by David Lodge
HENRY JAMES:
Daisy Miller
* * *
Daisy Miller, first published as a magazine serial in the summer of 1878, has a very special place in the history of Henry James’s literary career. It was by far his most successful work of fiction as measured by copies sold. A list of the estimated sales of his books in his lifetime in Britain and America gives a figure of ‘above 30,000’ for Daisy Miller, and the next highest is a mere 13,500 for The Portrait of a Lady.1 It was the closest James came to writing a ‘bestseller’, though it predated the coinage of that word, and unfortunately he did not reap the monetary reward it usually implies. In those days it was necessary to publish a book in America, if only a few copies, to establish the author’s copyright there, and James was too slow to prevent Daisy Miller from being pirated on a large scale before Harper published it in New York as a pamphlet in their ‘Half-Hour’ series. That edition sold 20,000 copies in a few weeks, but at a very low royalty-rate. In the summer of 1879 James wrote from England to his friend William Dean Howells, who had reported the fame of his story in America: ‘Your account of the vogue of D.M. . . . embittered my spirit when I reflected that it had awakened no echo (to speak of) in my pocket. I have made 200$ by the whole American career of D.M. . . .’2
Nevertheless the literary status and celebrity James acquired from Daisy Miller, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a priceless asset. It is not an exaggeration to say that this modestly proportioned work, short enough to be read comfortably at a single sitting (though perhaps not, with appreciation, in half an hour), was the foundation of his distinguished subsequent career. Discerning readers had perceived the promise of his earlier fiction – the novels Roderick Hudson (1875) and The American (1877), and stories like ‘Madame de Mauves’ (1874) – but it was Daisy Miller which really impressed his name on the collective consciousness of the English and American reading public as a new star in the literary firmament, with a distinctive vision and voice. It was, as he wrote to his mother at the time, ‘a really quite extraordinary hit’.3 Above all, its success confirmed for the author himself that, in the social and cultural interaction of America and Europe, he had found a wonderfully rich seam of material for fictional exploitation. This is evidenced by his quickly following up Daisy Miller with the slightly longer tale ‘An International Episode’, serialised in the winter of 1878–9, which is a kind of reversal of the earlier one, sending a couple of rather dim upper-class Englishmen to America with ironic consequences; and then collecting these two stories, together with ‘Four Meetings’, the poignant account of an American schoolmistress’s frustrated desire to see Europe (she gets no further than Le Havre), in a book published by Macmillan in England in 1879. James consolidated his reputation with The Portrait of a Lady (1881), a full-length novel about a young American heiress ‘affronting her destiny’ in Europe, and he continued to compose variations on the ‘international theme’ throughout his career, including his late masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904).
It was subject matter he was uniquely fitted to explore by the circumstances of his life. He was born in New York in 1843, the second son in a family of four sons, the eldest of whom, William, became an eminent philosopher and psychologist, and one daughter, Alice. Their father, Henry James Sr, was a man of strong, unorthodox opinions on education, which his inherited income allowed him to indulge. He believed that his children would benefit from being exposed to the influence of European culture from an early age, and with this aim took them on frequent extended visits to England and the Continent, where for periods they were put to school. The consequence, especially for the two eldest and most gifted brothers, was a somewhat disjointed education which retarded their discovery of their true vocations, and Henry came to believe that the restless, itinerant nature of his early life had alienated him from his native country and led him to make his literary career in Europe (for a time in France, and then permanently in England, where he settled in 1876). But if some personal and psychological loss was involved in this expatriate existence, there was an immense gain for literature, which Daisy Miller was the first of his works to demonstrate to a large audience.
Every fictional story has its moment of conception, when the basic idea, or ‘germ’ as Henry James called it, is first planted in the writer’s imagination. For James this was often something told to him in casual conversation, as in the case of Daisy Miller. In the Preface to Volume XVIII of the New York Edition of his Novels and Tales, which included an extensively revised text of the storyfn1 some thirty years after its original publication, he recalled:
It was in Rome during the autumn of 1877; a friend then living there . . . happened to mention – which she might perfectly not have done – some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter, whose young daughter, a child of nature and of freedom, accompanying her from hotel to hotel, had ‘picked up’ by the wayside, with the best conscience in the world, a good-looking Roman, of vague identity, astonished at his luck, yet (so far as might be, by the pair) all innocently, all serenely exhibited and introduced: this at least till the occurrence of some small social check, some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity, and which I forget.4
Out of this slight, almost trivial, anecdote James wove a story which dramatises profound differences of manners between America and Europe, and more importantly between different classes of Americans who meet in Europe. For the principal opposition in the action of Daisy Miller is not between Americans and Europeans (as it was in The American, for instance) but between two kinds of Americans in Europe: the upper-class, regular visitors and residents like Mrs Costello and Mrs Walker, who scrupulously observe the proprieties of ‘good’ society in the Old World (which also serves as their model in the New), and the less cultivated, more provincial, nouveaux riches American tourists, like the Millers, who behave exactly as they do at home. Henry James was one of the first novelists to perceive the social significance of tourism, as an activity accessible to anyone affluent enough to take advantage of the ease of travel in the industrial age. In America – certainly in the ‘minutely hierarchical’ society of New York – the snobbish Costellos and Walkers would have avoided any social contact with the Millers; in Europe, however, the latter must be either assimilated or ostentatiously excluded. Mrs Costello, who defines herself as ‘very exclusive’, and is naively admired by Daisy for that attribute, is determined to freeze out the Millers from the beginning: ‘They are very common . . . They are the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not – not accepting.’ Mrs Walker offers Daisy the opportunity to be assimilated, but is rebuffed, with fatal consequences. It is the European context which raises the stakes in this conflict of manners, and at the centre of the conflict, trying to interpret it, taking part in it, and having a personal interest in the outcome, is a young man who is American by birth but has lived most of his life in Europe, and does not fully belong to either society: Winterbourne. There was no such person in the anecdote which provided James with his ‘germ’; he is entirely James’s invention, and a crucial one, for the story is as much about Winterbourne as it is about Daisy Miller.
