SOURCE: "The Genteel Reader and Daisy Miller," in American Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 568-81.

[In the following essay, Randall maintains that Daisy Miller satirizes the mores and manners of late nineteenth-century American society.]

In an age in which one president is criticized for having a Boston-Harvard accent and another has it held against him that his speech is that of the Pedernales Valley, the concern with manners is far from dead. Manners may be an expression of nationality, or section, as well as morals; and many are content to judge the person by them alone. In a stable society such as once might have been presumed to exist, this may have been possible. But society has not been stable in America or Europe for quite some time. Whenever two people meet, there is apt to be a comedy of misunderstanding, and when people from different cultures meet, the chances are considerably multiplied. Below manners lies personality, which must be reached somehow; we ignore it at peril to our civilization. But the chances for misinterpretation are great, and the result is not always comic. So it might be instructive to look at a classic literary example of misjudging character through manners: the blunders of the ill-starred Winterbourne in trying to understand the elusive Daisy Miller.

In all fairness to Frederick Winterbourne, we must admit that the difficulty in judging character through manners is one of which he is not exactly unaware. When the American colony at Rome ostracizes Daisy and he is struggling to divine her attitude toward their treatment of her, he can come to no certain conclusion: "… he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal." This vexation was unfortunately not shared by contemporary reviewers of Daisy Miler, who wrote as if they knew exactly what they thought of her. Although emphatic, their opinions did not always coincide; they include the assertion that Daisy was bad-mannered and had more money than moderation (New York Times), that Daisy and her mother were "impossible" eccentrics (Harper's), that American young ladies abroad are usually dreadful (The Nation), and, from the other side of the Atlantic, that Daisy was a delightful exotic, while Americans abroad in general are censorious and dreary snobs (Blackwood's). True, on our own shores Daisy had a few defenders, notably William Dean Howells, but in general Yankees—or at least reviewing Yankees—were furious with her. This may be a sign of continuing American sensitivity about the behavior of other Americans abroad, but the whole problem of the difficulty in judging character through manners was left untouched. Subsequent critics have recognized the difficulty other characters in the tale have in judging Daisy, but more often than not have gone on to give their own opinions of her, which vary from praise to blame in a manner not unlike that of the early reviewers, although they are not so vehement about it.

The cause lies in James' method of presentation. Throughout the story Daisy is seen from the outside, we perceive her words and actions through the eyes of Winterbourne, who is not a very effectual observer. His effectuality is hampered by his being a servitor of Mrs. Grundy—or of Mrs. Costello, as she is called in the story. It is noteworthy that Mrs. Grundy, or Mrs. Costello, is an American, not a European; that Winterbourne, although protesting faintly, is subservient to her; and that his final betrayal of Daisy, when he lets her know in the Colosseum scene that he thinks her a bad girl, occurs when he gives in to Mrs. Grundy. He is entirely too much in awe of public opinion and hesitates to judge or act for himself. Daisy, on the other hand, is all too independent in judgment and action. Both come to a bad end, one in the Colosseum, the other in James' sarcastic little final paragraph. What are we to think of this? Does public opinion always get in the way of evaluating others? Is true judgment through manners possible?

It may be helpful to formulate certain attitudes and pose certain questions about them, the answers to which will depend on our own view of life:

1. Daisy is so unaware of or defiant toward form that she goes her own way, not caring what Rome thinks of her or what the Americans think of her. The question is, should she care?
2. She is interested in Winterbourne and can't find any way to reach him: he's too chilly. The question: does she try hard enough?
3. Much of the story concerns itself with attitudes toward gossip and rumor and the tremendous pressure exerted by a not-too-well-informed public opinion. Should one give it too much weight?
4. Below all this lies the problem of whether or not we can judge people. Can we even understand them, especially when they come from or interact with people of different cultures; or are they finally inscrutable? We know what Joseph Conrad thinks; can we tell what Henry James thinks in this story?

I submit that the answers each of us gives to these questions will depend on our attitudes toward spontaneity and formality, feminine and masculine courtship roles, individualism and group-centeredness, and finally the mystery of human communion and love. Since Henry James has presented Daisy purely from the outside, leaving us to draw what conclusions our temperaments and training incline us to, it strikes me that he has given us a double-jointed story which admits of more than one interpretation of the characters, depending, as I have said, on our own view of life.

