SOURCE: "Daisy Miller, Backward into the Past," in Henry James Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter, 1980, pp. 164-78.

[Hocks is an American author and educator who has written extensively on Henry James. In the following essay, he examines Daisy Miller from the perspective of one hundred years of criticism. Highlighting developments in critical perspective and revisions in James's thoughts on the novel, he explores the characters of Daisy and Winterbourne and the thematic issues that they raise.]

Here you have the work of a great psychologist, who has the imagination of a poet, the wit of a keen humorist, the conscience of an impeccable moralist, the temperament of a philosopher, and the wisdom of a rarely experienced witness of the world.

—W. D. Howells on Henry James

1. THE PRESENT

Although there is a lingering untrue truism that, with the publication in 1878 of Daisy Miler, James "invented the international novel," what is both enduring and true is that, with the character of Daisy Miller herself, James auspiciously identified as his special imaginative territory the plight of the international American girl. Well after he had transmuted her into Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady and, much later, into Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove—by which time he was willing to consent to the view that "my supposedly typical little figure [Daisy] was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else"—even then James was likely to be identified as the author of Daisy Miller. A tale that was pirated immediately in this country, that sold twenty thousand copies in pamphlet form in weeks, that was oft reprinted, translated, and given a different form as a play and even as a hat, and that generated some heated discussion when it first appeared, Daisy Miller was as close as Henry James ever came to becoming a popular novelist in his own lifetime. To committed Jamesians, especially in the American academy, Daisy Miller has frequently seemed like a mixed blessing within the novelist's momentous and immense body of work, for it occupies, along with The Turn of the Screw, perhaps, a somewhat disproportionate importance in that canon.

Yet that importance still persists and will, I should think, continue to do so. For one thing, those who teach Henry James often discover each year that, as with The American, so much a piece of the same vintage, university students respond exceedingly well to Daisy Miller, respond to it despite—I shall shortly argue even because of—the outmoded manners that constitute the narrative conflict. For another thing, the tale itself remains accessible to students and teachers alike because of its beautifully swift focus on the antagonism between Daisy and the Europeanized "gang" abroad, because of the vividly convincing "moral muddlement" rendered by James of his register Frederick Winterbourne, and because of the yet uncomplicated syntax of James's prose idiom—another element in common with the much-taught book The American. For still another thing, Daisy's plight, her character, and her willingness to take risks against the conventional mores all appeal immediately to the deep feminism of these times; the specific issues may seem tame, even quaint, but a great many young women college students, upon reading Daisy Miller for the first time, are convinced at once that she is their "sister." They see in her not only a victim of Victorian views about the conduct of women, but more generally a sacrificial victim of some amorphous "societal" set of "female expectations," of traditional "role models," the challenging of which is for them the first, or close to the first, priority of our own times. (It is always tempting at that juncture for a teacher to inform his students that Daisy Miller, after being rejected unceremoniously by an American publication, was first accepted and printed in the Cornhill by none other than Virginia Woolf's father!) That Daisy's principal antagonists are themselves women, older women with a sort of moralist-custodian station, is a feature of this tale that particularly appeals to these young readers; they "empathize" with her in that conflict, one in which men like Winterbourne are permitted to have their Geneva lady friends without any criticism from the Mrs. Costellos and Mrs. Walkers of the world, but in which Daisy herself is abominated, as it were, by these same vindictive ladies. A double standard derived from men but enforced by women! Finally, even the fantasies of such young college women, I recently discovered to my great surprise, may manage to connect up with the story of Daisy Miller: a particularly vivacious student informed the present writer and her own classmates that, upon reading this tale, she immediately "understood" Daisy because she herself had always wished to appear at her mother's bridge party, or else cocktail party, in a bathing suit! Both the fuss and the challenge to respectability were very important.

Those students who are sympathetic to the woman's movement and who are otherwise students of literature go on, of course, to read The Portrait of a Lady rather soon after their baptism into Daisy's cause. But after The Portrait they are not so sure what to think. If they have by then become appreciative readers of James, they will obviously read other tales and some of the other novels, perhaps, but they will no longer "relate" to James, or to his young American heroines, in quite the same way. One might even, at that stage, inform the few students who remain after the natural attrition process of the existence of The Bostonians, though hastening to add that James himself thought so poorly of it that he chose to omit it from the New York Edition! For those exceedingly few students who eventually become Jamesians themselves, it is hence-forth perhaps Kate Chopin or Edith Wharton, not the author of Daisy Miller, who will better represent for them the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American contribution to "women's literature." And yet, like all readers who come to admire Henry James, these last will permanently wish they could puzzle out the "bottom line" on this issue in the fiction of James.

