of male characters who populate nineteenth-century literature in America and England. He is the bachelor figure, bespeaking in the nineteenth century an anxiety of cultural exhaustion, the worry of a discontented civilization whose complaint is voiced by Winterbourne when he cannot type Daisy because "he had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him." The loss is not simply of the American instinct but of instinct itself—spontaneity, real awe rather than artificial appreciation, vitality, everything Daisy has and he lacks. Emily Brontë's Lockwood, George Eliot's Casaubon, Melville's gourmands in his "Paradise of Bachelors" who substitute the gustatory for the romantic and heroic, any number of Hawthorne's males who victimize women to their own destruction—all are Winterbourne's literary kin. The bachelor, as I have written elsewhere.

is a grotesque with an oversized intellect, a shrunken body, and a shrivelled heart. He refuses the human community; he will not risk relatedness, preferring to experiment on others or to observe them from a voyeuristic distance. Crippled by self-consciousness, if he loves he often runs away to maintain an equilibrium that is passion's defeat. Impotent and vengeful, highly intellectual but unwise, he sells his soul for a sullen invulnerability that is itself fraudulent, for his great need is to impress others.

This is Winterbourne's literary lineage.

The bachelor is a function not only of over-civilization but of a tradition in male authorship in the Romantic period by which the femme fatale is cleared of charges. Such writers as Keats and Hawthorne engage misogynist legends that blame evil on women and rewrite them to redefine the evil as inherent in the manner that men view women; and this has everything to do with Daisy Miller and with James and Daisy Miller.

James's explicit allusions in the tale are to Cherbuliez and Byron, and the latter particularly has to do with that cultural fatigue we are describing. If Byron's heroes suffer an exhaustion of spirit from idealistic questing, Winterbourne, fleeing such quest while alluding to Byron, suffers Weltschmerz squared and without glory, as a "Manfred Manqué,' in Susan Koprince's phrase. But the most powerful influences on Daisy Miller are not explicit. Central here is Hawthorne, about whom James was to write a full book in the next year. [In The School of Hawthorne, 1986], Richard Brodhead argues persuasively that "influence" is too mild a term to apply to the relation between Hawthorne and James, that James "perfectly internalized" Hawthorne from his earliest writings, giving fiction the dignity of internal literary history.

Daisy Miller is such a thoroughly meditated variation on Hawthorne's tale "Rappaccini's Daughter" that it seems folly to enumerate the parallels—Winterbourne's resemblance to Hawthorne's Giovanni in their voyeurism, secrecy, failure of faith, and destructive conformity to an ethic of cynical skepticism parading as respectability; Daisy's resemblance to Hawthorne's Beatrice in their joint status as femmes fatales who are far more sinned against than sinning. It is more to the point to quote a single passage from Hawthorne: "Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright!" exclaims the narrator. "It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions." In Winterbourne's case, while the "lurid intermixture" of his feelings prepares Daisy's doom, his demand for resolution seals it. In the "luminous dusk" of the Colosseum, with his "sudden illumination," Winterbourne unknowingly perceives via the darkness visible of his own sick spirit. Hawthorne's tale also connects James to Keats, for Hawthorne's Beatrice, poisonous yet pure, is herself a reminiscence of Lamia, the snake-turned-woman who captures a lover but sweetly, and who is destroyed by the lover's demand to show off his prize in a public wedding. She is ruined by his egotism and by his faith in a sophist teacher, Apollonius, the equivalent of Hawthorne's Baglioni and James's Mrs. Costello. Winterbourne stands with Giovanni (whose name, played upon, becomes Giovanelli and a better spirit in James's redaction) and Keats's callow, publicity-seeking Lycius as apparently pleasant if shallow youths who are yet male murderers.

But Hawthorne's tale goes back further, to an Italy older than Daisy's or Beatrice's. Beatrice was Dante's beloved, and the history of the poet's sublimation of his lust for her, to the point where he can experience God through her, is the ideal development that Hawthorne's Giovanni and James's Winterbourne fail miserably to achieve. Through Hawthorne, James reaches back to Dante's Rome—and to Dante's Satan, for Winterbourne's name is redolent of the Devil of the Inferno. Dante portrays a wintry Satan, devoid of all light and warmth, icily fixed in that loneliness that is the appropriate form of his utter self-love. The only motion available to Dante's Devil is the futile beating of his wings. Like Dante's lesser damned ones, like Winterbourne in the devastating final sentence of James's tale, Satan is condemned to endless repetition. The beating of his wings only fixes him more firmly in that ice which is the image of his hatred of others. This failed motion, repetitive yet worsening, also characterizes Winterbourne, incapable of "going on" or "going too far," capable only of "going round" and getting nowhere, beating his wings. By this network of allusions, James is saying nothing so crude as that Satan is Winterbourne's real identity. He is saying something worse, that this is the rough context for understanding what Winterbourne by his choices has made himself become.

But what has James become in the act of writing, Daisy Miller? It is certainly possible that James was working through the premature death of his beloved iconoclastic cousin Minnie Temple, that Daisy is a less intellectual surrogate for this real woman who died at an early age. For a more meaningful answer, we can refer to the relation between Hawthorne and another of his bachelors, Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance. As characternarrator, Coverdale bears a structural resemblance to Winterbourne, though James as narrator occasionally opens just enough narrative distance from his hero to satirize him, as in the early passage on what Winterbourne's theoretical enemies might say. Coverdale too is an idler, a more-and-more minor poet, a voyeur, an analyzer, a skeptic conformist, full of jealousy and lust and punished by the narrative into learning less and less of the truth of the individuals with whom he is obsessed. He misses all the major scenes, just as Winterbourne is progressively shut out of Daisy's life, staring at an occluding parasol. Yet in many ways Coverdale seems Hawthorne's avatar, for his refusal to share the Utopian hopes of the Blithedalers mirrors Hawthorne's reaction to his summer at Brook Farm. So too, James, reaching a point in his expatriation where he might have feared "living too long in foreign parts," and, more important, opting out of that revolution in American manhood whereby the new middle class had established competitive individualism, a rivalry for dominance, as its leading principle, much resembles Winterbourne. What Irving Howe writes of Hawthorne and Coverdale [in Politics and the Novel, 1957] may serve exactly for James and his Winterbourne. Howe notes the conflict in Hawthorne between a social self which "could summon no large enthusiasm" and "a powerful impulse within him" that "worked to assault and deride that scepticism." Thus Coverdale "is a self-portrait of Hawthorne, but a highly distorted and mocking self-portrait, as if Hawthorne were trying to isolate and thereby exorcise everything within him that impedes full participation in life." This seems to me exactly true of James in relation to the materials we have discussed.

With one exception. I think James has achieved something better here and throughout his career than merely an exorcism. Leverenz notes that the writers of Hawthorne's generation sought a manhood that would refuse the old aristocratic requisites but also would avoid the new demands upon manhood of rivalrous individualism. Instead, he writes, they sought, by the creation of heuristic, unsettling narratives, to unseat themselves and their readers, to "fashion styles of self-dispossession." Just so, James refuses the aristocracy of Winterbourne and the competing party of Randolph and Mr. Miller. That other alternative of self-dispossession, the one that feels what cannot be reasoned and questions all without the need for finality, is the manhood Winterbourne fails to locate and James practices. It is the site where manhood becomes ungendered and begins to become sexed humanity.