This may account for the variety of responses to the story on the part of contemporary reviewers, but where does James stand? Can we tell? I think we can. I think he has written a very ironic tale in which social class and the snobbishness that goes with it brings out the worst in everybody, except Mr. Giovanelli. The preoccupation with manners is so great that the characters have forgotten the original purpose of manners: to make social intercourse easier and more pleasant. Everyone except Mr. Giovanelli is afraid to be simple and direct; their sophistication undercuts their humanity, and even Mr. Giovanelli's entanglement with the class system and incomprehension of American manners interferes with his judgment when he lets Daisy persuade him to take her to the Colosseum by moonlight, which he clearly should not have done. Here a distinction may be in order. The eyes of all the characters may be fixed upon Daisy, but the focus of the story is not on Daisy's fate, which is somewhat underplayed, but on the fate of those who observe and respond to her. Of these, Mrs. Costello and, to a lesser degree, Mrs. Walker, may be taken as exemplifying in a transplanted setting all that has been said by De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill about the tyranny of public opinion in a democracy. They are sorry snobs, and that is all there is to it. The cases of Mr. Giovanelli and Winterbourne are more instructive, since, as we shall see, the Roman moves toward comprehension of Daisy's character, the American away from it. It is the American—who is traditionally supposed to judge people as individuals, free from class bias—who makes a dreadful blunder, and the European—who is traditionally supposed to see everything in terms of manners and social class—who comes to a true understanding of Daisy's worth.

During most of the story the question of Daisy's character is up in the air, and the other characters are as much at sea concerning her as the reader is. (No doubt this is the result of a deliberate effort on James' part.) We are not shown the workings of Mr. Giovanelli's mind, but we are shown Winterbourne's:

Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State—were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him.

And then he came back to the question whether this was, in fact, a nice girl. Would a nice girl—even allowing for her being a little American flirt—make a rendezvous with a presumably low-lived foreigner?… It was impossible to regard her as a perfectly well-conducted young lady; she was wanting in a certain indispensable delicacy … But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.

Since none of the characters knows what Daisy is like until after she is dead, it might be interesting to speculate about her character in accordance with what little James has told us about her. In fact, we might draw up two contrasting interpretations of her, labeled "Daisy pro" and "Daisy con," depending on our attitude toward that series of paired opposites I mentioned a few paragraphs back. If we do so, the result might be something like this:

1. Daisy pro: Assuming that Daisy was serious in the message she left for Winterbourne on her death bed and that, in his words, "she would have appreciated one's esteem," she has had a hard time with a man of Winterbourne's frostiness; he is hardly a knight on a white charger. Not only does he let gossip rule him, he uses it as an excuse to mask his own hesitancies and nonassertiveness. On this level, Daisy and Winterbourne are prototypes of a long series of noncouples in American fiction and prefigure the theme of the headstrong girl and the ineffectual man. (They certainly prefigure Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.) But the headstrong girl is not at all happy that the man is ineffectual. She keeps waiting for him to show some interest in her; he does nothing. He not only believes but is glad to believe the gossip about her, jumps to a quick conclusion about her in the Colosseum, thinks she is a bad girl and decides he's been wasting his time. She's friendly, she's playful, she tries to let him know she's interested in him, but all to no avail; he's just dead. He's Winter-born, and Winter, as Northrop Frye tells us, is the time for irony and satire.

   If this interpretation is correct, Daisy, piqued by Winterbourne's unwillingness to commit himself, is stung into spending most of her time with Mr. Giovanelli. Winterbourne has refused to stand up for her when she is criticized by the American colony, he has declined to commit himself when she twits him by pretending to be engaged to Mr. Giovanelli; Daisy might well echo the wail of Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady: "Words, words, words!" And so she visits the Colosseum by moonlight with Mr. Giovanelli. Why does she risk the perniciosa by going to the Colosseum at night? I suppose because she is young, because she doesn't believe anything seriously bad will ever happen to her ("I never was sick, and I don't mean to be!… I don't look like much, but I'm healthy!") William Hazlitt began a famous essay by declaring that "No young man believes that he shall ever die." The same holds true for Daisy Miller, and it might be said that, insofar as she is a type, no young American girl believes she will ever be compromised.

