[In the following essay, Gargano contends that Daisy Miller, considered as Winterbourne's and not Daisy's story, is "essentially the study of a young man's quest for innocence, a virtue for which his society has alienated itself ']

When John Foster Kirk rejected Daisy Miller as "an outrage on American girlhood," he unhappily misled critics of Henry James's novel into an obsessive preoccupation with its heroine. In his preface to the New York edition, James himself, perhaps still smarting from his rebuff, waives consideration of other aspects of the novel in his excessive concern with justifying his portrait of the maligned Daisy. Howells, too, because of the nature of his subject in Heroines of Fiction, focuses discussion of the novel on the appealing heroine.

Critical preoccupation with Daisy has fostered the view that the theme of the novel is the peril of a good but naive American girl in a stiffly conventional society. This simplification ignores the fact that Frederick Winterbourne, as the central intelligence, represents the consciousness upon which the events and characters of the novel have the greatest impact. Since he is always on the scene, observing, discriminating, and seeking to unravel the mystery of the enigmatic Daisy, the drama must, if James's art can be said to have any intention, structurally center in him. He, I believe, is the subject of the novel and not merely the lens through which Daisy's career is seen. His story has a richness that makes Daisy Miller more than a thin commentary on the lawless innocence of the American girl.

Winterbourne's visit to Vevey begins an experience which can be described, in one of James' favorite words, as an "initiation." In other words, Winterbourne leaves a world of fixed values, and adventures into a foreign one where only innate sensibility and large sympathy can guide him and where commitment to a restrictive code will surely hurt him. His attraction to Daisy, by wrenching him out of his moral and social insularity, offers him an opportunity to enlarge his consciousness and gain the psychic fulfilment that James's characters constantly seek and very rarely find in love. Thus, for all her independent charm, Daisy exists to test Winterbourne's ability to grow beyond his hitherto narrow and one-sided state into a fully realized human being.

Considered as Winterbourne's story, Daisy Miller is essentially the study of a young man's quest for innocence, a virtue from which his society has alienated itself. It is by no means accidental that Winterbourne meets Daisy in a garden—commonly associated with innocence—or that the severe Mrs. Costello describes the girl as romping "on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age." Indeed, the mis-en scene of the first section of the novel cleverly foreshadows the later conflict between innocence (here related to freedom) and the dark assumptions with which Winterbourne faces life. Winterbourne is visiting Vevey, which, because it resembles "an American watering-place," exhibits a more relaxed social life than is to be found elsewhere in Europe. Vevey is further identified with freedom by its proximity to the Castle of Chillon, unmistakably associated with Bonivard, a famous foe of tyranny. With typical finesse, James immediately emphasizes the spiritual distance between Vevey and Winterbourne, who "had an old attachment for the little capital of Calvinism." Certainly Geneva, later referred to "as the dark old city at the other end of the lake," symbolizes a rigidly conventional way of life whose forms mask a Puritan distrust of spontaneous and natural behavior. Winterbourne, who significantly attended school in Geneva and has many friends there, constantly assesses his new experiences by the standards of his spiritual home.

Vevey is the appropriate scene for Winterbourne's rencounter with a bewildering girl who "looked extremely innocent." But since innocence is the very thing in which Geneva has lost faith, Winterbourne consistently misreads Daisy's character and seeks to ferret out the arriere penske, the dubious motive behind her artless conversation. Still, his admiration of her constitutes a self-betrayal, a persistent belief in innocence perhaps rooted in his American origin and fortified by the romantic idealism of youth. Lacking as yet a fatal rigidity, he is offered an opportunity to discover innocence and escape the propriety that menaces the full flowering of his nature.

Winterbourne's initiation begins in a comic manner calculated to show his inability to appreciate instinctively the innocence of Daisy's character. When, contrary to the code of Geneva, he speaks to the unmarried Daisy, he wonders whether "he has gone too far." He risks "an observation on the beauty of the scene" and wrongly assumes that an excursion to Chillon with the girl must perforce include her mother as chaperone. When he attempts to classify her, she undermines all of his stuffy and inapplicable generalizations. He decides that she may be "cold," "austere," and "prim" only to find her spontaneous and as "decently limpid as the very cleanest water."

Winterbourne's perplexity in the presence of innocence indicates the extent to which he is "morally muddled." Unable to believe in natural goodness, which usurps freedoms of speech and action, he must analyze it with the suspicious rationalism of Geneva and thus miss its essential luster. Distrusting the authority of his feeling for Daisy's "natural elegance," he complacently pronounces her a flirt:

Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his seat;… he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt.

Winterbourne's comic ineptness demonstrates how poorly Geneva's formulas have prepared him to understand innocence.

His self-assurance is so halfhearted, however, that he takes his problem to his aunt, Mrs. Costello, the most reliable social authority he knows. Going to her with "a desire for trustworthy information," he suddenly betrays an inchoate perception of Daisy's nature. Though he uncritically allows Mrs. Costello's reference to the girl's "intimacy" with Eugenio to "make up his mind about Miss Daisy," he generously declares, "Ah you're cruel!… She's a very innocent girl!" In spite of his aunt's innuendoes, he holds to his purpose of taking Daisy to Chillon. Indeed, his momentary defection from Geneva appears so extreme that Mrs. Costello is confirmed in her refusal to be presented to his new acquaintance.

Winterbourne's recognition of Daisy's innocence may represent impatience with the stringent code of Geneva, but it can by no means be interpreted as thoroughgoing disillusionment. He sees only enough to be less blind than Mrs. Costello; if he departs from the dictates of propriety, he does so with customary prudence. Lacking the ardor and recklessness of a rebel, he is temperamentally doomed to swing in permanent vacillation between opposing claims. He has sensibility enough to be "touched, mortified, shocked" when he perceives Daisy's hurt at Mrs. Costello's refusal to see her; yet he is too tepid to do anything more than think of sacrificing "his aunt—conversationally." Even his trip to Chillon—perhaps his most daring action—is followed by his symbolical return to the bleak city of conformity. In his paralyzing introspection and most of his behavior, he is a morbid, though superficially cultivated, latter-day Puritan.