James also added to his source-story an earlier episode in a different setting: Winterbourne first meets Daisy Miller in the little resort of Vevey on the shores of Lake Geneva, and is both charmed and confused by her uninhibited friendliness, while his aunt is scandalised by her readiness to make an unchaperoned excursion with him to the Castle of Chillon. When Winterbourne catches up with Daisy in Rome some months later he is disconcerted to find that she has acquired an Italian escort, Mr Giovanelli, a handsome young man of dubious social status, thought to be a fortune-hunter, whom she insists on introducing to the exclusive circle presided over by Winterbourne’s friend, Mrs Walker. The way Daisy conducts herself with this admirer without apparently being engaged to him causes her to be ostracised by Mrs Walker’s set, to which Daisy responds by flouting the conventi
ons still more openly. When Winterbourne encounters her alone with Giovanelli in the Colosseum by moonlight he finally decides that ‘she was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect’. Daisy catches the ‘Roman fever’ (malaria) as a result of this rash adventure, and dies shortly afterwards.
Daisy Miller begins as a comedy of manners and ends as a tragedy of manners. As James himself said to a correspondent two years after its first publication, ‘The whole idea of the story is the little tragedy of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed as it were to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head and to which she stood in no measurable relation.’5 It may be difficult for readers in the twenty-first century to understand that a rumpus about manners could have such grave consequences, but in the nineteenth century ‘manners’ in the sense of ‘social behaviour’ still retained some of the older meaning of ‘morals’. The conduct of Daisy and her family violates the code of manners to which Mrs Costello and Mrs Walker subscribe in several ways, some of which are explicitly noted, others merely implied in the narrative. The Millers are, for instance, much too familiar with their courier, transgressing the order of the European class-system. They do not conform to the authoritarian structure of the traditional patriarchal family: Mr Miller is at home in Schenectady, earning the money that sends his womenfolk unprotected to Europe, and Mrs Miller is a weak, unintelligent mother, unable to counsel her daughter or control her obstreperous young son. They are largely ignorant of European culture and history, and their speech lacks elegance and polish. The main issue, however, on which the whole story turns, is the proper conduct of a young unmarried woman in relation to the opposite sex.
At the time and place in which the story is set a respectable unmarried young lady was not supposed to be in the company of a man without the presence of a chaperone. The code implied a ‘double standard’ of sexual morality, assuming that men were irrepressible sexual predators who could only be prevented from seducing every available virgin by the watchful guardianship of older women. In practice a young woman could forfeit respectability merely by violating the rule, even if nobody really suspected her of having illicit sexual intercourse. This code was enforced with varying degrees of rigidity in different classes and contexts. In the upper echelons of European society, where marriages were contracts involving the redistribution of inherited wealth and property, and the perpetuation of perhaps historic family names, the guaranteed purity of brides was a high priority and the observance of the code correspondingly strict; but in the more democratic and less cynical society of America the rules were more relaxed. In ‘Lady Barberina’, a story Henry James wrote a few years after Daisy Miller, a rich young American doctor is attracted by the beautiful daughter of an English aristocratic family but is baffled by the difficulty of getting to know her before asking for her hand in marriage (and, indeed, even after doing so). Having managed to take her aside at a party, he says:
‘How do people who marry in England ever know each other before marriage? They have no chance.’
‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said Lady Barberina. ‘I never was married.’
‘It’s very different in my country. There a man may see much of a girl; he may come and see her, he may be constantly alone with her. I wish you allowed that over here.’
Daisy Miller has obviously enjoyed such freedom, as she makes clear to Winterbourne in their first conversation:
‘In New York I had lots of society. Last winter I had seventeen dinners given me; and three of them were by gentlemen,’ added Daisy Miller . . . she was looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively eyes and in her light, slightly monotonous smile. ‘I have always had,’ she said, ‘a great deal of gentlemen’s society.’
