Unlike my experience with The Turn of the Screw, with Daisy Miller, I was thoroughly enjoying myself for the majority anyway, but more on that later. Daisy Miller is a novella focused on an expat in Europe's response to a visiting American girl who defies the traditional values and behaviors that restrict other girls her age.
In Daisy, James has a female character that embodies the spirit of the American as an ideological concept. She is free spirited, independent, and in defiance of societal expectations. In contrast to gender expectations of her time, Daisy bluntly states that she has “never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do”. She clearly doesn’t allow women to instruct her either as she defies Mrs. Walker’s admonitions to adhere to the European social morays saying that she doesn’t “see why [she] should change [her] habits” for European society. Instead, Daisy does what she wants, indicating that “if this is what’s improper…then I am all improper” and European society and Old World values be damned.
Winterbourne, our wishing-he-was-rebellious-but-actually-quite-staid narrator, becomes infatuated with Daisy upon first meeting her, and he spends the time he knows her, wavering between fascination and horror. Daisy's laid-back, do-as-I-please attitude and behavior intrigue him, but he simultaneous judges her behavior. Winterbourne is both intrigued and horrified by Daisy’s behavior: “he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal” (James 51). He continually attempts to figure her out, but no matter how he looks at it, Daisy “continue[s] to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence”. She is a truly fascinating character.
Warning, there be spoilers below.
But then James goes back to pissing me off since he has Daisy die. Seriously. Then anger. Why did she have to die? Was it punishment for her eccentric behavior? Is James arguing that Daisy should have conformed to the expectations of European society? Her death certainly seems to indicate such. It reminds me of Jenny's death in Forrest Gump, a movie that clearly suggests maintaining the status quo and doing your part to further the dominant ideology is the proper way.
In both tales, when two cultures clash, it is the traditional, formal, and staid culture that wins. Clearly, Winterbourne is effected by his meeting Daisy - to what extent is a bit vague - and one would think that other members of the European society Daisy came in contact with may be affected too. But in the end, traditional values win out as Daisy pays the ultimate price for her rebellion. Whether this is the author's way of promoting the dominant culture or just a way of showing how difficult it is to break away from said culture, well, that is another question.
End of spoilers.
This short, fast-paced, tightly focused novella is well worth the read.
Love your review.
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