2. Daisy con: According to this interpretation, Daisy is a "pretty American flirt" who is not really interested in Winterbourne at all, but merely in demonstrating her own power over men. She comes to dominate, and ends up by becoming a victim. She is self-centered, headstrong, petulant and not really interested in anyone but herself. She wants everyone to dance attendance on her, she wants always to remain uninvolved and dominant; with her, it is all taking and no giving. Her refusal to accept criticism and her attitude that "nobody tells me what to do" render her insufferable. Although she left a last message for Winterbourne, if she had recovered from her fever, she would have changed her mind about him. She has been spoiled by an ineffectual mother and an absentee father who is busy piling up dollars in Schenectady ("My father's rich, you bet!"); his deputy is her little brother Randolph, who represents in miniature the unpleasant bragging American tourist who goes through Europe, cigar in hand ("I can't get any candy here—any American candy. American candy is the best candy"). Daisy refuses to take advice from anybody, man or woman; and when Winterbourne tries to keep her from meeting with Mr. Giovanelli and insists he will stay with her when she persists, she thinks he is trying to manipulate her, when he is only trying to help her ("I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or interfere with anything I do"). But she herself is not above manipulating men by means of her sex appeal; she is not so much innocent as selfish. Daisy uses sex appeal to attack the class system, which is hurting her; she sets up an oscillation which makes women strike at her through the class system; then she hits back at them through her power over men. Although she may not have social standing, Daisy is a plutocrat as well as a beauty, and she well knows the power of these two things. It is even possible to give an economic interpretation of Daisy Miller, especially after reading Thorstein Veblen on women as status symbols. It would run somewhat like this: the reason Daisy blushes and is offended when Winterbourne suggests she may be in love with Giovanelli is that a young American woman is encouraged to regard her marriageability as her market value and use it as a bargaining counter. This involves not admitting that she cares for a man until he has spoken for her and has been accepted, i.e., until her market value has been wisely invested in a blue-chip engagement and she herself is safe. In suggesting that Daisy may be in love with Giovanelli, Winterbourne is driving her market value down and putting her in the position of appearing to allow herself to be hypothecated by Giovanelli. This view shows Daisy as a business woman and sees her motives as a mixture of commercial bargain-hunting and sexual prudery. Fantastic as it sounds, this view may have something to recommend it; it's clearly not the whole story, but it may be there.

It now appears that we have been reading two different stories, one entitled "Poor Daisy Miller, or, A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (Henry James himself inclined to this view, both in his letter to Mrs. Linton and in his preface to the New York edition of the tale), and the other, "Cold-Hearted Daisy, or, The Selfish Young American Flirt." The latter will appeal to any man in a misogynistic mood; I myself think the story is double-jointed and there is truth in both titles. But perhaps there is a third story we haven't read yet; Henry James may be counting on the genteel reader's stock responses. It was common for European authors addressing a European audience to begin a story with a stereotype of an unattractive American, and then gradually present the character in a more and more favorable light. An example contemporary with James was "Ouida" (Miss de la Ramee), of whom Elizabeth Hoxie writes:

In Moths (1880),. it was easy to take offense at Miss de la Ramee's picture of Fuschia Leach, the "wild little republican" with the "high, thin voice," who said "cunning" for "nice" and rested "her feet on an ottoman, her hands behind her head, a rosebud in her mouth, and a male group around her." Nevertheless, Fuschia proved popular because of her high spirits ("everybody delights her and everything is fun to her").

In such stories the author plays a trick on his audience by eliciting a stock response from it. The reader, presented with a character at whom people jeer, thinks he understands the story; he feels sophisticated but is only responding to a stereotype. Then as the character is more fully presented in more human terms, he does an about-face as he gradually perceives he has been taken in. James does the same thing in Day Miller, only in this case the trick is perpetrated on an American audience responding to the story of an American abroad. The reader first sees Daisy through the eyes of Randolph, her awful little brother, who thinks all things American are best except his sister. Then Daisy meets Winterbourne, without a formal introduction, through the same brother; she "picks him up" and wangles an invitation from him to visit the castle of Chillon. The reader, if he is sufficiently genteel and places a high enough value on formal manners, winces at this image of his countrywoman abroad; snobbery and prudery combine to make him agree with Winterbourne that Daisy must be either a sexual adventuress or else a dreadfully vulgar parvenu. Then he encounters Mrs. Costello and has all his convictions as to Daisy's vulgarity thrown back in his face, and this from a woman who is as narrow, rigid and heartless a snob as one is likely to meet among Americans in Europe. The reader becomes uneasy; this is not quite the company he wanted to keep. Then he begins to criticize Winterbourne for keeping and listening to such company. He finds that the Americans in Rome, who are the first group he is likely to identify with, are actually the last people whose judgment is to be trusted; it is the poor despised Mr. Giovanelli, upon whom they all look down, who has the final and kindest word on the case. The genteel reader's own snobbery is exposed to him and revealed as the ridiculous and destructive thing it is.

