SOURCE: "Daisy Miller and the Metaphysician," in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Autumn, 1980, pp. 270-79.

[In the following essay, Wilson and Westbrook investigate the metaphysical aspects of Daisy Miller, as well as its resemblance to certain mythological stories.]

According to Henry James, "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." James's fiction, consistently faithful to this thesis, seems to contain always one more nuance, one more complexity.

Critics writing on Daisy Miller, however, accept the judgments of characters who, by the Jamesian definition of experience, are not qualified to judge. Mrs. Costello has no desire to explore complications but the critical consensus accepts her simplistic analysis of Winterbourne: his problem is that he has been living "too long out of the country." Winterbourne seeks a formula to live by, but the consensus accepts his belated discovery of Daisy's innocence as if it were a tardy but meaningful revelation. Actually, Winterbourne has allowed himself only two possible views of Daisy, good or bad, which does not suggest that he has learned to make discriminations in the "immense sensibility" of human experience.

What happens in Daisy Miller cannot be evaluated by the snobbish disinterest of Mrs. Costello or by the absolutes of her Calvinistic nephew. Daisy is innocent, yes, but Henry James was not content with one-dimensional character portraits. The habit of his mind was to explore. With Daisy Miller—subtitled A Study—his probings led him through the context of social innocence and into the troublesome land of primal innocence, something closer to the Undine myth than to the "victimized innocence" of Catherine Sloper in Washington Square. Daisy is undone because she is a creature of inclinations, a willful child of nature whose vulnerability is more psychological than social. She is undone, also, by Winterbourne's failure to love her, but the reasons for Winterbourne's failure go beyond society's corruption of good manners from grace to tyranny and include a Calvinistic betrayal of his own primal self.

When Winterbourne protests that the Millers are "'innocent only'" and "'not bad,'" the distinction does not interest Mrs. Costello. The Millers, she argues, are "'hopelessly vulgar,'" bad enough so that one knows not to associate with them, which is sufficient information for this life. She says, "'Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being "bad" is a question for the metaphysicians.'" Clearly, it is not a question for Mrs. Costello. It is equally clear, however, that the question is of intense interest to the author of Daisy Miller. The "metaphysician," it follows, is Henry James.

Winterbourne, for his part, is interested and even bedeviled by the question of Daisy; but he seeks a "formula," an answer that will save him the pain of confrontation with himself. At the beginning of the story, he is said to be "studying." Rumors mention a mysterious "foreign lady—a person older than himself." At the end of the story, he is again said to be "studying" and to have, perhaps, a "very clever foreign lady." In brief, he is back where he started, the implication being that he has learned nothing, or that anything he may have learned has not come with fire sufficient to change his life of Calvinistic retreat.

Beyond manners, and invisible to the snobbish eyes of Mrs. Costello and the categorical eyes of Winterbourne, is another dimension. After establishing his hero and the setting, James introduces the Miller family—all a bit strange—through a puzzling character, the oft-noted but never-analyzed Randolph. A nine-year-old little brother with only seven teeth and a face that is "aged," who carries a sinister alpenstock "the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that he approached …", a child who talks and intimidates as Randolph does is not the ordinary little brother.

Wearing red hose and a red cravatte, Randolph is introduced as he pauses in front of Winterbourne: "'Will you give me a lump of sugar?' he asked, in a sharp, hard little voice—a voice immature, and yet, somehow, not young." James and many others were concerned about a current issue, the damage done to spoiled rich children being dragged around Europe, but that does not account for Randolph, who looks like a homunculus and is sometimes a classically impossible child. At Mrs. Walker's, Randolph declares, "'We've got a bigger place than this.… It's all gold on the walls.'" And when his mother replies that she told him he would "'say something'" improper, he snaps back, "'I told you,'" and gives "Winterbourne a thump on the knee." Randolph is not a Tom Sawyer grown rich.

Like his parents, he has dyspepsia. Like his strangely passive mother, he suffers from insomnia. Randolph—in face, voice, and manner—is an amorphous combination of the child and the old man. Henry James as metaphysician is weaving his "spider-web."

