Daisy Miller

The importance of social context for the themes of Daisy Mailer is difficult to overstate. Indeed, the social framework in which the characters operate seems almost to develop a life and personality of its own, and that has implications for character development as well. What must be understood above all about the characters of DM is that they function in a rarefied and privileged universe, much as James himself seems to have done. James's familiarity with the social milieu in which he wrote comes through as he implies that the people who have every material advantage would be well positioned to engage directly with a life vigorously and creatively lived. But in Daisy Miller, the upper-class characters repeatedly embody a tendency to shrink back from engagement that might entail emotional risk or exposure of vulnerability, especially to public embarrassment on account of their imperfect understanding of how their peers expect them to comport themselves. Meanwhile, the characters encounter new experience through a filter of evidently unwritten but definite rules of social behavior and engagement. Moreover, they do so at what turns out to be great emotional cost and loss of opportunity for personal fulfillme