This research examines the character of Daisy Miller in the novella of the same name by Henry James, with a view toward linking evaluations of that character to the larger themes of James's concern, including James's own assessment of the content of the American character.
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 fulfillment.
That dynamic is in the background of the character of Daisy. 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 9). Winterbourne's attitude is enlarged...