But of course the great majority of responsive young readers of Daisy Miller are precisely not the small sifted group above; they are those who feel an instinctive affinity with Daisy, yet one that hardly compels them to undertake the later prose style or sensibility of Henry James. In short, Daisy perhaps continues, in a real sense, to be as close as James can come to popularity, and this despite the vast and distinguished academic criticism and scholarship given to him. As for the young "feminist" response to the tale? It is anything but easy to know how much to challenge that response; how much, really, to complicate it—though complicate it, I am convinced, one should. But how much? The issue is a surprisingly intricate one, for not only is the tale itself far more intentionally ambivalent than a pro-sister-Daisy reading might wish it, but the cultural ambience out of which that reading comes manages to recomplicate things. For instance: it is not so hard to perceive, with Leslie Fiedler, that Daisy is, from a certain angle, the "Good Bad Girl" recast, the "virtuous whore," the "mythically innocent" figure, and the "prototype of all those young American female tourists who continue to baffle their continental lovers with an innocence not at all impeached, though they have now taken to sleeping with their Giovanellis as well as standing with them in the moonlight." Yet this kind of insight gives us but the lightest of Daisy's threads of continuity with our own day. Likewise, the instinctive response by young college students, especially young women, to Daisy's cause and "feelings" will remind us that these students too are after all themselves "intelligent but presumptuous" American people prepared to "affront their destiny," and thus that James always knew generically of what he wrote. But neither revelation is quite the "complicating cultural ambience" to which I referred before. Even less, nay least, penetrating is the sort of cultural interpretation that says the young sisters of Daisy Miller are today similarly poetic, endlessly baffling and appealing, and wonderfully "audacious and innocent" while pursuing merely a different, or heightened, set of goals, such as "self-fulfillment," a "nonsexist," "non-judgmental" social order, a "healthy sexual identity," or even a full "economic equality." That kind of analysis does not really complicate anything very much, although, like Fiedler's approach, it does exhibit a thread of continuity between Daisy's drama and our own day. But what I meant earlier by a complicating cultural ambience is, rather, something very different. It is my sense that, when studying Daisy Miller, the most enthusiastic young students, especially the pro-sister-Daisy interpreters and, if I may so metonymize it, the "bathing suit" response, depend in no small measure on the "quaintness" of the mores in conflict, depend on the formality, even, of the acts of conduct in question. In other words, I sense that the innocently anachronistic forms themselves, not to mention Daisy's own sexual innocence, are central to a contemporary response by the young reader to Daisy's predicament. I do not say that this young college reader has the more refined and ambiguous understanding of the story that the Jamesian has. Indeed, that reader does not, for, whereas the adult Jamesian will wish to emphasize the novelist's realism and, especially, his vigorous departure from siding with any Victorian value system, the young student may, without quite realizing it, be responding to a certain inchoate attractiveness in Victorian formalities, imperatives, and even conceptions of respectability. To put this another way, I sense that the young American reader may be attracted to the "outmoded manners" in conflict within the story in a way not unlike the way Daisy herself responds so excitedly on those few occasions that Winterbourne speaks hyperpoetically, formally, and anachronistically to her—" 'Dearest young lady,'" he cries, "'have I come all the way to Rome only to be riddled by your silver shafts?'"; and Daisy typically explodes, "'Just hear him say that!'" It is surprising just how often that sort of exchange occurs in the tale. In teaching Daisy Miller we are, properly enough, attuned to James's critical position. But I think our students who, after all, no longer need convincing that they are free and entitled to abide by the manners of nineteenth-century Schenectady (which is, after all, what Daisy "perpetrated," and nothing more)—such students find instead intrinsically fascinating the sort of formal code with which Daisy has to contend.

This is one reason, then, why Daisy Miller will most likely keep that "disproportionate importance" in James's canon. It will continue to attract young Americans, and now especially young women, to Daisy's cause; yet that very enthusiasm will, I believe, continue to be fed by a subterranean romance for the past, a kind of dimly understood nostalgia for a social context in which the high drama of such outmoded manners is still possible. If this assessment is correct, there is much irony in the fact that the student so taken with Daisy and her predicament can consciously only transfer her terms of allegiance with Daisy to her own contemporary cultural or sexual goals, ones which, enunciated now primarily by the language and thought of behavioral psychology and counselling—e.g., "feeling good about oneself," "personal growth," "sexually active," "non-judgmental," "reproductive freedom," "getting in touch with my feelings," "letting me be me," "a good self-image," "pro-activist input"—can hardly fail to reinforce the sort of jadedness which gave rise to the attraction of Daisy's charmingly "other" version of the moral drama in the first place.

These few reflections on Daisy Miller and the modern student are occasioned in part by the frame of a "centennial" consciousness, to be sure; but they arise pertinently too as a meditation on a very recent study of American social fiction by C. Hugh Holman, whose title Windows on the World not only recalls a famous passage in James's Preface to The Portrait of a Lady but whose argument contends, against the current academic fashion, for the significance of Realism as a fundamental American literary mode. Holman reminds us of what Realism and its ramifications were for the novel of society, but also points out the appropriateness of the Realistic Movement to the cultural and intellectual milleu out of which it came. He summarizes that overall view with words that evoke immediately the essential spirit of James and his contemporaries and that speak directly to the meaning, then and now, of a touchstone-document of imagination like Daisy Miller.

The surface details, the common actions, and the minor catastrophes of a middle-class society constituted the chief subject matter of the movement. Most of the realists avoided situations with tragic or cataclysmic implications. Their tone was comic, frequently satiric, seldom grim or somber, even when situations have—as they often do in Henry James's novels—tragic overtones.

I believe that realism as it was self-consciously practiced by the American novelist in the last half of the nineteenth century was the literary mode that most adequately embodied the assumptions of the thoughtful American of that time, as existential romanticism seems to embody the assumptions of ours. The major tenets of realism were called forth by the postulates of the American dream; at its apex realism proved to be a reasonably accurate expression of that dream; and the decline of realism into doctrinaire naturalism, symbolism, and expressionism in our century has been the result in part of a decline in an active faith in that dream. This position is, I believe, in accord with the facts of literary history.