Randolph is unshaped, an energy of inclinations, a striking example of what C. G. Jung calls the "irrational third," the child at a preconscious stage of development and with an uncertain potential. Far from being odd merely, or a sociological example merely, Randolph is very much his sister's little brother. Both are in a primal state of development. Both follow their inclinations. For his role as the one who introduces Daisy to Winterbourne, Randolph is specifically appropriate.

Daisy's manner, like her prepared-for entrance, is carefully managed. She poses before Winterbourne, before his bench, with the garden and light just right. James is creating a portrait, a technique he often used to interweave the inner and outer worlds. In The Ambassadors, for example, Strether sees the canoe come drifting in, just right, to complete the picture, as if by surprise and yet as if from the personal unconscious.

In keeping with the autonomy associated with the unconscious, Daisy is very much in command. She is not silent, at first, from being shy, and then suddenly talkative, from shyness released. Daisy is "not in the least embarrassed." She is "neither offended nor fluttered" by Winterbourne's forwardness. She has posed for him, in front of his bench. He responds. She looks at him briefly, then looks away, and waits. Daisy is a cool and even aggressive innocent, and there is—in the presentation and withholding of her self, in her elfin emissary, in her affinity for garden, water, and the dark—a suggestion of the natural in the archetypal sense of that word.

Beyond the social themes, the realistic basis of Daisy Miller, there are parallels with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Beatrice, Freud's concept of the unheimlich, Rudolph Otto on the nouminous, Jung on the unconscious, and with the myths of Lamia and Undine. These parallels, we think, argue for a corrective in our standard reading of Daisy. By definition, a social innocent is too self-conscious and gives excessive weight to the rules and powers of propriety and the dating game. A primal innocent is just the opposite: there is no blushing or flirtatious self-consciousness, and social rules are not felt to be real. That which brings pleasure—sugar, dinner parties, or whatever—is desired, but what is real to the primal innocent is inclination; and the development of the self is in jeopardy. Daisy's manners are American, but her psyche is unformed by any standards—European or American—and the person invited to love her will contribute to the decisions of her developing soul by his capacity to love or to betray. And that is why she responds to Winterbourne as if they were old friends, then turns away, blank. Daisy breaks rules by inclination, not from ignorance; her being is at stake, potential.

Dangers awaiting the primal innocent, furthermore, are substantive and personal as well as social. Thus the frightening delicacy of Henry James makes it seem, at times, that the innocent Miss Daisy may be evil after all. One can even begin to imagine that something is going on between Eugenio and Daisy. In the scene in which Daisy teases Winterbourne about the 11:00 p.m. boatride, for example, Eugenio's role is suggestive of the sinister; and yet Daisy teases him, even flirts with him, as her helpless mother watches. Then suddenly, with the information that Randolph is finally asleep, the whole scene is dropped. The passive mother makes a rare decision, assuming Daisy's assent, which comes automatically as the mother knows it will: with Randolph in bed, they will now retire. Supporting evidence comes from Daisy's love of the dark, the hint that she can see in the dark (as her mother approaches from a distance), her many and often mysterious gentlemen friends, and her disturbing affinity for the miasma of the Colosseum, where she settles down peacefully in the moonlight, as if at home in a place of evil and death.

But before the Colosseum scene—at the party, when Mrs. Walker snubs Daisy—all hints of evil are undercut. Suddenly, a marked change occurs in the story. Daisy, who seems to know exactly what she is doing, who has been told the rules repeatedly by her mother and by Winterbourne and his friends, is genuinely surprised and hurt. How can that be? After all her social experience in America and Europe, after all the explanations by so many people, after acknowledging the finality of her decision not to get into Mrs. Walker's carriage (" '… you must give me up' "), how can she be shocked? It is not possible to believe that Daisy is naive to the point of idiocy. Her shock cannot be accounted for in terms of social innocence; but it can be accounted for, we believe, in terms of primal innocence. Daisy is energized by a spontaneity long since buried in the Calvinistic soul of her friend Winterbourne, and the harsh forces of propriety are not yet real to her nature. Daisy, in fact, resists the loss of her preconscious state of being: "'I don't think I want to know what you mean.… I don't think I should like it.'" Since it is difficult to mature without betraying the spontaneous preconscious, Daisy accepts those social rules which are games merely, but rejects the threat of a developing consciousness.