From this point of view the story is about the shameful waste which can result, not only from snobbery, but from sheer ineffectuality and blindness, as James ticks off first the snobs, Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker, then Mr. Giovanelli, who is kind but ineffectual, then Winterbourne, who is neither effectual nor kind. So the true title of the story we have been reading may turn out to be "Only a Woman, or Daisy Revealed: Stereotypes Are We All Until We Get to Know Each Other if It's Not Too Late." For if the genteel reader has been responding to stereotypes, so have the characters in the novella. Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker obviously are; more interesting are the responses of Mr. Giovanelli and Winterbourne. We are not told much about Mr. Giovanelli; he may indeed have started out as a fortune hunter (James tells us "Winterbourne afterwards learned that he had practiced the idiom [English] on a great many American heiresses"), but then again he may merely be a young man out to have a good time in life, in short, a male Roman counterpart of Daisy Miller. Like her, he is good looking and attractive; like her he is looked down upon by those who are confident they can judge people through manners; as in her case, when the problem of sincerity versus opportunism comes up, the question is decided against him. His one real blunder, which has deadly consequences for Daisy, is allowing her to persuade him to take her to the Colosseum by moonlight; and this couldn't possibly be attributed to self-seeking. Apparently this arises from an incomprehension of alien manners (he thinks American girls must be allowed to make all their own decisions) and an excess of gallantry to someone above him on the social scale (he acquiesces in everything the lady wishes to do, even when for health's sake he should have taken a firm hand). For this he pays heavily. There is every reason to believe that he means it when he tells Winterbourne after the burial, "She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.… And she was the most innocent." Being in awe of her, he had thought she knew what she could and could not do (including on the level of physical survival); when she falls ill and dies, he realizes that she was just as fallible as poor ordinary European mortals after all.

Mr. Giovanelli may begin in incomprehension of Daisy, but he ends as the only character who realizes she is to be treated with consideration and kindness; and this may be as close to the "truth" about a human being as we are likely to get. With Winterbourne the case is otherwise. He, like the other Americans in the tale, sees life through the spectacles of the picturesque. What he responds to is a guidebook view of life, not life itself. Since this is the way in which genteel American readers of the 1870s may be presumed to have responded to stories about Europe, it should have been instructive to them to observe Winterbourne's fate. For most of the nineteenth century, the ability to respond aesthetically to the beauties of nature and of European antiquities was supposed to be a class trait. If one were a member of the upper classes, one might have it; if not, one did not. We see this in the stories and sketches of Washington Irving; we see it in the genteel heroes and heroines of Fenimore Cooper. It is still present in Henry James, especially the early James of the 1870s, although by that time he was already beginning to see his way around it and satirize it. What had begun as a fresh and original way of perceiving the irregular beauties of nature, untrammeled by neoclassical symmetry, had rigidifled by James' time into a stock response and a badge of class status; part of the snobbery of the American characters in the story is their stereotyped response to the picturesque. That this stock response can put blinders on one person and give him a distorted guidebook view of life is dramatized in the Colosseum scene, where Winterbourne, by seeing everything through the spectacles of the picturesque, actually prevents himself from seeing what is really going on.

The scene begins with Winterbourne's taking an evening walk to the Colosseum, where he starts to quote Byron's famous lines from "Manfred" just before he sees Mr. Giovanelli and Daisy, who see him first. The moonlit scene before him and the lines from Byron induce a romantic revery which puts him in the worst possible frame of mind to cope with the action-demanding realities which suddenly thrust themselves on him. Here the picturesque is one of the elements which help produce the catastrophe, since it leads him to a mood of unearned exultation followed by a precipitous drop from the sublime to the bathetic. As Daisy calls out to him, he is once again involved with his old fear of women and his inability to assert or commit himself, which he evades by hiding behind the skirts of Mrs. Grundy. James writes:

When, on his return from the villa … Winterbourne approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it occurred to him, as a lover of the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well worth a glance.… Then he passed in, among the cavernous shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade; the other was sleeping in the luminous dusk.