Indeed, Holman's formulation not only "accords with the facts of literary history," it simply evokes at once, as was said before, the very world of James's social and moral vision. When we teach Daisy Miller now to our responsive students we are deeply obligated by the "facts of literary history" no less than by the complexity of James's imagination to present the nouvelle as the true, critical dialectical inquiry it is. But we must also recognize, by virtue of the same facts of literary history since 1900 with the diminished importance of realism, that the nostalgic reach backward to the "quaintness" of the moral issue on the part of present-day readers, ourselves as well as our students, is as intrinsic to our collective character and circumstance as Daisy's instinctive response to the flowery language of courtly romance. It is that sense of a "backward imagination" that I have found lacking in the cultural approach epitomized, on the one hand, say, in Leslie Fiedler's view, or in the less formal "literary" application, primarily through feminism, of the language and thinking of counselors and therapists; in a strange quirk of recent history, requiring only a centenary, the obsessions of Victorian sentimentality—the family, motherhood, the respectability of the "Young Girl" (as Howells denominated her in his Criticism and Fiction)—are about to be replaced by the sentimentality of our own era, that of sexuality and feeling good about ourselves. We are becoming perhaps the new Mrs. Walkers and Costellos with, from their point of view, such unlikely doctrines! No wonder, then, that our enthusiastic students think uncritically that they "understand" at once what it is Daisy "feels," despite the fact that the tale never enters within her point of view. But no wonder, also, that the same students cannot help but be charmed deep within their being by the presence of a moral and social code like that which Daisy dared to flout.

11. THE MIDDLE PAST

To present Daisy Miller as the "true dialectical inquiry it is," and thus to present it also as a vintage expression of the literary milieu described by C. Hugh Holman, it may be helpful to take brief stock of certain configurations found in the critical literature of the work. Perhaps it should first be said that virtually all of its legendary "rumpus," and particularly its alleged "outrage on American girlhood," has been greatly overstated. Indeed, this notion, one that has accompanied the academic history of this story for years, is simply not to be found in the written contemporary reviews and response to Daisy Miler, with the exception on occasion of remarks by Howells, who of course attributes the sense of outrage elsewhere. Doubtless there was some talk along these lines, but the written record will not justify the legend. On the other hand, what cannot be overstressed is the extent to which Daisy Miller did immediately "click" in the reading public, did create overnight its vogue; in no time at all everyone did seem to know what "a Daisy Miller" was, in much the same way that today we all know immediately what "an Archie Bunker" is. In that respect, Howells' casual reference in The Rise of Silas Lapham to Daisy Millerism, or even his well-known comment about society's dividing itself into "Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites," is well justified, for it is after all possible to disagree about her in literary conversation while all participants agree that James's portrayal was appropriate and, to a greater or lesser extent, on target. If that sounds more like an academic discussion of the story than its supposed contemporary disrepute and scandal, that is nevertheless closer to what appears to have been the case. Everyone seems to have recognized Daisy as a "real" phenomenon, and the number of contemporary allusions to her, both individually and generically, is even astonishing. Yet what is finally compelling is the extent to which James's story had the effect of "teaching" the real Daisy Millers to behave differently, and even the extent to which he himself, along with others, believed that Daisy was almost an extinct species by, say, 1905.

There is some reason to believe, however, that James later thought Daisy extinct for reasons quite different from those marked by natural changes or increasing tolerance in social manners within international society. That James thought differently about the whole issue is almost surely the case. James may have felt by the first decade of this century that his Daisy Miller figure was inevitably more jaded than he had portrayed her earlier and was perhaps even sinister. Indeed, his reaction in this regard is almost a synecdoche for the reaction C. Hugh Holman points to in the demise of literary realism when it begins to lose faith in, and feel the decay of, the American dream. In other words, James's reconsideration of Daisy, a grimmer, more "realistic" reconsideration, we might say, is meanwhile symptomatic of the decline of Realism as the dominant literary movement!

This crux and paradox is, I believe, central to an understanding of James and of the Daisy Miller text that eventually came out of James's revision for his New York Edition. The viewpoint that Daisy had lost her innocence for James, a view corroborated by his portrayal of Julia Bride and by his discussion of those contemporary young Daisies in his later "Preface," is one that must register on the literary historian following the lead of C. Hugh Holman.

It is one side of the equation. But what is likewise part of that same moment, both for James and for literary history, is the other side of the equation. The American Daisy-figure underwent an idealized transformation, while the cultural ambience associated with her became, for James's sensibility, part of a poetic past subject to the ravages of the present. In other words, "the decline of active faith in that [American] dream" at the turn of the century, of which Holman speaks, took the form in James of subjecting the international American girl to the corruption of the modern world. In the case of Maggie Verver it meant fighting like nature herself red in tooth and claw against a hideous modern evil "seated all at its ease where she had only dreamed of good.… like some bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the thick-carpeted corridors of a house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon." Like Isabel Archer, another of Daisy's sisters, Maggie Verver had to fight for her life in a domestic framework of deception and brutal manipulation. It might even be said that, unlike Isabel, Maggie had no choice but to become deeply tainted morally, suffer the "miasma" of the corruption of modern life in order to survive.

In the case of Milly Theale, James even went so far as to identify her with the very poetry of Venice, a poetry, that is, which James interpreted as tied intimately to the beautiful city's own slow, inevitable decay from within, an intricate conception and interpretation that anticipates by about ten years a comparable one by Thomas Mann. James's haunting explication of Venice as "the poetry of misfortune" provides for us a deep analogue by which Daisy Miller, no less than her own prototype in his cousin Minnie Temple, had now been transformed into the Milly Theale phenomenon. "Is it the style," he asks, while pondering Venice's immemorial beauty,

that has brought about the decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified and consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of her dignity.… What was most beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, going—that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so desperately to read history into everything?

