by David Lodge
He lingered beside the lake for a quarter of an hour, turning over the mystery of the young girl’s sudden familiarities and caprices. But the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should enjoy deucedly ‘going off’ with her somewhere.
He manages to take Daisy to Chillon unchaperoned, and as she comes down the hotel stairs to meet him ‘he felt as if there were something romantic going forward’ and ‘could have believed he was going to elope with her’, but he is so preoccupied with observing and analysing her behaviour on the trip that he doesn’t fully enjoy her company – at least, Daisy asks him, ‘What on earth are you so grave about . . . you look as if you were taking me to a funeral.’ When he tells her that he must leave Vevey and return to Geneva the next day, she expresses her disappointment so emphatically that ‘Poor Winterbourne was fairly bewildered; no young lady had as yet done him the honour to be so agitated by the announcement of his movements’. The prissy diction here betrays a certain alarm that Daisy is forcing the pace of their relationship. As she accuses him of being in thrall to some female ‘charmer’ in Geneva (whose existence he denies) she seems to him ‘an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity’. Later, in Rome, her conduct with Giovanelli strikes him as ‘an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence’. Is she really ‘nice’ or a coquette? Is her ‘flirting’ harmless or dangerous? Should he court her with respect, or ‘treat her as the object of one of those sentiments which are called by romancers “lawless passions”’? He ends up doing neither, because of
his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late. She was ‘carried away’ by Mr Giovanelli.
The discomfort of his situation, tugged back and forth by conflicting loyalties to both sides in the war of manners, is subtly dramatised in the sequence when he escorts Daisy to the Pincio Gardens. Having given her his protection through the Roman streets, he is obliged to hand her over to a rival whom he suspects and despises; then, when Daisy refuses Mrs Walker’s insistent invitation to get into her carriage, Winterbourne is ignominiously compelled to get in himself, under the threat of banishment if he does not, and to watch Daisy walk away with Giovanelli. When he gets out of the carriage and goes in pursuit of Daisy and ‘her cavalier’, the intimacy of their posture, half concealed by a parasol, stops him in his tracks, and he walks – ‘not towards the couple with the parasol; towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs Costello’.
Winterbourne is one of several young men in James’s early novels and stories who are attracted to certain women but restrained by various doubts and inhibitions from seeking a full sexual relationship with them, and are left at the end of the story with no prospect of any other. The American hero of ‘Madame de Mauves’, for instance, Longmore (a name as obviously symbolic as Winterbourne), falls in love with the unhappily married eponymous heroine (another American expatriate), and is encouraged by her cynical French husband and sister-in-law to become her lover, but Longmore’s moral scruples and Madame de Mauves’s perverse devotion to the role of the wronged wife lead him to take the path of renunciation and go back to America. Some time later the husband commits suicide, and Longmore’s first instinct is to return to Europe. But, says the narrator in the last words of the story:
Several years have passed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is, that in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling, – a feeling for which awe would be hardly too strong a name.
‘Fear’ might be too strong, but not altogether wide of the mark. One of the most interesting interpolations of the narrator of Daisy Miller about Winterbourne concerns the latter’s puzzled perception of her relaxed and inclusive friendliness:
He could hardly have said why, but she seemed to him a girl who would never be jealous. At the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive smile on the reader’s part, I may affirm that with regard to the women who had hitherto interested him it very often seemed to Winterbourne among the possibilities that, given certain contingencies, he should be afraid – literally afraid – of these ladies. He had a pleasant sense that he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller.
Instead of following up this ‘pleasant sense’ in order to enjoy Daisy’s company more, however, Winterbourne perversely interprets her inclusive friendliness as a sign of moral weakness. The passage continues:
It must be added that this sentiment was not altogether flattering to Daisy; it was part of his conviction, or rather of his apprehension, that she would prove a very light young person.
So there is a sense in which Winterbourne is afraid of Daisy, or at least of the temptation to ‘lawless passions’ which, in one aspect, she represents for him.
‘“Frederick Winterbourne, c’est moi,” [Henry James] might have said,’ observes a modern critic, echoing Flaubert’s famous remark about Madame Bovary.7 That is probably an overstatement, but it is likely that he put a good deal of himself into the portrayal of Winterbourne and similar characters. It is the view of his most authoritative biographer, Leon Edel, that James both worshipped and feared his mother and that this ambivalence was carried over into his adult relationships with women.8 He was attracted to many women in his life, and had intimate friendships with several, but he always backed off when there seemed any risk of being drawn into marriage or other kind of sexual relationship. By the mid-1870s, not long before he wrote Daisy Miller, he had decided that he would not marry. How far this decision was due to his determination to dedicate himself fully to his art, and how far to a growing awareness of the ambiguity of his own sexual nature, is hard to say. Edel, and the majority of his other biographers, believe that he never had a physical relationship with anyone of either sex, but in the last analysis they must admit that it is impossible to be certain on such matters, and leave further speculation to novelists. There was certainly a homosexual element in James’s make-up, which became more obvious in late middle age, but he was not a closet gay writer, like, say, E. M. Forster, who had no real empathy with heterosexual love and was obliged to fake the representation of it in his fiction. The man who wrote, ‘he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl’, was not a stranger to ‘straight’ romantic attraction. Henry James wrote some of the greatest novels in modern literature about love, and the betrayal of love, between men and women, and no one has written better about marriage this side of the bedroom door. But he was also able to draw on his own experience and temperament to create memorable portraits of repression, inhibition, diffidence and regret in the affective life of men like Winterbourne. In a way, these troubled, self-doubting, eternally celibate heroes are surrogates for the writer himself. Like him they observe life rather than participate fully in it, but without enjoying the compensating creative fulfilment of the artist.