This is just what every genteel traveler in Europe was supposed to feel. The reader is lulled into thinking he is listening to someone who is au courant and knowledgeable. But Winterbourne has seen nothing new or fresh or revealing in the scene; it is a stock response. As he stands there he begins to murmur Byron's famous lines from "Manfred" (III, iv, 1-45) which begin:

The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!
I linger yet with Nature, for the Night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man …

Winterbourne clearly feels more at home with the moonlit scene than with the man and woman he is so unexpectedly to meet. The lines continue:

I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering—upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's wall.…

and go on in a vein of sentimental musing on the ruins of time which induces in Manfred a pleasant melancholy. He continues:

And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light…
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old,—
The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
[Italics mine]

We do not know how far Winterbourne has a chance to proceed in the soliloquy before seeing Daisy, but the mention of "Byron's famous lines" should have been enough to call up the whole quotation for the nineteenth-century reader. It is plain that the dead still rule the spirit of Winterbourne; the entire passage as used in this context is an implicit criticism and indictment of this snobbish and ineffectual young man. For, as he walks to the middle of the arena, he sees on the steps which form the base of the great cross in the center a man and a woman, whom from their conversation he recognizes to be Mr. Giovanelli and Daisy. Then at last he is able to make up his mind about her: "She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect." Not only does he come to an erroneous and damning conclusion about her; he is glad to do so, feeling that he has at last been taken off the hook and is no longer under the necessity of committing himself. The reason he does not immediately advance toward her is not the fear that his judgment may be wrong but "the sense of the danger of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from cautious criticism." When Daisy calls out to him that he is snubbing her, he does try to save her from malaria, but he hurts her by laughing at her and informing her of his brutal judgment that he thinks her a bad girl:

Then, noticing Winterbourne's silence, she asked him why he didn't speak. He made no answer; he only began to laugh … "Did you believe I was engaged the other day?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter what I believed the other day," said Winterbourne, still laughing.

"Well, what do you believe now?"

"I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!"

He felt the young girl's pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick gloom of the archway; she was apparently going to answer. But Giovanelli hurried her forward. "Quick! quick!" he said; "if we get in by midnight we are quite safe."

"… Don't forget Eugenio's pills!" said Winterbourne, as he lifted his hat.

"I don't care," said Daisy, in a little strange tone, "whether I have Roman fever or not!"

She is bewildered; she is hurt. This knowledgeable-sounding young American actually knows nothing and has acted with complete inhumanity toward her. What she says about not caring if she falls ill is more than mere petulance; she is saying that now she doesn't care what happens to her; then she falls ill and dies. In a very real sense, Winterbourne, for whom she cared, has contributed to her death.

All of Winterbourne's vices contribute to undo him with Daisy in the Colosseum scene, but it is his over-indulgence in the picturesque which gives him a distorted view of reality and helps prevent him from acting like a man. The picturesque is the killer here; like any form of sentimentality, when overdone it can mislead people into being extremely cruel. It is significant that the concluding lines from the Manfred quotation run:

                        'Twas such a night!
But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight
Even at the moment when they should array
Themselves in pensive order.
[Italics mine]

It is a pity that Winterbourne couldn't continue to the end of the quotation; if he had, he might have learned something helpful to know.

Soon after his soliloquy, Manfred dies of guilt and remorse for unknown but terrible crimes not specified by his creator. His final speech to the spirit that is summoning him to hell contains the lines

  I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.…

Winterbourne too has committed terrible "crimes" which are indirectly but clearly specified by Henry James: they resemble those of John Marcher in The Beast in the Jungle. He lives on, but he is as good as dead; and he has helped kill the youth of Mr. Giovanelli and the life of Daisy Miller. The two male characters are contrasted with each other, for although the young Roman and the young American are both interested in Daisy and both contribute to her death, their response to the experience is totally different: the Italian shows a vast moral superiority to the traveler from the New World. As Daisy turns from an unknown quantity to a human being for Mr. Giovanelli, she turns from an unknown quantity to a stereotype for Winterbourne. Or, rather, not an unknown quantity but a puzzle. For Daisy is a puzzle to Winterbourne, a pretty little puzzle. When he thinks he has the puzzle figured out, he solves it with a stereotype, and a derogatory one at that. This explains the use of the picturesque in the Colosseum scene; Winterbourne responds only to stereotypes, whether in nature, in architecture or among mankind.