By the time the metamorphosis of the Daisy figure into Milly Theale and the poetry of her misfortune had taken place, James had likewise begun to turn, at least partially, again toward Hawthornean romance as the vehicle for this tenor. In this respect James is, once more, a legitimate barometer of the change Hugh Holman points to in the beginning of the decline of Realism's dominance at the turn of the century. We have already noted, of course, that the elder James of the New York Edition was apt to refer to Daisy as having been "pure poetry." James's comments are confirmed by the findings of those scholars who have studied at close hand his textual revisions for the New York Edition. The consensus is that James's revisions serve to coat his earlier comedy of manners with a symbolic and poetic overlay, one that emphasizes not only Daisy's charm and the general disagreeableness of her critics in the story, but especially that stresses her symbolic ties to nature, ties which, inevitably, betoken also her subjugation to its laws and processes. It is thus at once an idealization of his heroine which, at the same time, makes symbolic connections with her fragile mortality. While it is most understandable that interpreters of James's nouvelle will wish to see this textual evidence as confirmation that Daisy was innocent, blameless, and beautiful of spirit, a true and modern victim whose Colosseum death is as unprovoked as those of the Christian martyrs preceding her, my own viewpoint is that James's revisions, together with his statements in the New York "Preface," have more to do with his own reinterpretation of the cultural past epitomized in the American girl abroad, a reinterpretation as "the poetry of misfortune," a perspective in which the elements of romance are part of the real, the "poetry" even part of the "monstrous" realization of a decay in the dream. Above all, perhaps, it was clear that in the New York Edition James would no longer prefer to emphasize his comedic objectivity and distance from the heroine in a comedy of manners by titling his nouvelle "A Study": the affinities with Milly Theale and the cultural reconceptions she symbolized made that impossible. Thus, despite the fine academic criticism James has received, no one, I think, has perceived this deep connection between Daisy and Milly any better than did Howells. He writes [in North American Review 176 (1903)]:

Milly Theale is as entirely American in the qualities which you can and cannot touch as Daisy Miller herself; and (I find myself urged to the risk of noting it) she is largely American in the same things. There is the same self-regardlessness, the same beauteous insubordination, the same mortal solution of the problem. Of course, it is all in another region, and the social levels are immensely parted. Yet Milly Theale is the superior of Daisy Miller less in her nature than in her conditions.

If one had to pick a single feature, or perhaps two, which have become crucial in interpreting the text of Daisy Miller by academic critics, those would be, first, the emphasis on James's "middle point of view" in the conflict he portrays, and, second, the importance to the story of Winterbourne, who is, after all, our narrative register rather than Daisy (who remains instead the "phenomenon" she is and could no longer quite be were we permitted within her consciousness). For obvious reasons these two approaches tend to overlap, because James's balanced objectivity relies in part on his, and our, keeping in mind that Daisy is perceived and evaluated from without, which in turn means from a point of view largely, but not entirely, that of Winterbourne. In the 1950's, for example, F. W. Dupee and Christof Wegelin represent two versions, if you will, of a balancing interpretation of the tale. Dupee emphasized that Daisy was indeed no martyr, but that James was addressing critically the sentiment of the American girl and the "legend of American innocence," not merely participating romantically in it himself (as James in retrospect, we recall, thought he had done erroneously in the case of Newman in The American). "Daisy's death" in the Colosseum, observed Dupee [in Henry James, 1951], "if it proves anything, proves that not every superstition is a fraud." For Wegelin, on the other hand, James's critical distance was keynoted by the fact that all of Daisy's own critics and censors in the story are Americans in Europe, a colony which bends over backwards to ape European practices and judgments. In this framework it is, of course, appropriately ironic that Mr. Giovanelli, the one actual European in the tale, pronounces accurately the "innocence" to Daisy's character denied by her own Europeanized compatriots! In still another vein, Leon Edel perceived James's social criticism to lie in no small measure in the "unerring vision which James had of the total abdication, by the mass of American parents, of all authority over their children."

But I think it fair to say that the most elucidative energy expended on Daisy Miller, at least in its comparatively recent critical history, has been a refocusing on Frederick Winterbourne as the Jamesian "center". of the story. Perhaps one measure of this refocus is a most recent comment au contraire by Edward Wagenknecht, in his book Eve and Henry James, that in the "one hundred years that the story has now been in existence, has a single human being ever read it not because he was interested in Daisy but because he was interested in Winterbourne?" Perhaps not, yet one can hardly blame a number of Jamesians for gravitating in the direction they have. Daisy is, after all, seen from without, is indeed misinterpreted from without; so it is natural to follow, as it were, the story's own narrative lead. This seems especially appropriate since all know that James himself became preeminently concerned with, and masterful at, developing the viewpoint character. Finally, a Winterbourne-focus in this tale does not divert us from the social conflict or "international theme" which comprises James's real subject, since Winterbourne is himself a solid representative, albeit in a softer key, of the Europeanized American colony comprising the story's collective antagonist.

