Daisy Miller

The social milieu in which Henry James as an individual and as a man of letters moved would seem to suggest that the people who have every material advantage would be well positioned to engage directly with a life vigorously and creatively lived. But in both Daisy Miller and The Beast in the Jungle, the upper-class characters repeatedly embody a tendency to shrink back from engagement that might entail emotional risk or exposure of vulnerability to social criticism. Indeed, these characters live life according to what seem to be unwritten (though apparently well-understood) rules of social behavior and social comportment. And they do so at what turns out to be great emotional cost, great loss of the opportunity for happiness.

Winterbourne's first glimpse of Daisy is a case in point. He watches her naive and open discussion of her experience of society in New York and Europe with an "amused" detachment: "He had never yet heard a young girl express herself . . . save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment" (James 495). Winterbourne's attitude is amplified in his aunt and Mrs. Walker, who would prefer he have nothing to do with this rather common "pretty American flirt" (495). The social s

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om drifting into the life of a high-class gigolo, one interpretation of what James describes as what everybody takes to be his interest in "a very clever foreign lady" (James 528). This isn't life lived as an American abroad; it is life unlived as an American yet not quite lived as a European, either. In The Beast in the Jungle, the consequences of the unlived life are more devastating than they are in Daisy Miller, mainly because these consequences are compressed into the intimate life experience of two people who remain close to each other over several decades. The entire narrative deals with the theme of the unlived life in the sense that May Bartram and John Marcher live life separated from each other when they might have lived life and grown old together as husband and wife. But the consequences of the choice more or less against a full life turn out to be greater for Marcher, who fails to take sufficient initiative to transform and enrich his life with May. What stops Marcher, essentially, is his failure to recognize emotional signals or emotional opportunities, which is complicated by fatuous self-absorption that he manages to raise to high art. Intellectually, Marcher can see that his growing relationship with May ought t
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Approximate Word count = 1660
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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