When it was first published, Daisy Miller was subtitled ‘A Study’, an interestingly problematic term. In the late nineteenth century it could mean ‘A discourse or literary composition devoted to the detailed consideration of some question, or the minute description of some object’ or ‘a literary work executed as an exercise or an experiment in some particular style or mode of treatment’. Although these meanings are not entirely irrelevant to Daisy Miller, they do not apply exactly. James’s subtitle is therefore usually interpreted as a metaphor drawn from the visual arts; but even in that context ‘a study’ can mean several different things, from ‘a careful preliminary sketch for a work of art’, or ‘an artist’s pictorial record of his observation of some object, incident, or effect, or of something that occurs to his mind, intended for his own guidance in his subsequent work’, to ‘a drawing, painting or piece of sculpture aiming to bring out the characteristics of the object represented, as they are revealed by especially careful observation’.9 Leon Edel maintains that James
was implying by the word ‘study’ that ‘he had written the equivalent of a pencil-sketch on an artist’s pad rather than a rounded character’,10 and quotes in support a remark in the Preface to the revised version of the story in the New York Edition of 1909. James dropped the subtitle in this edition, and professed not to remember the reasons why he had originally appended it, ‘unless they may have taken account simply of a certain flatness in my poor little heroine’s literal denomination’. This itself is, however, a somewhat cryptic explanation (it is not obvious that ‘Daisy Miller’ is a particularly ‘flat’ name). In any case the Preface is a deceptive guide to the story, and needs to be treated with caution. There is an obvious sense in which the last of the dictionary definitions of ‘study’ cited above is metaphorically applicable to Daisy Miller. As Philip Horne11 and other critics have pointed out, throughout the story Winterbourne is continually, almost obsessively ‘studying’ Daisy, both as a type and as an individual. He is immediately attracted by her pretty appearance, but his first reaction classifies her generically: ‘“How pretty they are!” thought Winterbourne, straightening himself in his seat.’ ‘They’ means ‘American girls’, though we are able to infer this only because of the narrator’s introductory remarks about the invasion of the Swiss hotel by American tourists, and the ‘flitting hither and thither of “stylish” young girls’ who make Vevey seem like Newport or Saratoga. We are told that Winterbourne ‘had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analysing it’. He soon becomes addicted to observing and analysing every aspect of Daisy’s person and behaviour, long after Mrs Walker’s circle have made up their minds about her.
They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative – was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal.
On one level – the level of character psychology – Winterbourne’s treatment of Daisy as an object of ‘study’ is a way of displacing or suppressing his own erotic interest in her. As Philip Horne astutely observes: ‘a secure state of knowledge about her even becomes at certain points, perversely, more desirable to him than Daisy’s virtue’.12 But there is no doubt that the anthropological or sociological aspect of the story contributed very largely to its popularity. The question of whether Daisy was an accurate portrait of a recognisable type of young American girl, or ‘an outrage on American girlhood’,13 and the related question of whether she was an innocent victim of social prejudice or the author of her own misfortunes, were fiercely debated, especially in America. W. D. Howells reported to his and James’s mutual friend James Russell Lowell, then resident in England:
HJ waked up all the women with his Daisy Miller, the intention of which they misconceived. And there has been a vast discussion in which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly. The thing went so far that society almost divided itself into Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites.14
If this suggests a prejudice against James’s heroine among genteel American women, there were nevertheless enough female admirers to make ‘Daisy Miller’ hats fashionable for a while.15 In the longer term, ‘Daisy Miller’ entered the language as a generic term for a certain type of attractive but forward and uncultivated young American girl at large in Europe.
