Henry James

B. In conflict with European society

C. In conflict with Americans living in Europe

E. Dual nature of Daisy and the novel

2. Are witnesses forced by governess?

Henry James was an American writer with a particular fascination for American characters placed in European settings, and James would contrast the supposed innocence of the Americans with the worldliness and corruption of Europe. His female characters in particular were placed in contrast to an older and more decadent world than that which had produced them. How James treats his women characters can be illustrated in three short novels--Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, and Washington Square.

Daisy Miller is a character who, like so many of Henry James's protagonists, is an American visiting Europe. For James, Europe is a corrupting influence, a society that may be ancient by comparison but that has therefore had longer to become decadent and corru

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int of view of a third party, a man named Douglas who is telling about his sisters' governess while he is at a party on Christmas Eve. He says that the governess reported a case of ghosts some years before and that she had recorded her experience in a manuscript, presumably what makes up the rest of the story. She has been hired to care for two children, and she likes her job. However, she begins to see ghosts in the vicinity of the children and believes that these figures are trying to reach the children. The apparitions are clearly not a manifestation of the mind of the governess, for they have a clear influence on the children and cause the death of the boy. James explained in his preface to the novel his view of the work as a ghost story in which Peter Quint and Miss Jessel were not so much "ghosts" as "goblins, elves, imps, demons" whose villainy of motive is the essence of the issue: What he happily comprehended was that any definition of that motive would inevitably dissipate the eerie atmosphere which would be the whole point of the tour de force. . . The job of the author was to make the reader's general sense of evil intense enough. The latter's own imagination would then finish the job. Interestingly, Auch

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