In any case, there is no gainsaying the tendency toward a kind of emphasis in the past twenty years to the effect that Winterbourne is really the pivotal character. This view was taken in Wayne C. Booth's influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction, but his emphasis remains there primarily technical; others, however, have sought to construct social, cultural, psychoanalytic, or moral interpretations of Daisy Miller extracted from a reading of, or by way of, the character of Winterbourne. With occasional exception, these readings concur that Winterbourne is morally culpable, as his name insinuates; indeed that he freezes to death this American Daisy as effectively, let us say, as Emily Dickinson's frost in her poem "Apparently with no Surprise." Perhaps this is only a newfangled way of continuing to read the story with a strong sympathy for Daisy's beauty, freedom, innocence, and vulnerability. But on closer inspection one discovers also that the real villain, for these commentators, is Puritanism, whether American- or Geneva-style; or, worst of all, the two symbolically combined in the chilly Winterbourne. What is foremost to that position, then, is that James's famous tale is a harsh indictment of Puritanism, either in cultural or in sexual terms, or in both. Yet a new and interesting variation on this tendency in recent years to center on Winterbourne is provided by Holman in Windows on the World. He argues that Daisy Miller takes its place in a long line of distinctively American narratives which are adaptations of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Bildungsroman. In a group extending from Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" to All the King's Men, Holman notes the persistence of the witness or spectator-characters, individuals who undergo a development toward wisdom and maturity by watching what happens to others, and who most often are instructed "in a dark dimension of life which that witness might otherwise never have seen." This version of the rite of passage associated with the Bildungsroman

comes not actually from his own experience or his own response to trials or actions or even from what is directly done to him, but from what he witnesses being done by and to others. The initiation through which he passes results from witnessing action not from taking it. That structure, in which a witness or a narrator watches actions by others and learns from them, has reappeared in so many American novels dealing with the maturing, development, or education of characters that it may be considered truly a peculiarly American form of the Bildungsroman.

Holman's argument is valuable primarily for his isolating a native sub-genre of the Bildungsroman rather than for his breaking much new ground on our analysis as such of Daisy Miller. And yet, what his remarks do perform for the nouvelle is an extremely helpful move away from using Winterbourne as the principal target for alleged anti-Puritan, anti-sexual-repression statements by James. Modern criticism has, I think, been wise to concentrate on the figure of Winterbourne, for one's reading of Daisy's character and her larger symbolic meaning is not impaired by that focusing; it is in fact enhanced. But psycho-sexual criticism, with its inevitable pillorying of "Puritanism," misses the whole point of James's moral world, at least in his international fiction. The drama of inner conflict, whether social or sexual, is the exciting stuff of James's viewpoint characters, especially when they are Americans. These critics sometimes seem to forget that James has created his own share of characters with emancipated views and practices in the domain of sexuality, and they are not the more compelling for it. Winterbourne's tale, if it is his tale, is essentially about the making of a Europeanized American. That sad and deleterious process has only completed itself by the very end, when his alternative possibility, in the person of Daisy, has been closed, and he returns to Geneva and to a "clever foreign lady." But we seem to forget that the issue was still in doubt only as long as he inclined toward Daisy's innocent and affecting ways and also kept vacillating from one moment to the next: thus, for example, when his aunt tells him Daisy "has an intimacy with her mamma's courier," Winterbourne, who had just before concluded that Daisy was an innocent American flirt, is caught off guard—" 'An "intimacy" with him?' Ah there it was!" There, of course, it was not; not even for Winterbourne, who changes his mind numerous times again before the story's climactic scene in the Colosseum. To put what is often said of him in a sort of obverse way, as long as Winterbourne remained truly puzzled by the question of Daisy's sexual innocence he was potentially worthy of her and worthy of our sympathetic engagement with him as narrative "center." Winterbourne's alliance with Geneva in the story does, I concede, suggest symbolically his association with the sources of Calvinism. But it primarily stands, I believe, for his amphibious attachments—national, cultural, and social—to the old and now worlds. It was really, without his knowing it, the new world element within his "queer mixture" that responded to the free spirit from Schenectady.

III. THE PAST

In 1870 James lost his beloved cousin Minnie Temple. Eight years later his conception of Daisy owed something central to his memory of her. Most important was a quality they both had of moral spontaneity, of questioning given institutions, and of a general natural free-spiritedness. Most different between them were Minnie's intellectual interests and her capacity for personal introspection—in that respect James's cousin resembles more the character of Isabel Archer. Still another element in common between Minnie and Daisy is, of course, their premature deaths. This parallel may be of particular importance, inasmuch as James seems always to have believed that Minnie's death, terrible as it was, at least precluded her discovery of the full extent of the world's evil. James always felt that she had died, not only betimes, but before the inevitable disillusionment with her reading of life had set in. Yet James simultaneously believed that he himself, and also his brother William, had been thrust rudely out of their own innocence and youth by her death. It is only extending slightly James's own lifelong analysis of the meaning of Minnie's death to suggest, then, that her liberation, even by death, from the darker interpretations of life became the occasion and even the requirement that James accept and convey them, as it were, for her. Daisy's abrupt death functions in a similar way in Daisy Miller. She remains, we are told, first by Giovanelli and then twice in echoing repetition by Winterbourne, "'the most innocent!'" And Winterbourne, who is the exact same age as was James when Minnie died in 1870, is left with the burden of consciousness, the loss of his own spiritual innocence. The manner of Daisy's death, too, suggests not so much a martyrdom perpetrated by the bad accusatory Americans—even though Winterbourne's reaction once she is at the Colosseum is, as she says, "'he cuts me dead!' "—rather it suggests that the "Roman fever" she catches is worldly evil, which is pervasive, whether she knows it or not. Whatever one might say of Winterbourne, his aunt, or Mrs. Walker, it might be suggested that Giovanelli's friendship, which Daisy prized, was somewhat less than elevated from his side by his willingness to take her to the "fatal spot." His explanation that he had no fear for himself and that Daisy "'did what she liked'" is accompanied by his raising "his neat shoulders and eyebrows to within suspicion of a shrug." From a certain angle, Giovanelli's actions and explanations are closer to the unprotected condition of life, the cruel Roman fever of experience, than is the misjudgment or even the rejection, on passionate ground, by Winterbourne. What is clearest at the end is that, apart from her own family, Winterbourne is the only one who continues to reflect on Daisy's fate and its implications for himself.

