[In the following essay, Wood records her impressions of Daisy Miller, noting that Daisy, as an example of the typical American girl, is ultimately 'public property"—little more than an object to be acted upon.]

And there she was, Daisy Miller, the American Girl, pretty, vulgar, vulnerable, formally presented to the public in 1878 by the young Henry James. She charmed, angered, and amused Anglo-American readers in her own day, provided her author with his only commercial success, and lingers potently today with still provocative claims on the American imagination. I know that her story has long held a tenacious and personal if somewhat elusive fascination for me. I read it over a decade ago on my first trip to Europe, in the midst of my own complicated discovery that I too was the American Girl; I passed it on later as prescribed reading to a young man I knew—a not very subtle reminder of the privileges and perils of involvement with such a creature; I have taught it half a dozen times with undiminished interest. Yet I was never much like Daisy Miller. I wouldn't have liked to think of myself as being "pretty"; I have never dressed fashionably or even well; and I have always fancied myself as some sort of an intellectual. Why do I care about flat little Daisy in her fine clothes? I think it is because she reveals what I and others, whether rightly or wrongly, welcomed and dreaded daily in our youth and retained a sense of later: the fact that the American Girl is absolutely and quintessentially public property.

James creates Daisy's reality for his readers not by illuminating her interior life, but by throwing a flood of light on her exterior existence. This is not just James' technique, but Daisy's substance as James understood it. Chronic over-exposure is somehow part of her nature. We learn a great deal about the American Girl from the fact that Daisy Miller is not really about Daisy Miller, but rather about other people's opinions of Daisy Miller. This is not to say that anyone in the book, with the possible exception of Winterbourne, gives her close scrutiny and careful analysis, or tries to understand her. No, the issue at hand is simply whether those observing her will accept or reject her. Daisy does not at first realize that she can only be chosen or discarded, but James does. She is somehow a product and the only question can be whether or not one wants to buy. Daisy Miller taps the paralyzed anxiety of American girlhood in a way that shuttles me back to adolescent nightmares of the terrors of wallflowerdom. Accepted or rejected, loved or hated, living or dead? Which?

Daisy, so pretty, so processed, so dependent, comes from a country which has Hollywood in its future. Absurd as it may sound, she anticipates to me the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe. Daisy Miller exists only as she pricks the imagination of her public. Her obliviousness to this fact is but a sign of unconscious proficiency; an acquired trait has per force become instinctual. She is a professional attention-getter. But the attention which creates her also transfixes and traps her. And like Monroe, what beauty she possesses is in her slightness, her final powerlessness to save herself, her inevitable fragility. Monroe died, I sometimes think, of her inability to stop pleasing; Daisy, her faint fictional prototype, from a rather desperate decision to displease. But she has for me some of the same pathos. An ever-present audience which has ceased to comprehend, if it ever did, can sometimes leave the performer with no recourse but suicide.

Perhaps I could say that Daisy Miller is finally not about Daisy, but about her audience which is hostile as well as uncomprehending. One of the many ironies of Daisy's fate is that her author is less interested in her plight than he is in her enemy's problems and methods, for these are much closer to his own difficulties of self-definition than Daisy's unverbalized struggle. Her audience of opponents is essentially parasitic, and its chosen weapon is naturally that of the parasite: gossip, that "confidential" talk by which we form and flay those who in some way perform for us. The process of gossip already engages James' attention: it was in certain ways to be the model for his novelistic craft. He shows its function here to be not as a protection for traditional conventions and ideals in a stable society, but rather as a substitute for them in a transplanted and unstable community of emigres and tourists forced to make critical pretension take the place of inherited values. In the world of Daisy Miller, gossip is not the traditional home-grown, over-the-back-fence garrulous and wayward chatter of washing day, but a kind of art, the perfected form of curiosity and malice by which alienated men and women create and discard each other's personalities and their own. Gossip is the culture of the dispossessed, and as such, provides the art of innuendo, the technique of suggestiveness by which the articulate exert their power in James' fiction. The expatriate society of Daisy's Rome relies on scandal and the snide as a means both of self-expression and of social manipulation.

