[Draper is an English author and educator. In the following essay, he studies the character of Winterbourne, and demonstrates the ways in which he is the central figure in Daisy Miller.]

"She goes on from day to day, from hour to hour," says Mrs. Costello of the heroine of Daisy Miller, "as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar." This unconscious echo (unconscious, that is, as far as Mrs. Costello is concerned) of As You Like It lends a comic absurdity to her notion of vulgarity. It is perhaps true that to lead the free, untrammelled life of the Forest of Arden in the formally moral, but, in reality, cynical atmosphere of Rome is a kind of sentimental indulgence possible only to the unsophisticated, "vulgar" mind. In such a context, however, the word has a boomerang effect. It damns the sophistication of those who gloss over the nastiness of their "fallen" world with the manners and taste of cultured society, making the ignorance and simplicity of the "vulgar" almost a positive value. This is a pastoral effect that makes the association with As You Like It an appropriate one, and it would be possible to argue that "a pastoral" would be a better qualification of the title than "a study." It would certainly have the merit of directing the reader's attention away from Daisy's significance as a character-study, which has only limited value, and towards her much more important role as a focus for other people's opinions—above all as a focus for the uncertainty and moral confusion of the character who is the real centre of the tale, Winterbourne.

Early readers of Daisy Miller found Daisy an offensive representation of American womanhood abroad. Manners have so changed that the point of the story, though not lost, is much more likely to seem to the modern reader to lie in the offensiveness of expatriate Americans like Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker. Neither attitude is correct. Daisy is culpable in her self-will. She bridles at any hint of interference. "I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me," she says to Winterbourne, "or to interfere with anything I do." A little earlier we learn that Winterbourne remembered a compatriot's saying that American women "were at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness." Daisy has her share in this fault, too. Indeed, what is called her flirtatiousness seems to be more of this nature than anything suggesting the provocativeness of a coquette. She is the very embodiment of the spirit of youth with its paradoxical combination of selfishness and ingenuousness, which yet, through warmth and spontaneity, makes an almost irresistibly strong appeal.

For the purposes of the story (and who could one expect to be more aware of the story as story, with its own artistic purposes, than Henry James?) this appeal is directed at Winterbourne. It is he who gives form and meaning to the story, and it is primarily through his consciousness, or "point of view," that the events are narrated. As Maxwell Geismar says [in Henry James and His Cult, 1964], "… it is Winterbourne's own conflict, his repressed love for Daisy, the attraction beneath his disapprobation, which carry the story along." After all, we know very little about Daisy at first-hand. If we were meant to think primarily of her, we should want to know a great deal more about what is going on in her mind. Certainly, we are not completely ignorant of this. We can guess, for example, that she tells Winterbourne that she is engaged to Giovanelli in order to challenge him to come out of his shell, and that she promptly denies it afterwards because she wants to make sure that he has not misunderstood her. It is instinctive with her to challenge response from Winterbourne—not, that is, to provoke him "sexually" (as that word is commonly used, though I think it is in a deeper, and quite underogatory sense, sexual provocation), but to try to compel him to overcome his "stiffness" and to defy convention for the sake of real feeling. This is evident in her reply to Winterbourne's warning that if she continues her present behaviour towards Giovanelli, people will give her the cold shoulder.

Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to colour. 'Do you mean as Mrs. Walker did the other night?'

'Exactly!' said Winterbourne.

She looked away at Giovanelli, who was decorating himself with his almond blossom. Then looking back at Winterbourne—'I shouldn't think you would let people be so unkind!' she said.

'How can I help it?' he asked.

'I should think you would say something.'

'I do say something'; and he paused a moment. 'I say that your mother tells me that she believes you are engaged.'

'Well, she does,' said Daisy very simply.

If it is strange that Daisy leaves her mother in doubt about so important a matter, it is that much more significant that she clears up Winterbourne's doubt. But the major point of the dialogue is the challenge issued by Daisy, and unhappily missed by Winterbourne, that he should stand up for her. I have called it a challenge to defy convention, and so it is, as convention seems to operate among these Europeanised Americans; but it might equally well be called a challenge to live up to the standard of gentlemanliness that he and they jointly profess. A "gentleman" would protect her, whereas all that Winterbourne's good intentions amount to is an attempt to persuade her to conform to the usual appearances, to do in Rome as the Romans do. Either way, the discussion brings us back to Winterbourne rather than to Daisy herself. It is what she represents for him, rather than what she is in herself, that ultimately counts.

It matters a great deal, of course, that Daisy dies of Roman fever—at once a natural and a symbolic death; a death that she brings on herself by her folly, and a death in which Giovanelli, Winterbourne, and expatriate American society all have a share. James's artistic tact allows the climax of the story to have all these implications. And yet it is much more of a significant climax for Winterbourne than for anyone else. With regard to Daisy herself it is pathetic; with regard to him it is as nearly tragic as his Prufrockian nature will allow. To appreciate why this is so it is necessary to consider Winterbourne's "case."