When the harsh forces of society do finally penetrate her spontaneous nature, she changes. Society for Daisy is pleasure, not ultimate reality as it is for Mrs. Costello, and its loss is merely the loss of one possible source of pleasure. But Winterbourne's refusal to return her love—a refusal sponsored and supported by social forces—is a rejection of her being. Daisy is jolted rather than guided toward consciousness. Her independence does not mature from the spirit toward the world, as it might were she moved lovingly into it by Winterbourne. She becomes defiant. With her natural joy short-circuited, she moves toward despair. The manner of telling the story changes also, with the narrator using ironic language to describe Daisy's detractors: "these shrewd people had quite made up their minds"; her fellow countrymen "desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that … Miss Daisy Miller … was not representative—was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal."

"Innocent" and "bad" are abstract categories used by Calvinists, gossips, snobs and other narrow-minded people who are impatient with distinctions. James the metaphysician is concerned not only with types and combinations of innocence and evil but with the drama of meta-physics, a changing land in between. And the concern is pervasive. Even the apparently innocent Mr. Giovanelli has his dark moments. He must have known, without needing any information from Mrs. Walker, that Daisy's reputation would be injured if she strolled with him on the Pincio. Did Giovanelli mean to appease Daisy at any cost, or feel that he had a better chance of marrying her if she had no American friends? The rhetorical sequence of the conversation in the cemetery is worth considering. Winterbourne asks Giovanelli "'[w]hy the devil'" he took her to that "'fatal place.'" Giovanelli says "'she wanted to go.'" Winterbourne rightly says this is "no reason.'" Under pressure to explain why he took Daisy to a place he knew to be lethal, Giovanelli says, "'If she had lived, I should have got nothing. She would never have married me, I am sure.'" In what way is that an answer to the question asked? It strains critical good manners to think that Giovanelli, finding that he could not have Daisy, consciously tried to kill her, or let her commit suicide; but ominous possibilities have been suggested in this scene and passim and are substantive to the story.

The special tension of James, that air of things beings up for grabs, unknown, not yet through happening, is due in part to his fascination with human intercourse as a drama in which the end—contra the predestination of Calvinism—is not determined. Daisy is warned, and Winterbourne was "booked" to make a mistake; but the motivations and decisions of both involve character, an identity which describes but does not prescribe. Daisy, like Alice Staverton and May Bartram, is potential, alive, asking to be loved; and Winterbourne, like Spencer Brydon and John Marcher, is also in dramatic suspension, his soul too at jeopardy.

A critical language for this dimension of Daisy Miller—no claims of influence intended—is available in the Undine myth. In The Uncreating Word: Romanticism And The Object, Irving Massey provides an excellent and useful analysis.

The real problem is that consciousness itself, without the intervention of other people [Winterbourne is excessively self-conscious, and he lives, essentially, without other people], produces a division between the inner and outer dimensions of the self [Winterbourne vacillates between his attraction for Daisy and his Calvinistic suspicions].

For self read "Winterbourne," for innocence read "Daisy," as Massey continues:

A self which has become an object is a contradiction in terms. The attempt of the self to escape the status of an object is the pursuit of innocence, the attempt to recapture the primal, preconscious harmony. But it is an attempt which is doomed, for the self that wishes to recall its object-self is already compromised. It has been guilty of the original act of objectification; it is contaminated with self-consciousness. And consciousness is incompatible with innocence; inevitably, it leads toward experience, a sinister state which in these terms turns out to be strangely similar to abstraction or theory.