Yet, although their talk sets the terms of Daisy's destruction, it in no way brings the event about. That task James assigns to Frederick Winterbourne, a young American long domiciled in Geneva who turns out to be Daisy's major enemy and James' chief concern. He is the most important member of Daisy's audience for he alone is potentially a critic in the real sense of the word. He himself causes little comment, generating only rather vague, uninformed rumors about a possible mistress. The scent he leaves is apparently faint, veiled, undecided; he is essentially privatized and inaccessible. But he is drawn to Daisy, and while his "set" is that of the emigres who denounce her, he long resists the gossip which passes as judgment. If he is a bit disdainful, at least he is disdainful of everyone. He wants, and tries, to judge for himself.

Daisy knows perfectly well that only Winterbourne of those around her can possibly spring her from her trap or permanently condemn her to it. James shows her accepting, even willing her death as soon as she realizes that he has emotionally dismissed her. Yet in the face of her utter need of him, why does she treat him as she does? It is clear from the start that Daisy likes Winterbourne; it is equally clear that, once arrived in Rome, she does everything she can to make herself unappealing to him. Yet given her dilemma as James has displayed it, she has no other course of action open to her. Her struggle for survival must involve putting her head on the block and calling for execution.

To cease being a product and to become a person, Daisy must annihilate her market value as irrelevant. To be sure that Winterbourne cares for her self, she must demand that this most ceremonious and "stiff" of young men accept her when she is absolutely unacceptable. And perhaps at the bottom of her lawless little heart lies a belief that if she all but destroys herself, he will have to intervene, and massively. This is a perverse way of looking for love, the tactic of one who does not know what love is, the strategy of "an American girl," whose father is absorbed in business, whose mother is absorbed in stolid domesticity, whose brother is absorbed in himself. Daisy's world, as James reveals it to us, is a singularly loveless one. Her distinction is that, no matter how confusedly, antagonistically or backhandedly, she is looking for something her experience could hardly have told her existed, and for which, if found, she might well have had no adequate response.

Winterbourne's failure to cipher her inverted code is hardly surprising, but it spells tragedy not just for Daisy, but for him. One might well ask why, since James makes it crystal-clear that there is nothing in Daisy herself which would attract a man of taste like Winterbourne. She is pretty, but she is deficient. She comes from a society where there are no long-standing cultural traditions, and she is plainly an advertisement of their absence. Small wonder, James seems to be hinting, that she has a "monotonous" voice, that her language is impoverished past the power of any degree of prettiness to camouflage ("well," a kind of non-word, is, too tellingly, her favorite word). Predictably, Europe is a closed book to her.

Yet James knows that Winterbourne needs Daisy not perhaps for what she is—for James is as uninterested in that problem as are her fellow characters—but for the experience she offers to one in Winterbourne's position. Winterbourne is of course an expatriate, who pursues "studies" in Geneva, and enjoys quoting Byron at night in the Colosseum. He has adopted the role of sentimental traveler, a well-worn one in the brief annals of American fiction, and one whose viability Henry James in 1878 had every reason for wishing to test and understand.

Just three years before writing Daisy Miller, after nearly a decade of vacillation, James had left America for good. He had heralded his decision in 1875 by an allegorical story called "Benvolio," whose hero, in choosing New England over Europe, sacrifices his creativity to his morality. James knew that he could not meet the cost such a sacrifice would impose on him. Yet he never lost his belief in the possibilities for important literature in America. When he wrote Howells in 1880 that he (Howells) was "magnificently and heroically right" in deciding to work from within American culture, I see no reason for doubting his sincerity. He knew, however, that Howells lacked what an American writer to be great must have, "A grasping imagination," the ability for "sniffing … the very earth of our foundations" and there to find the "very heart" of human nature. Melville had it, although James seems not to have known it, but James, as he surely at bottom felt, did not. James needed, as F. W. Dupee and Leon Edel have shown, to be an outsider, even a voyeur, in order to create, to be, as he put it, "an observer in a place where there is most in the world to observe."

Furthermore James wanted to establish the value of American literature by making it art, even at the sacrifice of mass appeal. James Russell Lowell could still proclaim "Let no man write a line that he would not have his daughter read," and the daughters of the land read him with pleasure. But Howells tells us that New Englanders, "especially the women," disliked James' work. James desired, as he later frankly put it, to reclaim the novel from "the ladies and children—by whom I mean… the reader irreflective and uncritical." In other words, he wished to write in some sense an intellectual fiction, one which could not be written for a nonintellectual audience. His final if limited success was to be as a writer in a recreated patronage system of authorship—working long and arduously to please the discriminating few—not under the pressures of a commercial system—working systematically and perhaps superficially to capture the uncritical many.

