[english]Analysis of Major Characters
Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller is a wealthy, young, American girl from upstate New York, traveling around Europe with her mother and younger brother. Daisy is a curious mixture of traits. She is spirited, independent, and well meaning, but she is also shallow, ignorant, and provincial—almost laughably so. She offers the opinion that Europe is “perfectly sweet,” talks with shameless monotony about the tiresome details of her family’s habits and idiosyncrasies, thinks Winterbourne might know an Englishwoman she met on the train because they both live in Europe, and wonders if Winterbourne has heard of a little place called New York. Daisy is also a tiresome flirt. She has no social graces or conversational gifts, such as charm, wit, and a talent for repartee, and she is really interested only in manipulating men and making herself the center of attention.
Throughout Daisy Miller, Winterbourne obsesses over the question of whether Daisy is a “nice” girl, and Daisy’s behavior never reveals whether she is or isn’t. Winterbourne accepts that Daisy is vulgar but wonders whether she is innocent, and we never really find out the truth. Daisy does often seem less than innocent—Winterbourne does, after all, catch her with Mr. Giovanelli late at night at the Coliseum. However, whether such actions are or are not appropriate is more a matter of social convention than any firm moral expectation. In the end, the truth we find out about Daisy is only what Winterbourne thinks is true.
Winterbourne
An American who has lived most of his life in Europe, Winterbourne is the type of Europeanized expatriate that Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker also represent. He is also closely associated with New England Puritanism: he makes his home in Geneva, “the dark old city at the other end of the lake” that James is at pains to identify as the wellspring of Calvinism, not out of necessity but by choice. In many ways, Winterbourne is as central a character as Daisy and may very well be the story’s true protagonist. Certainly, he is the novel’s central consciousness, the character through whose eyes we see and experience everything.
Early on, we are told that Winterbourne is “addicted to observing and analyzing” feminine beauty. However, he does not appear to be a very deep or discriminating thinker. He spends time with his aunt not because of affection or because he takes pleasure in her company, but because he has been taught that “one must always be attentive to one’s aunt.” Winterbourne seems to hold in high regard what Mrs. Costello tells him, about the Millers as much as anything else. Out loud he defends Daisy, albeit rather feebly, but the whole novel is, in a sense, the story of Winterbourne’s attempts and inability to define Daisy in clear moral terms. Winterbourne is preoccupied with analyzing Daisy’s character. He wants to be able to define and categorize her, pin her down to some known class of woman that he understands. Daisy is a novelty to him. Her candor and spontaneity charm him, but he is also mystified by her lack of concern for the social niceties and the rules of propriety that have been laid down by centuries of European civilization and adopted by the American community in Rome. He befriends Daisy and tries to save her but ultimately decides that she is morally beyond redemption.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Americans Abroad
Daisy Miller was one of James’s earliest treatments of one of the themes for which he became best known: the expatriate or footloose American abroad. Americans abroad was a subject very much of the moment in the years after the Civil War. The postwar boom, the so-called Gilded Age, had given rise to a new class of American businessman, whose stylish families were eager to make “the grand tour” and expose themselves to the art and culture of the Old World. Americans were visiting Europe for the first time in record numbers, and the clash between the two cultures was a novel and widespread phenomenon.
James was of two minds about the American character. By temperament, he was more sympathetic with the European way of life, with its emphasis on culture, education, and the art of conversation. Like most Europeans, he saw his compatriots as boorish, undereducated, and absurdly provincial, unaware of a vast and centuries-old world outside their own new and expanding dominions. However, he was also fascinated by the poignant innocence of the American national character, with its emphasis on earnestness rather than artifice. In later novels, such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American, James would continue to explore the moral implications of an artlessness that, like Daisy’s, cannot defend itself against the worldliness and cynicism of a decadent society based, necessarily, on hypocrisy.
The Sadness and Safety of the Unlived Life
If the American abroad was James’s signature theme, that of the unlived life was his almost perpetual subtext. Repeatedly in James’s novels and stories, characters focus their attention on an abstraction, an ideal or idea they feel they could figure out or achieve if only they could devote their spirit or intellectual faculties to it with sufficient understanding or patience. Again and again, they realize too late that whatever it was they sought to understand or achieve, whatever they waited for, has passed them by and that they have wasted their whole life—or, like Winterbourne, they never fully arrive at that realization. One way of looking at Daisy Miller is to conclude that the whole issue of Daisy’s character is beside the point, a red herring that distracts Winterbourne from the business of living. In that case, the heart of the novel would be Winterbourne’s character, and the fear or lack of passion that causes him to hide from life behind the ultimately unimportant conundrum of Daisy’s innocence, or lack thereof.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Gossip
Daisy Miller is a story about gossip couched as a piece of gossip, an anecdote told by a narrator who not only was not involved in the events described but who doesn’t really care very much about them. The narrator sees the whole incident with detached amusement, as a pleasant way of diverting his listeners. Daisy Miller originated with a piece of gossip James had heard from a friend while visiting Rome, but the story had a nonending—someone got snubbed, that was all. James has been criticized for adding the melodramatic element of Daisy’s death. In a sense, though, by underselling the story as a piece of inconsequential gossip, James heightens the poignancy of Daisy’s fate. The fact that Daisy dies and no one seems to care much makes her death all the more sad.
Innocence
Throughout Daisy Miller, Winterbourne is preoccupied with the question of whether Daisy is innocent. The word innocent appears repeatedly, always with a different shade of meaning. Innocent had three meanings in James’s day. First, it could have meant “ignorant” or “uninstructed.” Daisy is “innocent” of the art of conversation, for example. It could also have meant “naïve,” as it does today. Mrs. Costello uses the word in this sense when she calls Winterbourne “too innocent” in Chapter 2. Finally, when Winterbourne protests, twirling his moustache in a sinister fashion, he invokes the third meaning, “not having done harm or wrong.”
This third sense is the one that preoccupies Winterbourne as he tries to come to a decision about Daisy. He initially judges the Millers to be merely “very ignorant” and “very innocent,” and he assesses Daisy as a “harmless” flirt. As the novel progresses, he becomes increasingly absorbed in the question of her culpability. He fears she is guilty not of any particular sex act per se but merely of a vulgar mindset, a lack of concern for modesty and decency, which would put her beyond his interest or concern. One could argue that it is the way in which Daisy embodies all the different meanings of “innocence” that is her downfall.[/english]
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