As is not the case with the later James, however, character analysis as such, whether of Winterbourne or of Daisy, will take us only so far. To appropriate Winterbourne's own language, the two principals in this story are "booked to make a mistake" with one another because the reactions by each to the other are culturally and socially predetermined and are psychological only in a subsidiary way. Given our general recognition that Henry James developed an extraordinary capacity in his mature fiction to translate cultural issues into the dominion of individual psychology, the emphasis in Daisy Miller remains at the level of social determinism; it is fundamentally what the nouvelle immediately following it was called, "an international episode." And it is not even necessarily a better intrinsic piece of work than the latter (which has also its Daisy Miller/Isabel Archer American girl in the person of Bessie Alden). What it does have, however, is the special conflict and mutual misunderstanding that arises between the "natural" American free spirit and the complicated response to that spirit by the Europeanized American who is at once attracted and repelled by it. Yet it is still, at least at this stage in James's career, a case of a quasi-tragedy through cultural implantation; or we might want to call it a social comedy of errors with a darkening and lyric edge.

For this reason, Daisy's name functions emblematically in the tale in a way that would almost be worthy of James's predecessor Hawthorne. She is, of course, the North American "daisy," thus by association a "natural" and "common" flower from the region of her native land: indeed, Winterbourne's initial response to what he thinks of as her "natural elegance" is much in keeping with this typology. Etymologically, as several critics have mentioned in passing, she is the "day's eye"; I think it is interesting that not only does she, like certain species of the daisy, "close up again" at night when she visits the Colosseum with Giovanelli, she also puts off her earlier nighttime sojourn with Winterbourne to the castle of Chillon at Vevey until another time when it becomes instead a daylight excursion. And even though Mrs. Costello, so to speak, "cuts her dead" verbally when hearing about the Chillon outing—"And that … is the little abomination you wanted me to know!"—nevertheless Daisy herself is anything but "closed up" by that earlier expedition with Winterbourne. Thus, while the two trips to Chillon and the Colosseum are clearly structural opposites in the story, and are largely ironic in the fact of the two companions and the different social conventions governing Vevey and Rome (so that Winterbourne is, in a sense, the prototype of Giovanelli while at Vevey), the same structural opposition is enhanced with additional meaning when looked at through the iconography of Daisy's name.

But Daisy's name also carries emblematic associations with the other principal species of the flower, the European plant, sometimes called the "English daisy." Here I suspect we have not so much a type to which Daisy herself refers, as with the North American species, but more the expectations made of her by critics and verbal adversaries throughout the tale. For this latter European species of daisy is commonly referred to as "bachelor's button," suggesting, as boutonniere, a number of images antithetical to Daisy's free-spiritedness and natural state, indeed suggesting elements of conformity, of unlimbered rigidity, of exactness and precision, all by dint of being severed from the natural soil. (Daisy, we recall, continually calls Winterbourne "stiff "; Winterbourne, in lamenting often that Daisy fails to "compose," is surely not thinking of the "bachelor's button," but I am not sure James himself does not have that, along with much else, in mind.)

Still another meaning connected with Daisy's name is the colloquial, or slang, expression of "daisy" meaning something which is fine, first-class, first-rate. A beautifully memorable use of the word that way, an ironic use, is by Mark Twain when characterizing Natty Bumppo's following the canonball track in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." This slang meaning parallels, perhaps, something of the ambiguous resonance we are left with in our reflection upon Daisy after taking stock of many factors, both those denoting her natural elegance and victimization as well as those denoting her foolishness, stubbornness, and, more than once, a sort of tactless crudity. More immediately, the "daisy" of the slang meaning conveys, I think, the sort of dramatized ambivalence concerning her which is found in Winterbourne's puzzled consciousness.

Let me say that, having taught James and written about him for many years, I have found "allegorical" approaches to his fiction halting, to say the least. My analysis here, however, by way of Daisy's name, is meant to elaborate two points. First, I have meant to suggest that these emblematic features tie into and support the very same kind of social drama we would ordinarily explicate without such typology. Second, I wish to suggest again by this approach the extent that Daisy Miller is primarily governed by cultural determinism, and is not primarily an example of James's depth and complexity at rendering individual psychology. Though other Jamesians may doubtless disagree, it is my own view that, in the novelist's later, more complex idiom, the typology of his fictional names is in itself less enhancing, but instead functions as a kind of first-level framework of meaning and interpretation, the point of which is usually to be complicated and qualified through further analysis—as with "Marcher" and "May," for instance, in The Beast in the Jungle.

In a somewhat different vein, yet pointing to the same overall meaning, James's craftsmanship in Daisy Miller is particularly evident in his masterful use of verbal foreshadowing, one of the strongest features of his mature fiction as well. Thus, in addition to the kind of ironic adumbration found in Winterbourne's early excursion to Chillon with Daisy at Vevey, we find that the early designation by Mrs. Costello of Daisy as "a horror" actually anticipates the very term for the emotion Winterbourne feels when he finally makes up his mind against her in the Colosseum: "Winterbourne felt himself pulled up with final horror now—." Such verbal echoing has the force of aligning Winterbourne with his aunt, thus telling rhetorically against him despite the fact that the moment comes to us from within his own consciousness. Still another, powerfully subtle case of such verbal foreshadowing in Daisy Miller occurs in connection with the phraseology of going "too far." When Winterbourne first meets the young lady, he "wondered whether he had gone too far, but decided that he must gallantly advance rather than retreat." After a number of references throughout to Daisy's having gone too far by exceeding the limits of propriety, we find, once again in the climactic Colosseum scene, that Winterbourne's original motive for visiting is said to be the following: "The air of other ages surrounded one; but the air of other ages, coldly analysed, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne sought, however, toward the middle of the arena, a further reach of vision, intending the next moment a hasty retreat." The configuration here of a "further reach of vision" followed by a "hasty retreat" is an extraordinary case of the sort of "reflexive" language James mastered in his fiction throughout his career. The literal reasons—to gain a more general look and then leave before the bad air harms him—give way quickly to the key idea that Winterbourne has, with Daisy, been struggling to extend his vision, to discover her special goodness and beauty (and his own shortcomings in the light of that discovery) but is now about to "retreat" hastily again into the prejudices and judgments of others against Daisy when, in the next moment, he sees her there with Giovanelli. The same phrasing of his now "retreating" also, of course, reverses the earlier articulation at Vevey when he was cast in a different role, as we have seen. James's conscious, intentional use of such phrasing is unquestionable. In this case, for instance, he altered the Scribner's text from the earlier version so that the idiom would carry the full reflexive force just described.