Henry James was not altogether pleased by the proverbial status his creation acquired. It irritated him that throughout his career he was best known and remembered by the general public as the author of this early and comparatively slight work, while his much more ambitious and complex later fictions were neglected. His last secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, compared his feelings to those of ‘some grande dame possessing a jewel-case richly stocked with glowing rubies and flashing diamonds, but condemned by her admirers always to appear in the single string of moonstones worn at her first dance’.16 This helps to explain the somewhat deprecatory tone of James’s remarks about the story in the 1909 Preface, and the curious discussion of it with two friends which he claims to have had some time after its original publication. Although there was no doubt a factual basis for this anecdote, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that James improved it in the telling for his own purposes. The three friends are observing the indecorous behaviour of a pair of young American girls on the water-steps of a hotel in Venice, and one describes them as ‘a couple of attesting Daisy Millers’ (meaning that they prove the representativeness of James’s character). The other companion, his ‘hostess’, protests against this application of the name, and then addresses the author in a long speech of such syntactical and rhetorical complexity, flattering him under the appearance of chiding him, that only Henry James himself could have composed it, and no human being could possibly have recalled it verbatim after an interval of years. The essential gist of her accusation is that James, having started out with a character who was a recognisable and generally deplorable ‘type’, invested her with such irresistible charm and pathos as to make her quite exceptional, so that paradoxically the two young Americans ‘capering’ before them are the ‘real little Daisy Millers’ while James’s heroine is not. James meekly concedes that ‘my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else . . .’
By this devious means Henry James sought to correct the received view of Daisy Miller as a realistic ‘study’ of a certain kind of young American woman, and to present it as a work of imagination which transcends the limits of empirical verisimilitude. At the time when the story first appeared, James was often linked with Howells as an exponent of a new kind of social realism in post-Civil War American fiction, but it was a classification that proved less and less appropriate as his work developed. The ‘solidity of specification’ which characterised his earlier novels and tales, and which he still insisted was an essential requirement of the ‘Art of Fiction’, in his 1884 essay of that title,17 gave way to a more impressionistic, ambiguous and subjective rendering of experience in the later ones. In the late 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century James’s fiction took a direction that could indeed be described as ‘poetic’, entailing the use of iterative symbolism and a highly wrought style permeated with metaphor. The very titles of some of the key works of his ‘major phase’ – The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ – illustrate the point, contrasting with the simple referential titles characteristic of the earlier ones: Roderick Hudson, The American, ‘Madame de Mauves’, Daisy Miller. In the 1909 Preface, therefore, James was trying to present Daisy Miller as a kind of minor precursor of his mature art, playing down the very qualities that had made it so popular on its first appearance. And the changes and additions he made to the text in the 1909 version were, consciously or unconsciously, motivated by a desire to make it (as far as was possible without completely rewriting it) stylistically consistent with his later work, and to encourage a view of the heroine as exceptional rather than typical.
It has been estimated that James modified 90 per cent of the sentences of the original text in the New York Edition (NYE), and added some 15 per cent to its length.18 Many of the revisions are trivial, and none of them alters the structure of the story; but cumulatively they have a considerable effect on the way the reader receives it. The most significant fall into one of three categories: (1) expanded descriptions of Winterbourne’s thoughts about Daisy; (2) the replacement of simple speech-tags, like ‘he/she said/declared/exclaimed’, with more elaborately descriptive phrases (which also reflect Winterbourne’s perceptions); and more rarely, (3) emendations of the dialogue itself, which generally add emphasis rather than changing the original meanings. The 1909 text contains more information than the 1879 text, but because this additional information is nearly all about Winterbourne (since nearly everything is narrated from his point of view) it actually unbalances the story, in my opinion, and spoils the quality which W. D. Howells very perceptively singled out f
or special praise, when he wrote to James in 1882, three years after its first publication:
That artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities most valuable in the eyes of those who care how things are done . . . this impartiality comes at last to the same result as sympathy.19
What Howells meant by ‘artistic impartiality’ was James’s refusal to judge his heroine. Instead, he shows Winterbourne judging her, and leaves it to the reader to decide how justly. Judging Daisy entails judging Winterbourne; this complicates the interpretive process and involves the reader in the active production of the text in a way more characteristic of modern fiction than the classic Victorian novel. Both versions of the story make this demand on the reader, but in the 1909 text the disparity between the ‘objective’ reality of Daisy and Winterbourne’s subjective responses to her, between the transparency of her speech and the ‘logic-chopping’ complexity of his inner dialogue with himself, is more marked and insistent. Philip Horne, who has made a scrupulous comparison of the two texts, observes that ‘whereas the first edition offers strong intermittent hints that we should doubt Winterbourne’s conclusions, the NYE works the doubts far more closely into the texture of the narration’, and ‘in the revised version the speeches stand out from the interpretive framework Winterbourne progressively tries to fit them into’.20 By making us, as readers, less likely to trust Winterbourne, the 1909 text correspondingly makes us more likely to sympathise with Daisy, but as Howells observed, the ‘impartiality’ of the 1879 text is not incompatible with ‘sympathy’ for her; it merely makes the reader work harder to achieve it. The impartiality also extends to the characterisation of Winterbourne, generating more sympathy for him than he seems to deserve in the 1909 version, so that we end the story with a feeling of regret for his unfulfilled life as well as sadness at the untimely end of Daisy’s.