The story begins and ends with him. He is a vaguely drifting idler, "an extremely amiable fellow", rumored to be "extremely devoted" to a Genevan lady older than himself—James's colloquial extremely has its own ironic effect, since caution rather than extravagance seems to be his key-note. According to sound dramatic practice, James introduces him to Daisy via her younger brother. Quite apart from sounding the note of America, as the Old Pretender would say, in strident fashion, this enables a comment to be made on Winterbourne's Europeanised notions of how women are to be approached: "It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented… In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring conditions.…" The fact that he dares to make such an advance to Daisy is in his favour, but it is not unambiguously so, for there is a faint suspicion that he feels able to treat her with freedom because he is free not to respect her. Daisy's honesty and freshness attract him, but he is at the same time confused—"amused, perplexed and decidedly charmed." Should he condemn her for "laxity of deportment"? He is troubled by the very fact of having lost his instinct for knowing such things. "He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone." James follows his soliloquising with absorbed interest. This is the thing: how the betwixt-an-between Winterbourne, out of instinctive touch, gropes to find a category that will fit Daisy Miller, and at last hits upon the useful formula "pretty American flirt."

In the second section of the tale, Winterbourne applies to his aunt whom he hopes to make the guarantor of his good behaviour in Daisy's eyes—though, once again, this tells us more about himself than it does about Daisy. He is the one who thinks it necessary, and it is his own uncertainty that is further revealed. James, with cool irony, informs us that Winterbourne listens with interest to Mrs. Costello's slightly malicious gossip that "helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy," and he presses the conversation further, "with a desire for trustworthy information," to find an echo of his previous thought in Mrs. Costello's assertion: "You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent." The tone here is comic:

'My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,' said Winterbourne, smiling and curling his moustache.

'You are too guilty, then!' Winterbourne continued to curl his moustache, meditatively.

One laughs both with and at Winterbourne and his aunt. But the serious words innocent and guilty also make their effect. James has placed his character beautifully between them. It is his dilemma that he is both innocent and guilty, and does not know which part of himself to prefer. He shelters behind the curling of his moustache, which can be taken as either a consciously Byronic self-parody, or as complacent enjoyment of the right to repudiate mere innocence (on the basis of his experience with the lady of Geneva, perhaps?). Such ambiguity surrounds all Winterbourne's actions. Daisy by comparison is single-minded and spontaneous. When she makes the expedition to Chilion, she has no "guilty" sense that she is eating forbidden fruit. It is Winterbourne who thinks in these terms: "To the young man himself their little excursion was so much of an escapade—an adventure—that, even allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her regard it in the same way. But it must be confessed that, in this particular, he was disappointed."

Section three transfers the action to Rome. Some of the most delightful paragraphs in the story are indebted to James's journalistic experience in evoking the spirit of place, and can be read for just that. But place is also tinged with implications for manners and morals. I have already referred to Daisy's death from "Roman fever," and likewise to the presence of a mysterious lady in Geneva. The historical associations of the Castle of Chillon in the second section provide a contrasting backdrop to the freedom and chatter of Daisy herself. Once again, the piquancy of this contrast depends on the double perception of Winterbourne, who, in this respect, is an indispensable reflector of the author's awareness. (Winterbourne's informed appreciation of European culture provides an obvious comic contrast to Randolph's belief that the best place he has seen is the City of Richmond, but it is not—any more than Philip Herriton's comparable appreciation of Italy in Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread—an unqualified asset.) He expects some credit for having missed out on Bologna and Florence on his way down to Rome, only to find that Daisy reproaches him for not having come more quickly; and, in fact, the reference to what he has missed, even though it forms no more than a comment on what is passing through his mind, has the almost unreasonable effect of making him appear to value too much the very cultural opportunities that he foregoes. The weight of European things combines with the restraint of European manners to impede the natural warmth of response that Daisy might otherwise call forth in him. Accordingly, it is above all in Rome, where both these influences are at their strongest, that the challenge of Daisy Miller comes to its crisis. The off-stage opposition of Mrs. Costello is replaced by the on-stage friendship (which turns to ostracism) of Mrs. Walker; and this has its grand, dramatic expression (inflated language for a trivial episode, perhaps, but James's art is to make convincing mountains out of apparent molehills) in the scene of the carriage on the Pincio.