The Undine myth itself, as told by Massey, bears a striking relevance to Daisy Miller: "The story begins with the arrival of a young knight at the shore of the lake." Then a young girl arrives, a "quicksilvery, willful, temperamental girl, totally spoiled and uncontrollable.… On being crossed in a whim, she stamps out into the night." Later, she is discovered "on an island in the midst of a torrent… lying in the moonlight, apparently completely unafraid." After persuasion by the knight, Undine "finally agrees to return." But she does not return "because of any sense of impropriety in her behaviour or of duty or guilt towards her foster-parents. She is innocent.… She does not know the meaning of repression or voluntary self-frustration."

Winterbourne is unable to persuade his primal innocent to return; but the end, for Daisy and Undine, is the same, and the parallels are clear. Daisy's strong desire to enter society is coupled with an even stronger determination that her gentlemen friends must not tell her what to do. Daisy's cheerful American manners are coupled with a strange affinity for water and darkness. She wears Paris gowns in exquisite good taste but is nicknamed "Daisy."

The Undine parallel, furthermore, helps explain why Daisy must die. She is not an American flirt who is disappointed in romance and therefore courts death, a reading which reduces Daisy to contradictory stereotypes. The actual case on which the story is based does invite sentimentality, and James may well have felt the tug; but Daisy Miller is not the story of a romantic pining-away. On the level of character motivation, Daisy is hurt by Winterbourne's perfidy and does something she is not supposed to do, something like climbing too high or too far out because someone one loves does not love in return. On the psychological level, not to be loved in youth is not to develop to the next stage. Growth stops. Undine, as Massey explains, "has no soul; totally moved by the elements and the natural forces of the world, she will, at the end, dissolve and return to them." Daisy, a lovely and natural American girl, is innocent, in part, because she is motivated more by the vitality of what she feels and sees and wants than she is by the importance of society's strictures. This is her charm, her present personality, but it is also dangerous. If the primal innocent does not grow and mature beyond her natural vitality, then she must return to nature, back to the sea, or, in Daisy's case, "beneath the cypresses and the thick spring-flowers."

Again, we do not intend to argue that Daisy is Undine or that Henry James (who was interested in psychological and occult materials) made conscious use of the Undine myth. The intent of the comparison is to suggest a critical language to account for specifics in the story which cannot be accounted for by the simplistic terms of social innocence and social knowledge.

This argument holds not only for Daisy herself, but for Winterbourne. If the standard reading is correct, Winterbourne is a good and sensitive man who—too late—understands Daisy. But this approach does not account adequately for Winterbourne's actions or attitudes, especially as regards Daisy, nor does it explain the emphasis on Calvinism. What is the purpose of the narrator's odd and seemingly pointless conjectures about Winterbourne's reasons for staying so long at Geneva? The first explanation is assigned to friends: Winterbourne "was at Geneva 'studying.'" The second explanation, offered by "certain persons," somehow different from friends, is that Winterbourne "was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself." Then a third explanation is offered, one which comes directly from the narrator:

Very few Americans—indeed I think none—had ever seen this lady, about whom there were some singular stories. But Winterboume had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there as a boy, and he had afterwards gone to college there—circumstances which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of these he had kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction to him.

Winterbourne, as we see later, has probably never had a proper romance. And yet the mysterious foreign lady does exist. When Daisy assumes a "mysterious charmer in Geneva," Winterbourne is amazed: "How did Miss Daisy Miller know that there was a charmer in Geneva?" The narrator then tells us that Winterbourne, "who denied the existence of such a person," is "divided between amazement at the rapidity of her induction and amusement at the frankness of her persiflage." Daisy is just now, he feels, "an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity."

It seems that an affair, for this Calvinist, is dirty, something to be denied, a secret to be kept by American colleagues, who are presumably too refined to mention such matters (his friends say he is "studying"). It is only those who are really enemies (and Winterbourne is too nice and neutral to earn an enemy) who would mention the foreign lady or who (being Europeans) would ever be allowed to see the proof of her existence. For Daisy to sense the possibility of an affair is for her to be guilty of "crudity," even though her manner of chattering on in romantic anger is a sign of her "innocence." Winterbourne, in short, has already denied his foreign lady as, later on, he will deny Daisy. He has associated sex with the unmentionable, something gentlemen do not discuss. And a lady, of course, must not even realize the existence of such things.