By delaying Daisy’s final declarative sentence with a description of her attractive appearance, and then delaying its conclusion further with the inserted speech tag, ‘she said’, James makes us feel its effect on the young man before he tells us: ‘Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed.’ Winterbourne does not know how to interpret the manners of this young woman from Schenectady. He has ‘never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion’ except where it revealed ‘a certain laxity of deportment’.
Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State – were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person?
This is the question that torments Winterbourne for the duration of his acquaintance with Daisy. Is she a new type of fearless, independent but virtuous American womanhood, or is she a shameless coquette who exploits the relative freedom apparently permitted to young people in America? His aunt tells him he is unqualified to judge correctly.
‘You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent.’
‘My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,’ said Winterbourne, smiling and curling his moustache.
Facial hair is a physical index of male sexual maturity and moustaches function in this story as metonymic symbols of virility. Winterbourne is jealous when he later discovers Daisy in Rome ‘surrounded by half-a-dozen wonderful moustaches’. So in curling his moustache as he denies being ‘innocent’ he is hinting (or pretending) that he is sexually experienced – enough, at least, to judge whether Daisy is morally ‘innocent’. But in fact he cannot make up his mind about her behaviour, much to his own annoyance. Not until his final encounter with Daisy, in the Colosseum, does he condemn her unequivocally – only to discover later that he was mistaken. (He has in fact made precisely the opposite ‘great mistake’ to the one his aunt predicted.6) At Daisy’s funeral Giovanelli assures him that she was ‘the most innocent’ young lady he had ever known, and Winterbourne realises, too late, that she might have returned his love – or as he puts it to his aunt, in his prim way, ‘she would have appreciated one’s esteem’.
Henry James was arguably the first among English and American writers to understand, analytically as well as intuitively, the importance of ‘point of view’ in telling a story. From whose perspective should it be told – one character’s, several characters’, the omniscient author’s, or a combination of these methods (as in the classic Victorian novel)? This fundamental choice by the writer determines the meaning and effect of any story. Daisy Miller is an early example of James’s mastery of the single, limited and fallible point of view. The title implies that Daisy is the subject of the tale, but everything we know about her, as readers, is filtered through the consciousness of Winterbourne. We see her only through his eyes; we acquire only information about her that is passed to him. Therefore, in making up our own minds about Daisy’s character we are simultaneously having to make up our minds about Winterbourne’s, and about the reliability of his perceptions and judgements.
There is an authorial narrator, who on a few occasions refers to himself as ‘I’. He sets the scene at the opening of the story, and conveys certain facts about Winterbourne (though never directly about Daisy); but for the most part his persona is unobtrusive and self-effacing, very unlike the expansive, judgemental authorial narrators of, say, Dickens’s novels, or George Eliot’s. Many of Winterbourne’s private thoughts about Daisy are rendered in free indirect style, transposing what he is saying to himself, or asking himself, into a third-person/past-tense discourse, so that we have the illusion of direct access to his mind. An example would be the sentence just quoted above: ‘Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State – were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society?’ (This is in fact a particularly subtle application of the technique, since it includes a slightly patronising recall of Daisy’s own words.) Even when his thoughts are reported in a more straightforward way, there is so little difference between the style of the authorial voice and Winterbourne’s own diction that we have very little sense of moving outside his consciousness.
To take an example from the same place, in ‘Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed’ the authorial epithet, ‘Poor’, expresses an amused sympathy with the young man’s bafflement, and the other words are exactly those he would have used about himself.
This authorial narrator is certainly not omniscient. ‘I hardly know,’ he says, after the opening description of Vevey, comparing its hotels to those of American resorts, ‘whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the Trois Couronnes . . .’ The narrator tells us very little about the background and past history of this young man, and the most interesting information is notably ambiguous:
When certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there – a foreign lady – a person older than himself. Very few Americans – indeed I think none – had ever seen this lady, about whom there were singular stories.
The ambiguity is, pointedly, never resolved. At the end of the story Winterbourne returns to live in Geneva, ‘whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is “studying” hard – an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady’.
Since Winterbourne’s interest in Daisy is at least partly sexual, the question of his own sexuality is highly relevant to our interpretation of his speculations about her character. His surname (foregrounded by the fact that we never learn his Christian name)fn2 suggests ‘born of winter’, or one who has a wintry life ahead of him, ‘bourn’ being an archaic word for destination. These connotations do not encourage belief that he is conducting a passionate love affair in Geneva, and his general behaviour, thoughts and speech present him as a young man who, though superficially sophisticated, is in fact sexually diffident and probably inexperienced. He is attracted to Daisy’s pretty looks and vitality at their first meeting, and he is excited by her availability, living as he does in a society where ‘nice’ girls are unapproachable except under very strict surveillance. When she invites him on the spur of the moment to take her out on the lake in a boat at night he begs her mother ‘ardently’ to let her go, for ‘he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl’. But the appearance of the courier puts paid to this scheme. ‘I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something!’ Daisy says skittishly, bidding him goodnight. Winterbourne says only: ‘I am puzzled.’