Nevertheless, before his visit to Rome, Winterbourne has found Daisy's innocence appealing enough to defend. On the free soil of Vevey, he has even dared to take an unchaperoned young lady on an excursion. He may cut a comic figure in his attempts to reduce Daisy's ingenuous license to formula, but his mind is open to impressions that the bigoted Mrs. Costello refuses to receive. Since Rome, however, is the city where one behaves as the Romans do, Winterbourne's capacity for freedom and conversely the extent of his commitment to Geneva are tested there.

The Roman phase of the novel ironically dramatizes the disintegration of Winterbourne's somewhat nebulous faith in innocence. In the presence of Daisy's critics, he defends her in a manner which reveals a desire to strengthen his own faltering belief in her. To Mrs. Costello's indictment of the Millers, he timidly responds: "They are very ignorant—very innocent only, and utterly uncivilized." When Mrs. Walker's carriage appears in the Pincian Gardens to rescue Daisy from her "tryst" with Giovanelli, Winterbourne again insists upon the girl's innocence, but as he does so he "reasoned in his own troubled interest." Indeed, before Mrs. Walker's intrusion, he had himself explored all manner of doubts about the "fineness" of Daisy's character. Obviously, then, in his debates with the girl's critics he is confronting, and only temporarily triumphing over, his own sinister suspicions. Basically, he never triumphs at all, for after his colloquy with Mrs. Costello he "checked his impulse to go straightway" to visit Daisy and after his bout with Mrs. Walker he confesses, "I suspect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva." His evaluation of himself is so accurate that when Mrs. Walker affords him a chance to return to Daisy, and thus to conquer his doubts, he permits mere appearance, "the couple united beneath the parasol," to undermine his insecure faith in innocence.

Winterbourne's desertion of Daisy in the Pincian Gardens (again the garden suggests innocence) characterizes him as incapable of embracing values larger than those of his parochial society. His acuteness in recognizing the cruelties of Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker is not vision, and his persistent defense of Daisy is hardly courage. With a finicky, formal taste, he wants his innocence wellbred and prudent, not realizing that innocence is by nature averse to calculation. When Daisy asks him if he thinks she should desert Giovanelli and enter Mrs. Walker's carriage, he advises her to "listen to the voice of civilized society." Sententiously, stiffly—Daisy describes him as having no more "give than a ramrod,"—he lectures her about the "custom of the country" and the "ineptitude of innocence."

His final incapacity to champion innocence is shown when, Mrs. Walker having turned her back on Daisy, he is "greatly touched" by the girl's "blighted grace" but characteristically does nothing more than accuse Mrs. Walker of cruelty. It is no wonder that he soon feels "that holding fast to a belief in [Daisy's] 'innocence' was more and more but a matter of gallantry too fine-spun for use." He admits that "he had helplessly missed her, and now it was too late." Yet, he cannot completely abandon his belief in an innocence that once charmed as well as bewildered him until he discovers Daisy and Giovanelli together in the Colosseum at night. Then, with "final horror" as well as "final relief," he capitulates to Geneva:

It was as if a sudden clearance had taken place in the ambiguity of the poor girl's appearances and the whole riddle of her contradictions had grown easy to read. She was a young lady about the shades of whose perversity a foolish puzzled gentleman need no longer trouble his head or his heart. That once questionable quantity had no shades—it was a mere black little blot.

Winterbourne's quest has thus ended in a typically Puritan repudiation of innocence. Now, giving greater faith to his new discovery of Daisy's "evil nature" than he had ever given to his timid belief in her goodness, he spurns her with a severity as inhumane as Mrs. Costello's and Mrs. Walkers. His last conversation with the girl is a caustic revelation that his nature has shriveled rather than expanded. He counters her assurance that she is not engaged to Giovanelli with a confession of indifference made "with infinite point." "It was a wonder," says James, "how she didn't wince for it." Essentially the slave of a society that worships form and ignores humane considerations, he lifts his hat and leaves her while Daisy cries out, "I don't care … whether I have the Roman fever or not!" Even Daisy's death-bed message, reminding him of their trip to Chillon (freedom) and disavowing the rumors concerning Giovanelli and herself, leaves him intransigent and unaffected.

Winterbourne's harsh certainty about Daisy's character convicts him of a fatal coldness of heart fostered by the sin-obsessed society of Geneva. Having failed to respond to Daisy's need for affection, he can gain enlightenment only from without, never from within. Ultimately, he must be convinced of Daisy's purity by the impressionable fortune hunter, Giovanelli. Their short conversation after Daisy's burial brings home to Winterbourne how irremediably the dark old city has played him false. He has seen innocence—the only kind of innocence this complex world affords—and has conspired with Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker to kill it. Listening to Giovanelli's elegy to Daisy, he is made to face his own incredible error:

"She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable." To which he added in a moment: "Also—naturally!—the most innocent."

Winterbourne sounded him with hard dry eyes, but presently repeated his words, "The most innocent?"

It came somehow so much too late that our friend could only glare at its having come at all.

Months later Winterbourne reveals to Mrs. Costello that he has brooded over and measured the depth of his mistake. Nevertheless, though he locates the cause of his failure in his "foreign" education, his wisdom culminates in a retreat to Geneva. The quest for innocence has thus merely brought him experience of his own lugubrious inadequacy to transcend—even with the advantage of knowledge—the sham and cruel proprieties of the dark old city.