What, then, are Winterbourne's motives? Repeatedly, he is struck by how pretty Daisy is. He likes her personality. He finds that her unaffected response to life tugs at his inner being. Outwardly, he defends Daisy as being, after all, innocent. In the privacy of his consciousness, he associates Daisy's charm with wickedness. The contradiction becomes clear when he listens to his aunt's report on the Millers:

"I shouldn't wonder if he [Eugenio] dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners.… He probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a Count. He sits with them in the garden.… I think he smokes."

Clearly this is gossip: "I shouldn't wonder," "Very likely," "He probably," "I think." And yet Winterbourne accepts these conjectures as the truth. These "disclosures" help "him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild." But when Mrs. Costello challenges the "respectability" of the Millers, Winterbourne pretends to be hurt: "'Ah, you are cruel!' said the young man. 'She's a very nice girl.'"

The "division between the inner and outer dimensions" of Winterbourne's "self" coincides in detail with the fragmentation described by Massey. Winterbourne thinks of Daisy as a type, he searches for a "formula" by which to accommodate his mixed feelings, he vacillates between thinking of her as good or bad, he contradicts himself by saying one thing and feeling the opposite, and he is intrigued as much by the hope that Daisy will prove to be virtuous as by the oblique titillation of the opposite possibility:

If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the liberal license allowed to these young ladies [Mrs. Costello's granddaughters], it was probable that anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not appreciate her justly.

The paratactical implications are that Winterbourne is "impatient to see her again" because "anything might be expected of her"; and the words "instinct" and "justly" are left to carry a deceptive, disturbing, and very Jamesian ambiguity.

So the critics are right to quote Mrs. Costello: Winterbourne has "lived too long out of the country." But this is merely the first strand in the metaphysician's web. Winterbourne has become, also, a foreigner to his own inner feelings. He cannot read his unconscious or natural self any better than he can read Miss Daisy. And the critics are right to say that Daisy is an American innocent, but her innocence is also a profoundly human determination to assert the original self, to resist the desire of consciousness to capture and enslave the unconscious. Youth wants to be what it wants to be.

Thus it is appropriate for the climax to come on a special territory. The moonlit night in the Colosseum—suggesting the unconscious—is for Winterbourne unbearable. Confronted with this ancient presence, unable to rationalize further with gentlemen-at-the-pub thoughts of Daisy as a woman capable of "anything," Winterbourne refuses to love his Lamia, Beatrice, or Undine. This is his personal tragedy; for, as we see in "Pandora," Henry James believed it was possible for a Daisy Miller type to be rescued by love.

Pandora Day has a vague father and mother, comparable to the vague Mrs. Miller and absent Mr. Miller (the preconscious is in need of a guide). Pandora's little-brother-Randolph has become a disturbingly independent youth of poise and strength. He is detached but contented, and older people recognize and respect his confident personality. Pandora herself is Undine matured, the amalgamation of consciousness and unconsciousness which Daisy Miller, with better luck, might have achieved. Count Otto Vogelstein, a "stiff" Germanic version of Winterbourne, is reading a story entitled Daisy Miller and doubting his ability to analyze Americans scientifically (Winterbourne's "formula"). The Count takes Pandora to be a flirt. She seems innocent yet forward, completely unaware of social restrictions. But this "Daisy" is married and mature. She is able to maintain her spontaneous charm and to function successfully at the presidential level of American diplomatic circles on behalf of her husband.

The implication of "Pandora," confirmed by Daisy Miller itself, is that Winterbourne's statement to Daisy at the Colosseum is terribly wrong:" 'I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!'" And his conclusion after Daisy's death is, however formal, unmistakably right: "It was on his conscience that he had done her injustice." But Winterbourne, to the very end, sees with the intellect. He is fragmented, a man with a good but timid will, living in fear of confrontation. Below the level of propriety and consciousness there exists another part of the self, a reality signalled by language and story: "'Quick! Quick!'" pleads Giovanelli at the Colosseum, "'if we get in by midnight we are quite safe.'"