James' decision to expatriate was probably the right one, and his intelligence in finding a crucial distinction between Scylla and Charybdis fine. That same intelligence, however, never let him forget that he had taken the least debilitating of two potentially debilitating options. Winterbourne is the expression of this awareness. If the American Girl Daisy Miller displays for James the dangers of over-advertisement attendant upon the essentially commercialized life-style which he had rejected, the expatriate male in that story exhibits the perils of over-privatization attendant upon the esthetic one which he had chosen. The mutual need of these two figures is inevitable and transparent.

As Winterbourne listens to Mrs. Miller discussing her liver ailments, or young Randolph boasting about America and his own perversity, he has the air of a man politely and resolutely swallowing the unswallowable at an unsuccessful dinner party. In actuality, he is being fed the coarse bread of life. Indeed, in the Millers' unconscious candor lies Winterbourne's only chance of replenishment. Daisy and her relatives are invaluable to him as they are to James, because they spread before him the vast vistas of the "vulgar," the flat terrain of American mass culture that his residence in Europe has safely yet dangerously distanced to a subculture for him.

And Winterbourne finds not just comedy but magic and excitement both in the new and in the casual freedom with which it is offered. He marvels at the easy aplomb Daisy shows chatting about her personal life or riding in public on a boat unescorted except by a gentleman friend. Who can tell what other astonishing transformations of experience she can accomplish? It is Winterbourne's pretentious aunt who, in discussing Daisy's unabashed display of familiarity with her Italian friend, identifies her appeal:" 'she thinks of nothing. She goes on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age.'" It is precisely Daisy's extraordinary public quality which is her "innocence" and her attraction. It is her denial, perhaps her ignorance, of dark corners which draws Winterbourne—and James—to her in mingled envy, hope and disdain. Unawares, Daisy suggests the tantalizing half-promise of a golden vulgarity, the release from the strain of cultural and sexual privatization—the essential resource of liberation. Winterbourne, perhaps like James, distrusts this promise but his torment is that he does not disbelieve it. He destroys, but he regrets.

This is where the book ends, not with Daisy's death but, characteristically, with the effect of her death on Winterbourne, and with James' penetrating and subtle analysis of his predicament. Geneva, the "little metropolis of Calvinism" to which Winterbourne returns and whose Puritan aspects James carefully stresses, represents all too clearly the literal historical origin of New England. Geneva, whose young ladies never do as Daisy did, symbolizes here, as New England was in part to do in James' book on Hawthorne, a spirit of hostility to the free play of the imagination. Ironically, Winterbourne, in following the "gossip" of his countrywomen, has simply chosen as guide the New England conscience debased and operating in alien territory. He has traveled only to stay at home, and worse, in doing so, he has nourished not his creativity but his guilt. This was the fate that James himself was to try to avoid, although not perhaps with complete success.

Here the book closes, yet I cannot close, as James intended I should, on Winterbourne's loss, because that is not the real force of the story for me. There is a certain self-pity lurking amidst James' ironies here, and perhaps I want some of my own. Yes, poor Winterbourne, James seems to be telling us, and I sympathize even while I note Daisy's displacement. Like all those other introspective, somewhat ineffectual and self-condemning observer-figures who decide and re-decide through the pages of James, Hawthorne and Howells, Winterbourne, James implies, must finally bear the burden of life. By a curious logic, it is apparently only the good-looking, nonconforming woman or girl who has the privilege of dying and leaving that rather unemployed man who failed to understand her a permanent sinecure of self-indulgent grave-tending. Of course it is not so simple, but still I am drawn to Daisy not just because Winterbourne deserts her, but because in a sense James does too. It is of her essence that she does not quite "belong," even in her own book. She is so vulnerable, this Daisy Miller, an American Girl whose superficiality is her complexity. She never knows she is pathetic, decked out in Daddy's trophies but without Daddy, emblem and victim of mass culture, addicted to attention and ignorant of love, perishing of that inability to articulate peculiar to a cult figure obscurely dissatisfied with its cult, losing her audience but not her image: the eternal object. Who looks at her, who owns her, who kills her, who buries her, who misses her, who writes about her, and why— that's what matters, there's her story. Dear Daisy, when they've all gone home, do you exist? I need to know.