SOURCE: An introduction to Daisy Miller: A Study, The Heritage Press, 1969, pp. v-xvi.

[Holloway is an English author and educator. In the following essay, he discusses the evolution of theme in Daisy Miller, claiming that the novella dramatizes "the fate of innocence in a devious and sophisticated world," but agrees with James in the assessment that the story is more a poetic than a critical study of Daisy's character.]

It is nearly a century since Daisy Miller was published by Leslie Stephen in The Cornhill Magazine of 1878, and today it is strange to seek out, on the reserve shelves of some big library, the dusty Cornhill volumes for those years, and to find, on their yellowing pages and among their heavy black Victorian illustrations, James's spirited and incisive allegro. But his nouvelle caught the spirit of that time: its preoccupations were not James's alone. If Daisy Miller depicts a contrast between American and European manners, the Cornhill, not long before, had run an article precisely about the greater freedoms of youth in the New World. Its account of the 'bright, cheery, hearty, simple ways of the young people … straying on the sands of Newport' makes one think of James's 'An International Episode,' almost a companion piece to Daisy Miller; and the titles of other contemporary Cornhill pieces—The Tyranny of Fashion; The Decay of Fine Manners; Mara, or the Girl Without References ('it is a curious symptom…that alacrity with which moral people jump at the idea of an improper connection')—all these details recall James's story, and help to show its typicality in a certain sense.

James himself, in writing of his story a generation later, adverted to his own 'incurable prejudice in favour of grace.' In this early period his style was at its most lucid, and nothing he ever wrote displays that prejudice in favour of grace with more luminous delicacy. The very name of its heroine points to this: 'Daisy' is a pet-name, supplanting his heroine's prosaic, baptismal 'Annie P.' with enchanting appositeness—her delicately trim spontaneity is indeed daisy-like.

James had incomparable resources for giving his story its crisp, summery charm (one quite forgets that the Roman part is as a matter of sober fact set in the winter season). He had a rich response to the landscape of Europe, especially its cultivated landscape; and at this time at least he still had a wonderfully alive, direct, yet decorous sense of young femininity, and almost a woman's awareness of the brilliant subtleties of haute couture. Paintings by Manet like 'Olympia,' or Renoir's 'The Box,' with their scintillating responsiveness to texture (whether of cloth or skin), and to fashionable dress, were painted only a few years before Daisy Miller was written.

At this period also, James still displays the same order of sensibility to every nuance of conversation, and plays colloquialism and formality exquisitely against each other. His meticulous, slightly old-fashioned use of French ('tout bonnement'; 'a young lady quisepasse sesfantaisies') adds another touch of refined cosmopolitan charm. Even the note of colloquialism is unobtrusively modulated from character to character:

'… You won't back out?' she said.
'I shall not be happy till we go!' he protested.

With Daisy it is the product of quick but guileless wits; with Winterbourne, her would-be lover, it is scrupulous, well chosen, flat ('I think you had better get into the carriage'), a product of his self-confessed 'stiffness'; in Mrs. Costello, his aunt, plainness of speech goes with a narrow if often good-humoured self-assurance; and in the 'earnest' Mrs. Walker it expresses a rather more kind-hearted conventionality. James's spare and lucid dialogue does not prevent Daisy Miller from being a masterpiece of character portrayal.

Yet, while James has beautifully discriminated the outward style of his characters in this nouvelle, their inward natures remain more opaque. How, to begin with, ought we to see the shaping idea of the story? James says in his Notebooks that it is 'of the international family,' like 'The Siege of London' or 'Lady Barberina'. One of the very greatest Jamesians, Leon Edel, has interpreted it as centred upon a contrast between a 'child of nature and of freedom' who 'refuses to yield her innocence,' and the 'supersubtle alien codes' of 'the Europeans,… the Europeanized Americans.' Certainly in a novel like The Europeans, which is of the same year as Daisy Miller, or in the savage little Four Meetings of the year before, James saw a contrast between the Old World and the New, of a kind almost wholly favourable to the latter. But his sense of this whole rich field, and its interaction with other permanent interests of his, seem to me to vary from work to work.

It would not be right to think that James always saw Europe as super-subtlety and America as innocence, or that he thought of Europe as the only place with a rigidified 'high society.' In writing in his Notebooks some years later, he glosses 'an international tale, a tale of the Daisy Miller order,' with the phrase, 'the eternal question of American snobbishness abroad.' In 'An International Episode,' there is an American high-society just as there is an English one: more 'bright, cheery, hearty,' much more conscious of intellectual culture; but its members feel insulted by the suggestion that they are not of the 'aristocracy.' As for subtlety, the conversation between the English and the American aristocratic ladies at the end of the story is a miraculously elegant display of barbed, pregnant high-society amiabilities on both sides. In 'The Siege of London,' New York society is too rigid to admit the enchanting but much-married Westerner Mrs. Beck, while London society does so simply because she is 'amusing.'