Now we see why the story focuses on those around Daisy rather than on Daisy herself. The question of Daisy's worth, or even of what she really is, is irrelevant to the moral imperative that she is entitled to consideration and respect as a human being; and, in the story, Mr. Giovanelli alone gives that to her. We don't find out much about Daisy, but we do find out what Winterbourne is like. Winterbourne doesn't care at all about the truth of the matter; he is afraid to face it, for the truth may involve him with other people and frighten him by bringing him face to face with himself. So he prefers the appearance of respectability rather than life; appearances are safer, he thinks; all the best people believe in them. But the man who finds the appearance of respectability more important than truth misses out on the best things in life and never understands anyone at all. Henry James, although something of a snob, was also and more importantly an artist; and he was not so big a snob as he has sometimes been pictured or as some of his readers were and are.

But what of the genteel reader all this time? If he were perceptive enough, he would have had his little universe shattered; he would see that the implicit criticism and condemnation of Winterbourne is a condemnation of his own habits and tastes. But, judging from contemporary reviews, this is exactly what did not happen. The reviewers remained genteel; they reacted not perceptively but angrily. In a perverse way, this proved James' point; the carapace of gentility was so thick as to be impervious to ridicule, which only aroused a defensive and self-righteous anger. So I will have to confine my comments to how the readers might have reacted, had they read the story with attention rather than indignation.

In presenting the Colosseum scene to us, James is dramatizing and satirizing the American nineteenth century's most cherished concepts of "culture" and "civilization": "Europe," the picturesque, the daylight-moonlight metaphor of the romantic movement, the genteel, the cult of sexual purity and respectability in young American womanhood. Perhaps the preoccupation with respectability can best sum it up. And overconcern with respectability kills Daisy Miller; "the letter killeth." When Winterbourne approaches Daisy and Mr. Giovanelli in the Colosseum, they, intensely conscious of their surroundings, imagine he looks like an old-time lion or tiger eyeing the Christian martyrs. This is neither as playful nor as far-fetched as it sounds. For fantastic as it at first seems, Winterbourne actually is a lion ready to devour poor Daisy. As a representative of the American colony at Rome, he is quite exhilarated to see her sacrificed to that crowd; in the words of another line from Byron, she is "butchered to make a Roman holiday." In every sense including the physical one, Daisy Miller is a martyr to the genteel tradition on the very spot where the Christian martyrs died centuries before. The barbarousness of degenerate Rome gives way to the barbarousness of the invading Americans; like the Romans, they too think of themselves as highly civilized. And the reader? One by one he sees his genteel idols smashed before his eyes: Europeans are frankly spontaneous; Americans are rigid formalists; the ruins of antiquity are deadly, not life-giving; "respectability," far from civilizing people, dehumanizes them; the cult of sexual purity kills life itself. One could go on: the "untrustworthy" "lower-class" European becomes the noblest Roman of them all; the genteel American abroad becomes an agent of death and destruction comparable to the ancient persecutors of the martyrs; the American colony at Rome becomes the howling mob that once filled the Colosseum with their bloodlust, interested only in the brutal gladiatorial games of the haut monde in which to turn thumbs down on a person means instant death for him. The genteel audience should have squirmed under self-scrutiny when it saw that the un-Manfred-like "crimes" of Winterbourne are exactly the crimes of negation, exclusion from human sympathy and snobbish cruelty that were most likely to be committed by the genteel nineteenth-century American Puritan reader. This story is about the disintegration of value (as are Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, both of which were influenced by it), and it contains a revealing glimpse of cultural history. It shows a falling-off in value from the plain living and high thinking of pre-Civil War Boston (for in the story America is Boston); the land of the free has become the home of the genteel. The Americans in this tale have taken the ideals of an earlier America and stood them on their heads—something they would never have done with their persons. By their whole way of living, they have taken the pre-Civil War statement of Emerson's, that transcendentalism was a Saturnalia of faith, and inverted it. Instead, they enact a Saturnalia of snobbery and unbelief, and this not in the New England where their far-off ancestors had once proposed to found a city on a hill, but in eternal Rome, where indeed the entire world can see.