The confrontation of Daisy and Mrs. Walker provides a black-and-white contrast. The intermediate shades in which James is chiefly interested belong once more to Winterbourne. Daisy's association with Giovanelli makes his own moral disorientation yet more acute. While being vexed with himself for what he begins to recognize as a strong "inclination" towards her, he would welcome evidence that she is indulging in an amour with Giovanelli, for then "to be able to think more lightly of her would make her much less perplexing"—that is, he would have an avenue of escape from his own perplexity. But Daisy continues to present "an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence." He, therefore, has to face her first explicit challenge—though the fact of its being so explicit is a measure of the extent to which he has failed in response to the instinctive challenge that Daisy constitutes in her self—when she demands of him: "Does Mr. Winterbourne think … that—to save my reputation—I ought to get into the carriage?" The advice he gives is prudent: to get into the carriage. But James makes it more interesting to the reader by attributing it to "gallantry" rather than prudence, with the gloss that "the finest gallantry, here, was simply to tell her the truth; and the truth, for Winterbourne, as the few indications I have been able to give have made him known to the reader, was that Daisy Miller should take Mrs. Walker's advice." James's first-person intrusion in this sentence is not a clumsy lapse from his point-of-view technique, but a timely reminder that it is such a technique that he is employing. The truth here is only the truth "for Winterbourne." What the truth for Daisy is, or what the truth is, it is not among the purposes of the story to unfold. And the truth "for Winterbourne" is inseparable from his image of himself as a person of gallantry—which I take to be a facet of his image of himself as a gentleman. Although it is to his credit in this instance that he does not indulge in the kind of gallantry that is mere compliment, but feels bound to speak as he thinks, his answer disturbingly reveals that he cannot make a like discrimination between appearance and reality where the question of a young woman's "reputation" is concerned. His answer implies what Daisy's question had challenged him to deny, that reputation is a matter of appearances. The conclusion of the episode, which James so places that it is also the conclusion of the third section, confirms this. Winterbourne shows a touch of fire in his defence of Daisy before Mrs. Walker. He speaks "angrily," and his earlier, private misgivings about having been too long in Europe flash out in the sharp comment, "I suspect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!" Yet his intention to rejoin Daisy—which might have been his commitment to a growing self-criticism—is deflected by no more than the action of her parasol in screening her head and Giovanelli's from view. It is what this appears to signify that makes the young man direct his steps, not towards the couple, but towards Mrs. Costello; and the structure of the story tells us that this is a serious relapse, for Mrs. Costello, who has never even condescended to know Daisy, ought to have been relegated to an earlier stage of Winterbourne's development.

The last section is the one in which Daisy's conduct has something of the air of wilfulness, but she also has justice on her side, notably in her criticism of the false Roman propriety that considers flirtation more appropriate in married than in unmarried women. Mrs. Walker's cutting her lends force to this criticism. Vulgarity is seen to lie on the side of "culture" rather than Daisy's "audacity and innocence." Winterbourne, not yet free from his vacillation, despite the significant move made at the end of the third section, can be ironic to his aunt about the quality of that culture that she upholds; but when he muses to himself upon the meaning of Daisy's determination to accept Giovanelli's company, he finds that "holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's 'innocence'" is "more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry." In reality the "gallantry" has worn thin. He concludes that "She was 'carried away' by Mr. Giovanelli." The scene in the Colosseum, where he, too, cuts Daisy, is a consequence of this. Although he again vacillates to the extent of trying to cover his intention from Daisy, the outcome is a final move in the Mrs. Costello direction, made "with a sort of relief "that he is at last released from ambiguity: "She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect."

As in The Wings of the Dove—for which Daisy Miller is in so many ways a preliminary sketch, in spite of the great difference between the characters of Daisy and Milly—the story ends not with Daisy's death, but with the realization by her diffident lover of what he had lost both in her and in himself. The shreds of evidence contributed by Mrs. Miller (Daisy's insistence that she never was engaged) and Giovanelli (he knew that she would never marry him) provide a sufficient force in this delicately counter-weighted story to swing Winterbourne right through the arc of his apparently resolved ambiguity to the opposite recognition that he had done Daisy an injustice. If it had been D. H. Lawrence writing the story (which, admittedly, is to suppose that its whole tone and tempo would have been different, but not, I believe, fundamentally its theme) Winterbourne's failure would have appeared more explicitly as a missed opportunity with "one of the lords of life." James, limited to impressions upon Winterbourne's consciousness, and given more to the irony of understatement, nevertheless hints at a similar conclusion. The final variation on the recurrent motif of Winterbourne's having lived too long in Europe is James's way of saying this. "You were right," says Winterbourne to Mrs. Costello, "in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts." To say in such a way to Mrs. Costello that she was right is to indicate firmly that she was, and is, wrong, in her sense of the phrase, but also conveys to the reader Winterbourne's final understanding that a certain quality of life has atrophied in himself.

The ironic and ambiguous expression of Winterbourne's failure is of a piece with his character and with James's method of telling his story. A great change has taken place, but the surface remains intact. We assume that Winterbourne's attendance on his aunt continues as before, and the last paragraph tells us that he has returned to Geneva, and probably to the mysterious lady there. Unlike Romeo, he passes not from a Rosalind to an ultimate commitment to his Juliet, but from Rosalind to a half-hearted relationship with Juliet, and back to his Rosalind again. That is the sort of tragic hero he is—not one that opens the Shakespearean stops, or excites the Lawrentian indignation, but a tragic figure for all that in a muted fashion. He has failed to answer Daisy's challenge; and her death, touching as it is, is less the point of the story than the stifling of instinct in himself that his act of "injustice" to her represents. James, as the ending of The Turn of the Screw illustrates, is quite capable of making a death scene the highly dramatic conclusion to one of his stories; but it would have been quite inappropriate to end Daisy Miller with the heroine's death, for this would have meant contradicting the whole emphasis of this particular story. It is the hero's slow, lingering, and almost comically un-dramatic death that is the main theme, and his ironically distanced, but unavailing struggle for life that provides the material of the slender plot.