Daisy Miller – Henry James, 1879 ★★½

Fatal Abstraction

Is Daisy Miller a little child running wild? Or is she an innocent martyr to outdated social conventions? Could she be both?

And why is this acclaimed novella more interesting to ponder than to read?

Henry James has been a problem for me. A high-brow aesthete, his characters lack depth and relatability. The stories themselves often revolve around long conversations in drawing rooms regarding the finer points of life. A simple hello can be strung out into something like: “I cordially tendered upon him my most earnest salutations.” Sure, the man could write, but I feel he was his own biggest fan that way.

Daisy Miller doesn’t suffer from one Jamesian problem: Despite the circumlocutory prose, it’s short. The novella is presented in the form of a second-hand narration regarding a man named Winterbourne who meets Daisy, a fellow American abroad, at a hotel in Vevey, Switzerland. She surprises him with her eagerness to talk, despite his awareness about its perceived impropriety:

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; but here at Vevey, what conditions could be better than these? – a pretty American girl coming and standing in front of you in a garden.

Winterbourne chats up Daisy, even takes her to a castle, employing the aid of Daisy’s rambunctious little brother, Randolph, who talks longingly of being in Schenectady with his father. Then Winterbourne and Daisy part. When they meet again in Rome, he finds Daisy squired by a dubious Italian who wears a nosegay. Tongues wag among Winterbourne’s circle of rich Americans:

“What has she been doing?”

“Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night. Her mother goes away when visitors come.”

What can Winterbourne do to reclaim Daisy’s respectability? Or is she too far gone to care?

 The Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, where Winterbourne first encounters Daisy Miller and sets the tale in motion, remains in business in Vevey, Switzerland. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vevey.

Daisy Miller exists in multiple forms. The original version first appeared in The Cornhill Magazine in 1878 and then the following year as a novel. Five years later, James reformatted it as a play with a happier ending. Finally, in 1909, a new prose version appeared with significant revisions by the author.

If you were like me and didn’t know which edition you have in your collection, an easy way to check is to count the number of chapters. There are two in the 1879 version, four in the 1909 version; though their difference in actual length is not as marked. In essence, James kept the arc of his story intact, revising passages or inserting new ones to emphasize or de-emphasize certain ideas:

1878 Cornhill edition:

He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. There had not been the slightest alteration in her charming complexion; she was evidently neither offended nor flattered.

1909 Revision:

He was ceasing to be in doubt, for he had begun to perceive that she was really not in the least embarrassed. She might be cold, she might be austere, she might even be prim; for that was apparently – he had already so generalized – what the most “distant” American girls did; they came and planted themselves straight in front of you to show how rigidly unapproachable they were. There hadn’t been the slightest flush in her fresh fairness however; so that she was clearly neither offended nor flattered.

The original edition is apparently preferred; you see why here. It’s less wordy, and James’ narrative more effective for what he doesn’t say rather than for what he spells out.

Maybe I’m just biased preferring the original version as I found it long enough. I don’t think the story benefits from more explanation and description around existing events. Yet Daisy Miller could use more in the way of something, whether that is action, speaking characters, or some diverting side business. What you get grounds down into a series of meetings between a man and a woman; her alternating between complaints of his ignoring her and putting him off; and finally his discomfort at her becoming an object of social derision.

It makes for a thin skeleton; James fleshes it out with descriptions of Daisy’s loveliness that suggest the author didn’t really have much to say on the subject of female beauty, leaning on the word “pretty” overmuch. Or maybe he was being ironically atonal on the topic:

She sat there with her extremely pretty hands, ornamented with very brilliant rings, folded in her lap, and with her pretty eyes now resting upon those of Winterbourne, now wandering over the garden, the people who passed by, and the beautiful view.

Later:

Her face wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes were gleaming, she was swinging her great fan about. No; it’s impossible to be prettier than that, thought Winterbourne.

What works for the story is the way life is fed through Winterbourne’s subjective perspective, indirectly given he is not our actual narrator. The idea of a man who finds himself the object of a desirable woman’s flirtation, only to wonder at her motives, is an age-old device which James had employed earlier in the decade with The American. Here, I wondered not only at what drove Daisy, but what drove Winterbourne, too; which kept me perversely invested.

At the core of the story, what gives it drive and tension, is the idea of a young woman struggling to find her identity against the expectations of an easily scandalized society. It’s a strange society, again not unique to this particular work of James, where wealthy, idle Americans resent Daisy going in because her father’s wealth is earned rather than inherited.

“They are the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not – not accepting,” is how Winterbourne’s aunt, Mrs. Costello, explains it.

At first, Daisy seems ignorant of her family’s social isolation. An exchange with Winterbourne about Mrs. Costello offers a rare bit of needed humor: “I like a lady to be exclusive; I’m dying to be exclusive myself. Well, we are exclusive, mother and I. We don’t speak to every one – or they don’t speak to us. I suppose it’s about the same thing.”

Daisy is a character in need of guidance she doesn’t get from her mother, a sickly, easily distracted woman who earns Mrs. Costello’s enmity by allowing a servant to be too familiar with her and her children. There and elsewhere you get an implicit criticism of Mrs. Costello’s hypocrisy, being as she is the product of a democracy yet grasps after Old-World aristocratic affectations. Still, Mrs. Miller does make for a poor parent, and Daisy strains any reader identification or enthusiasm by taking both her and Winterbourne for a ride.

“I’m a fearful, frightful flirt,” she tells Winterbourne. “Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?”

Defiantly reckless, unwilling to trim her sails for anyone, Daisy is viewed by many as a feminist hero. But is she? Her attitude is narcissistic, self-destructive, maddening. Winterbourne calls out her empty chatter several times. She takes up with an Italian, “a barber’s block” as one of the American biddies call him, amusing given that she’s the one that’s out of place in his country. Daisy’s involvement with Mr. Giovanelli proves ruinous; is it deserved?

Henry James as a young man, not unlike Winterbourne as he appears in the novella Daisy Miller. It was an immediate success, though James would note one friend described it to him as "an outrage on American girlhood." Image from GettyImages.com.

Perhaps James wants to present Daisy as victim of her own assigned role in society, a fatal abstraction to the designs of others like Winterbourne, who views her as a charming companion without depth; or Mrs. Costello, who prefers dainty wallflowers over real women. That’s my take. The value of Daisy Miller as a story is it offers such a range of possible interpretations, a kind of philosophic Rashomon effect.

There are also scintillating descriptions, particularly of Rome in the novella’s second half. James may not describe Daisy all that well, but he’s more on point with her surroundings:

The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure. Daisy was strolling along the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions. It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then. He stood looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and color that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odors, and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion.

Such settings are all you get in the way of beguilement, but it does help make Daisy Miller enjoyable even when it is not leaving you scratching your head.