In 'Pandora' (1884) the American lady Mrs. Dangerfield is convinced that American society is full of 'distinctions, of delicate shades, which foreigners are too stupid to perceive'; and later in the story, another American lady says to a visitor from Europe, 'How we do puzzle you!' and he replies, '… But of course, we are very simple.'

Coming back to Daisy Miller with these works in mind, one cannot but be struck by the idea that James is not constructing a general contrast between American and European mores at all. The two ladies who so much condemn his heroine are themselves both American. They have both resided in Europe, but this is not why Mrs. Grundy has won them to her side. Mrs. Costello makes it clear that her values are those of American 'society':

'But don't they all do these things—the young girls in America?' Winterbourne inquired.

Mrs. Costello stared a moment. 'I should like to see my granddaughters do them!' she declared grimly.

—'American snobbishness abroad,' in other words. Critics have stressed how the line, 'You have lived too long out of the country,' which Mrs. Costello addresses to Winterbourne, points implicitly, and from James's own position, to the fact that he has lost his awareness of youthful American innocence. But Mrs. Costello herself meant simply that prolonged absence has made him unaware of social vulgarity by home standards. Daisy herself—innocent as she is of anything that could be called Europeanization—is perfectly well acquainted with the idea of respectability, mentions propriety twice, speaks of her 'reputation,' and blushes or goes pale several times over, rather as any young lady might. The point about Daisy is not that she is encountering a 'rigid and complex' society for the first time, but that she has as good as no idea of what, by American standards or any other, 'propriety' consists in, and also that she has what can at most be described as a very intermittent interest in the whole subject.

Finally, one must register the position of Giovanelli, the not altogether engagingly personable Italian with whom she compromises herself. This young Italian (again, the name tells one something) had the truest and also the most humane and life-affirming insight into Daisy's character. This least American of the characters—this negation of everything American as the story sees it—not only recognizes Daisy's true nature but very much cares about it, and that disinterestedly. He wanted a rich American wife ('… Mr. Giovanelli, who spoke English very cleverly—Winterbourne afterwards learned that he had practised the idiom upon a great many American heiresses'), and was setting aside his own ambition, simply to enjoy the company of 'the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.' He was a humane enough man to find it worth his while to waste his time.

Thus, anything by way of a contrast between European and American life was not James's concern in this particular tale. Rather, he used an international setting for a quite general theme: the fate, irrespective of nationality, that so easily befalls innocence and directness in a devious and sophisticated world. Daisy Miller is thus close to Washington Square, published only three years later. True enough, Catherine Sloper's innocence and directness in that novel are not quite those of Daisy. The later heroine has less brilliance, and more of something that perhaps makes up for that. But Washington Square recounts Catherine's destruction through the dried-up sophistication and calculatingness of others: 'She was sickened at the thought that Mrs. Penniman had been let loose, as it were, on her happiness,' while Winterbourne and his two dowagers were 'let loose' on Daisy's youthful happiness; and sophisticated, calculating and dried-up they all were in their various ways. If that is not quite the whole truth, it is for a most interesting reason, and an unexpected one: Daisy herself was also let loose on that precious article.

James's intention was unquestionably to portray his heroine as an instance of endearing innocence: there happens to be a contemporary letter, written by himself, which decisively confirms this. Mrs. Lynn Lynton, an Englishwoman of literary pretensions, wrote to James shortly after the tale was published, saying that she had quarrelled with a friend over its meaning, and asking him to adjudicate. In his reply, James was explicit. Daisy 'went on' with Giovanelli, he said, because she was 'above all things innocent.' She had 'a little sentiment about Winterbourne, that she believes to be quite unreciprocated'; but she was 'too innocent' to be 'playing off Giovanelli against Winterbourne.' What the story recounted was the 'little tragedy of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head.'

Thirty years later, James revised Daisy Miller for the 'New York' collected edition of his works. He gave much added stress to the innocence and naturalness of the heroine, and sharpened the contrast between her and the other characters. 'That pretty American girl' is expanded into 'that little American who's so much more a work of nature than of art.' But Mrs. Costello's tongue becomes sharper than ever. 'Skinny little' gets inserted into the mild words of 1878, 'Oh, the […] mother is just as bad.' Winterbourne now refers to Giovanelli as a 'thing,' rather than a 'man'; and James himself now degrades Giovanelli all the way down from 'brilliant' to 'glossy.'

