American Fiction 2018

“Daisy Miller” by Henry James (1878)

Reading Guide (C. Flys)

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter
what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you
haven't had that what have you had?--from the Preface of The
Ambassadors

Notes on the AUTHOR BIO:

Information taken from online-literature that is relevant from the reading of Daisy Miller:
“American-born and never married, James would live the majority of his life in Europe,
becoming a British citizen in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I.”

“Henry James Sr. was one of the most wealthy intellectuals of the time, connected with noted
philosophers and transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as
well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; fellow
friends and influential thinkers of the time who would have a profound effect on his son's life.
Education was of the utmost importance to Henry Sr. and the family spent many years in
Europe and the major cities of England, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany, his children
being tutored in languages and literature.”

“After several attempts at attending schools to study science and law, by 1864 James decided
he would become a writer.”

“He ventured out on his own travels to Europe, wrote book reviews, and submitted stories to
magazines.”

“James left America and lived for a time in Paris, France before moving to London, England in
1876.”

Website: http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF AUTHOR:

From online-literature:
“[…] social commentary on politics, class, and status, as well as explorations of the themes of
personal freedom, feminism, and morality. In his short stories and novels he employs
techniques of interior monologue and point of view to expand the readers' enjoyment of
character perception and insight. Often comparing the Old World with the New, and
influenced by Honore de Balzac, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
American Fiction 2018

Website: http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/

1. Early in the story Winterbourne asks himself: “Was she [Daisy] simply a pretty girl from
New York State—were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of
gentleman’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, in short an expert young
person?” Does the story resolve this question, and if so, in what way? How are we finally
to understand and evaluate Daisy’s character and moral status?

We get everything Daisy is through indirect characterization: her beauty, her manners,
even maybe her thoughts when we infer what her actions really mean. She was not in
gentleman’s society, for she followed her heart and she tried to break the ice that was in
Winterbourne’s heart. In order to fulfill her personality, questions 8 and 10 contain
information about how Daisy behaved.

2. What are the advantages of telling the story from Winterbourne’s point of view? What
are the disadvantages? How does the chosen point of view influence the reader’s own
perceptions and understanding?

The good point is that the story seems to be kind of reliable, since the narrator is only
omniscient when dealing with Winterbourne, so the reader has the reflections and ideas of
one of the characters. Winterbourne is also a man filled with conventionalisms, and he
wants to follow social rules all the time, so it is a mirror in what happened at that period of
time. However, I would have liked to dig into Daisy’s consciousness, for she is the
character who is opposing society in her behavior, and I would have liked it. But it is true
that, in having Winterbourne explaining on and on why she is indecorous, I had the feeling
of rebelling against that thought and those conventions, so I believe that the effect the
author wanted for the feminine audience to feel was reached. I also think that telling the
story from the point of view of Daisy would lead to some kind of censorship, or maybe to
some controversy because of the “outrage” in writing a story from the perspective of a
shameless girl.

3. Who is the focal character of the story, Daisy or Winterbourne? If it is Daisy what is
Winterbourne’s function? If it is Winterbourne, what is Daisy’s?
Taking into account the function of the narrator, Winterbourne seems to be the main
character, for he is from whom we get all the internal thoughts. However, it is Daisy the
one who is set in the center of the plot, since everything goes around her: some examples
are that almost all the events happen around her and, when she does not appear in a
scene, people are talking about her. The reader gets almost all the information about Daisy
by indirect speech (e.g. her physical description, her actions, or what others say about
her). The purpose of this inversion in being the main character the object of admiration
can be because, in this manner, the reader is having the point of view of society from
beginning to end, which strongly opposes with Daisy’s behavior and morality.
American Fiction 2018

4. What is the meaning or significance of Daisy’s deathbed message to Winterbourne? Of

Winterbourne’s decision to return to Geneva and the subsequent “intimation that he’s
much interested in a clever foreign lady”?

n saying that she was not engaged, she is admitting that everything was a pretension and
that she really loved him.
I suppose that when Winterbourne says that he is much interested in a clever foreign lady,
he means that he has seen how Daisy really was, and that he does not want other kind of
lover (e.g. a girl who follows social conventions and rules).

5. Who or what is finally responsible for Daisy’s death? Why must she die?

Personally speaking, I think the only responsible was herself because a person can’t ignore
their health for another to look after it. From the point of view of the action, Giovanelli is
the guilty one, for he did not care her health at all up to the extent that she got ill. Finally,
from the point of view of the plot, Winterbourne is the guilty one, for Daisy was waiting
him to break his iced heart and start acting the way he thought, that is to say, she wanted
him to start showing off the love he professed to her, for example, in taking her home. She
is outside on the street getting cold, maybe against her will, just because she wants to see
a reaction in Winterbourne.

6. What criticisms does the story seem to level at Europeanized Americans like Mrs.
Costello, Mrs. Walker, and Winterbourne himself? What does the story finally have to
say about social conventions and manners? About the difference between American and
European standards?

In the novel, European standards are based on social rules, for example in the polite way
Winterbourne has when he is talking, or in the “values” of European social life (being
interested in music, literature, painting, etc… or even using words from other languages
when talking, especially French and Italian).
Additionally, European people do not show off their real feelings, they always go around
the bushes, or gossip. American people show off the way they are, with no ornamentation
in their speech, with no second meanings hidden in their words, and with audacity and
sincerity.

7. Comment on the portrayal of American education of children, motherhood and

fatherhood.

Daisy’s brother does not receive any education because of his mother’s thought that she
needs to look for a more suitable teacher, but from my point of view she does not care
whether her son gets any education or not (maybe because in the end his life will be
prosperous, either if he studies or not)
Regarding parenthood, I think I have not seen any references to fathers, but maybe I have
just skipped it or I do no remember it.
American Fiction 2018

Talking about mothers, there is Winterbourne’s mother, who portrays the conventions of
mother bond at that time (making a division between what a married woman can/cannot
do and what an unmarried woman can/cannot do).

8. Comment on the significance of the names Winterbourne and Daisy.

Daisy is a flower, she is delicate, she is pure and she is unaffected by the poison of society.
As Winterbourne says at the end of the novel “and [she was] the most amiable”.
On the other hand, Winterbourne’s heart is iced, cold, for he never shows off his real
feelings, and he always thinks twice before talking (even sometimes Daisy had discovered
that). “Bourne” in Winterbourne could mean two things: the first inference is that his
heart has an iced boundary, an iced wall that does not let anything from his heart to go
out; and the second implication could be that he has led Daisy to death in his behavior,
which is to say, to winter/coldness.

9. The novella is subtitled “a study.” What are the implications?

In this study the reader is shown the game social conventions play in real life, and how
manipulative they can be, up to the extent that it can change the current of events (for
example, in separating two lovers).

10. Henry James scholar James Kraft contends that “Daisy is a classic American woman even
today, a reference in criticism, an observable phenomenon in life, the ideal of a certain type
of American woman....Daisy embodies an essential aspect of the American experience that
transcends the immediate encounter and touches upon elements common to all of us.” To
what extent and in what ways does your own reading of the story support such an
assertion?

I think that what Kraft intends to contend is that Daisy is the portrayal of the freed woman, of
the adventurer, the fearless woman who has broken the laws imposed by society and who is in
search of their own fate. I think that, in the figure of Daisy, all American values can be found:
looking for freedom, looking for an own voice, looking for respect in different points of view,
looking for individuality and for prosperity.