Winterbourne's moral failure in James's tale, as many readers agree, occurs the next moment he recognizes Daisy's presence in the Colosseum with Giovanelli and determines for himself that she is base. He feels himself, as we have seen, "pull up with final horror now—"

and, it must be added, with final relief. 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. He stood there looking at her, looking at her companion too, and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely he himself must have been more brightly presented.

James's moral "ricochet," as before, is the great achievement here. Who else could inform us that Winterbourne's false conclusions about Daisy, conclusions in the very act of forming in his reflective consciousness, are themselves only too clear to the reader, so that, whatever shade of truth may attach from them to Daisy and to her companion, Winterbourne himself is, without of course his perceiving it, all the "more brightly presented" in his transgression against Daisy's character? Who but James could do that—make the very articulation immediately subject to the light of moral reflex, while on its surface level the passage only says that Winterbourne was more visible by moonlight than the two he just now condemned? So tight in this respect is James's moral landscape that should we, say, want to embroider the surface meaning, as by calling Winterbourne "caught in a shaft of light," or some such parallel, we could hardly avoid expounding figuratively the inner meaning along with it. All of this is, certainly, a function of the creative principle James was later to call "operative irony"; generically it is the same kind of irony that elsewhere occurs when, for instance, Mrs. Costello and Winterbourne both claim at different times that Winterbourne has "lived too long out of the country"—each attaching opposite implications to that shared proposition.

But in the passage above the operative irony is particularly dense, because there it converges with several other verbal and thematic elements, and does so at this appropriate moment of crisis. Thus, the "sudden clearance" connects beautifully and ironically with the "further reach of vision" from the earlier passage. Likewise, the "final relief" he feels has the effect of his letting go of the uncertainty which has been the hallmark of his "Puritan" vacillations concerning Daisy, the presence of which uncertainty, I would argue against some commentators, has merited on his behalf our sympathetic engagement. Especially important to the passage, however, is the language and meaning attached to the issue of "shades," language, I should add, entirely introduced by James into the later Scribner's text. Whether we think of it as shades of interpretation of Daisy's character (her "riddle" as Winterbourne also calls it) or perhaps as shades of moral and ethical responsibility, in which case it might well apply to both main characters, the whole conception at this moment of "shading" is imaginatively deep and powerful. Daisy herself, of course, has been from the start transparent in her absence of coquetry, of discrimination, or of subtlety of any kind (except perhaps her deeper attraction to formal and courtly expressions on the part of her admirers). Winterbourne, by contrast, has, by virtue of his own "queer mixture" of European and American allegiances (symbolized by his "Geneva-ness") translated that shadowy ambiguity into his vacillation regarding Daisy. This moment of ironic epiphany, then, manages to reverse and fuse both sides of the moral equation. Winterbourne finally discards "shades," thereby being himself exposed to our moral censure; Daisy simultaneously takes on the shades Winterbourne discards, for not only does she literally sit there in vague silhouette obscured from the moonlight, she moves swiftly out of the tale, as well as the Colosseum; this disappearance effectively leaves us to ponder, not so much about her essential character as about her judgment, especially with respect to this last, and final, episode in her short history. Jame's transpositions here of Winterbourne's shades and shadings into Daisy and of Daisy's transparency into Winterbourne (don't we judge and condemn him right at this moment with a decisiveness comparable to that of Daisy's censors in the tale generally?)—these constitute a feature which is found in his finest work. For those who have studied it, his extraordinary inversions of lightness and darkness in The Portrait of a Lady will be seen at once to function in the same way.

