Daisy Miller

Just trying to get some clarity on Daisy Miller, especially before we tackle the much more challenging novella, The Beast in the Jungle. There are perhaps two contrasting ways to explain Winterbourne's failure as a lover. The basic way is is within the esthetics of the story: As his name suggests, he is laden with obstacles, a lack of warmth in particular. He has spent too much time under the influence of corrupting, cynical European suspicions, represented by his aunt, Mrs. Costello as well as his older friend, Mrs. Walker -- a cold, judgmental quality so well captured in this still photograph from the film version. Basically Winterbourne is dead to all the beauty, charm, liveliness that is Daisy. Despite what many classmates feel, I have no doubt whatsoever that James was wholly supportive of his heroine's innocence: She loved Winterbourne "as Mrs. Costello tells him, in classic James understatement, "would have appreciated one's [his] affection"), but as in a fairy tale essentially chose to test Winterbourne's worthiness, namely, the extent of his freedom from European prejudice, by forcing him to act on his heart -- a test he fails miserably (although obviously some classmates see her as being manipulative here, playing mind-games, and so forth). He is a man who, alas, has lived "too long in foreign parts."

Yet there is another explanation -- one that lies a bit outside the story and in James's life, and as such perhaps even more relevant for this course. There is an element of homosexual fright in many of James's male characters -- a great fear of heterosexual intimacy, most manifest (not surprisingly) as the chances of intimacy near. One suspects this is a key part of James's own personality that was never entirely resolved as many of his closest friendships were with women, yet not only were none consummated, two, in particular, seemed to have haunted him: one with a charming cousin, Minnie Temple (long considered the prototype of Daisy Miller), who died in 1870, at age twenty-three (some eight years before the novella); the other was Constance Fenimore Woolston, a close friend of James's middle years who eventually took her own life in 1894 (some nine years before John Marcher's problems with Mary Bartram in The Beast in the Jungle).

Unlike Werther and Turgenev's Vladimir from First Love, Winterbourne seems to shun all physical intimacy with Daisy, happiest judging her from afar. Perhaps the character he is most like is D.H. Lawrence's Paul Morel, the protagonist on our lone long novel, Sons and Lovers.