st of the world. This is a society that has created a body of rules of behavior which makes that behavior artificial, and people are judged not by who they are but by how well they follow the rules. Daisy is the center of the novel:
As an American girl she was a recognizable figure, the question was the evaluation and composition of that American girl.
Daisy contrasts with other, more suspicious American women who seem to resent her open nature as much as they have a concern for her safety:
All the ladies who condemn Daisy for going about Rome unchaperoned with Mr. Giovanelli are Americans. Perhaps an uneasy sense of social inferiority to Italian noble families makes them more censorious of a nonconforming countrywoman than they would have been at home, but one imagines that they did their share of staring from carriages on Fifth Avenue as well as on the Corso.
One interpretation of the novel sees Daisy's innocence as proving that she is a child of nature and that her innocence is a virtue that separates her from the too-rigid conventions of an ex
...