Jamesians should know, of course, that shades and nuances constitute in the last analysis virtually a microcosm of James's own epistemology and aesthetic practice. Winterbourne's relinquishing of "shades" at the crucial moment in effect pits him against everything James stands for as a writer. But whereas Daisy eventually "retreats" from us into the obscurity just mentioned, her character and her judgments while "planted straight in front" of us throughout the tale do anything but vindicate her, at least from this perspective of "shades." It is not Daisy's directness or obvious lack of ulterior design in her negotiations with people, any more than, say, Billy Budd's, which tells against her in this respect. It is, rather, her absence of real consciousness itself. In this sense it is almost a moot point whether we hold that her inward life is withheld from us because of James's choice of point of view, or that he made that choice because he wished to qualify Daisy's various positive qualities—naturalness, absence of guile, fresh beauty, true innocence—in this one important direction. Again, the comparison with Billy Budd is possibly instructive, for Melville apparently found, at one stage of composition, that he could not tell the story adequately without a Captain Vere, without, that is, a character who possesses a reflecting consciousness. The point is all the more acute when we recollect that James's principal quantum leap forward with the American girl after Daisy is his conception of Isabel, one which, as he insisted so strongly in the later Preface, constituted a singular decision to make this "frail vessel" type his reflecting consciousness as well. That decision transformed, among other things, "A Study" into "The Portrait," a figure into a character properly speaking. Yet it is remarkable to recall how much Isabel too is direct, is natural, is devoid of guile, possesses a fresh American beauty and a moral spontaneity. And it is just as remarkable to recollect that, on one level, Daisy fulfills James's famous Isabel-formula of the engaging, presumptuous "young woman affronting her destiny." But the difference, that Isabel's story is told from within, marked a momentous change in the whole trajectory of James's career, at least with respect to his international fiction and his conception of the American girl. Daisy's lack of maturity and judgment, as opposed to her beauty, innocence, and "poetry," is signified in her absence of reflection and consciousness. In that sense she resembles more the character in The Portrait of Henrietta Stackpole, although Henrietta has many more ideas, however blunt and unsifted by any real thoughtfulness, than does Daisy. In her own story Daisy reveals a capriciousness, usually based on the enjoyment of a "fuss," which effectively precludes any inward life whatever. She "chatters" in a way that, semantically as well as socially, sometimes resembles more the sound of a scattergun than the verbalization of real thought. That she is only one step removed from her mother is at times painfully obvious. And the fact that the two of them share in central and southern Europe only the topics of brother Randolph and Schenectady's Dr. Davis is wincing.

Even so, Winterbourne's off-repeated sense that Daisy's various parts fail to make an "ensemble," or that she somehow doesn't quite "compose," has occasionally suggested to this writer a qualification James made in his otherwise strong approbation of the fiction of his colleague Howells. My point is not, obviously, one of comparing the minds of Daisy and Howells, but of recalling that, for James, composition had its analogues outside the aesthetic sphere. Perhaps Howells, whose imagination and dominion was, from James's viewpoint, particularly American, and whose work and method is dominated sometimes by long and uninterrupted conversations, could be said to exhibit a kind of spiritual kinship with Daisy. Perhaps it might be added that Howells represented in his fiction something like the highest terms of a tutored vision of the sensibility which in its primitive state resides in Daisy. And this is only to say, too, that perhaps Winterbourne is, in his primitive state, something like the answering sensibility in James himself.

Although the emphasis is on the appeal, Winterbourne's formulation of Daisy's "queer little native grace" hints at her limitations as well. James's own Winterbourne-like formulations from his later "Preface," that with a "sufficiently brooding tenderness" he could "eventually extract" from Daisy as his subject "a shy incongruous charm," hints at the same appeal and limitation. The word sincongruous" especially echoes her "want of finish," her absence of "form" which Winterbourne frequently remarks to himself. Daisy is, then, as much a "queer mixture" as is Winterbourne himself. Even the young man's potential for romantic love for her is a mixed issue. While it is certainly the case that he "liked her awfully" and that, as much as anything else, Winterbourne's conflicts with her in Rome arose from a combination of jealousy and disappointment that she had not been pining away for his arrival, it is equally true that: "It pleased him to believe that even were twenty other things different and Daisy should love him and he should know it and like it, he would still never be afraid of Daisy. It must be added that this conviction was not altogether flattering to her: It represented that she was nothing every way if not light." This judgment by Winterbourne is sufficiently of a piece with the James of the later "Preface." Indeed, here the later Scribner's text makes the assessment more generalized, more "reliable," less Winterbourne's own opinion subject to a distorting lens. And since it is already the consensus of those who have studied the matter that James chose to render Daisy herself more poetic and idealized in the revised text, it suggests that at no time, early or late, did James fail to perceive his heroine's limitations. A "lightweight," in Jamesian terms, most often means someone without sufficient consciousness.

Daisy and Winterbourne were not really star-crossed lovers, because they never did have a sufficient meeting of minds to become lovers in anything but a preliminary sense. At best they were perhaps complementary figures. Daisy's enthusiasm and spontaneity needed to be tempered by a capacity for analysis, reticence, discrimination, if you will the critical faculty, whereas Winterbourne, as she kept insisting to him, was not spontaneous enough, hadn't enough "give." One of the most humorous aspects to the story, yet finally a sad one, is that unconsciously Daisy is reaching out for Winterbourne's funny-bone; when she teases him time and again she is truly searching for his American "funny" side, which is still latent within him, but which is already obstructed, as her opposing latent possibilities are obstructed, by presuppositions culturally planted and entrenched within their beings. Out of the Daisy/Winterbourne opposition were to emerge the great sets of American and European opposing correlatives in the international fiction of James. Nature required art; activity and energy required meaning and consciousness; innocence required experience; freedom demanded an awareness of life's limitations; the ethical temperament required its aesthetic understanding; spontaneity must always inhabit the conditions of history and custom. Daisy's will was at once strong and weak by virtue of the indistinctness of her aims and, of course, the absence of any critical reflection on them. Her family situation betrayed the same problem, for it is clear from the vivid presence of Randolph, of her mother, and the situation of her absent "downtown" father, that they all inhabited a vacuum, all were deprived (as our early novelists themselves lamented) of a cultural "content." Winterbourne, like many another James character to come, was flawed spiritually by his preconceptions, by his either-or thinking, by the very "relief" he experiences, both early and late, when he thinks he has discovered "the formula." And so the story does remain a true dialectical inquiry, as well as an unforgettable early success of James and of American Realism. With the great international novels ahead of him, and certain very special lessons learned from this piece of work as well as from its predecessor, The American, it was to be James himself, rather than Winterbourne, who had discovered the formula.