Professor Carol C. Ohmann, in an interesting essay on the tale, has argued that Daisy is 'identified … simply and wholly with the natural world which has its own beautiful and eternal rhythms' and that, taken all together, James's revisions make this clearer than ever. Certainly, they emphasize Daisy's naturalness; but hardly in this Wordsworthian sense in which even her death could seem part of the transience-in-renewal of nature. Rather, it is a question of an older sense of the word, where the focus is on human not scenic nature. Changes in the other characters by no means go to make them more social and artificial in contrast to a more 'natural' Daisy—but merely a little nastier.

Viola R. Dunbar has put forward the view that James was free to give added emphasis to Daisy's charm and naturalness, because he abandoned the idea that she was typical of American girlhood. But the key words in his Preface to the New York edition mean something more than this. Here they are (my italics):

… the simple truth, which ought from the first to have been apparent to me, that my little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms.

This does not mean that James had written a Wordsworthian story while only half realizing it, nor that the contrast between 'critical' and 'poetical' is one simply between the representative and the idiosyncratic. I think it means that James saw how Daisy Miller, judged as a whole, exposed itself to a serious and limiting criticism; and he met this not by attempting a direct victory over what exposed it to criticism, but by making his story in effect less ambitious than it had been at first.

James's position over sophisticated society and the sincere individual was something of a self-contradiction. He always had an enchanting vision of innocence and sincerity, and he saw how the predatory conventions of society did those things violence. But at the same time he could not have accepted the only terms on which what he hated in high society might have been done away with. Society, with its elegance and its finesse, enchanted him also, and made up his life. He understood inward spontaneity and vitality less as Hardy or Lawrence or Yeats did—from within and first hand—and more with the external awareness of a delighted and perceptive social being. To portray someone who threw off society by virtue of an altogether superior inward power, and so could rebel and succeed with rebellion, was outside his range. His 'outsiders' are like Mrs. Headway in 'The Siege of London' and Pandora Day in 'Pandora,' whose primal, self-made virtue establishes them as insiders after all.

Daisy Miller illustrates these facts. It is something rather less rigorous than really to have been 'A Study' (James dropped the sub-title when he revised the text), and it is 'poetic' rather than 'critical,' partly because the author's judgement of his heroine is extraordinarily lenient. This is not because propriety matters in itself but because, in Daisy Miller's own particular circumstances, it mattered so little that to go mixed up with it either way was to betray a terrible triviality of mind. Daisy was in love, and the man she loved returned that love—or nearly—but needed some help before he could say so. Here are indeed circumstances in which independence of 'super-subtle' alien codes could stand one in good stead. But what does Daisy do with her 'nature' and 'freedom'? It is her doing as much as his that neither lover glimpses the full truth until too late. True, he has a difficulty that she does not feel: but could that be a matter of indifference to a woman who loved him?

Meanwhile, Daisy fills in with the company of Giovanelli. Giovanelli may indeed have had an acute and humane appreciation of the 'amiable' and 'innocent'; but he also displays a truly savage egocentricity. Even if we suppose that he is meant to have no inkling of the feelings of Daisy or of Winterbourne each for the other, he certainly knows that he is abetting Daisy's social ostracism, and over Daisy's death James is most careful to make plain his murderous selfishness: 'For myself I had no fear … [it is the second time he is made to proffer this gigantic self-inculpation]. If she had lived, I should have got nothing.' This second observation follows at once after the first. His modest words are the words of an unconscious brute. Perhaps James was catching something of what used to be thought a 'southern,' a 'Mediterranean' type.

In this story, then, the author was really much more on the side of "polite" society than transpires at first, or than he seems himself to have realized at the time. He enchants us with Daisy's innocence, exquisite face, bright wit, and lovely clothes, but his 'child of nature and freedom' is no real indictment of the world she has to live in: if anything, her blindness and destructiveness exceed its own. For total consistency in his 'study,' James would have had either to create another child of nature and freedom, one who could bring larger and more valid energies to her independence—or to treat Daisy's tragedy not as the 'little' tragedy of one who was merely a child 'over' whose 'head' it was that things 'went on,' but as the more substantial tragedy of one who, without realizing it, was a destructive caricature and trivialization of the great inward dimension of life.

The result was that when he revised his story he simply made it less 'social' altogether. Daisy is now a little less to be seen as standing in any exact context, and so inviting us to exact 'study,' of tensions between society and the individual. More, she is (to use words from his later text) a 'charming apparition,' a figure of 'lovely remoteness.'

James understood his own difficulties, and met them with his own masterly sophistications; but the enigmatic charm and grace of his heroine remain in one's mind, long after the problems raised by her story have receded.