ENDNOTES
Daisy Miller
1 (p. 5)
Newport and Saratoga: Newport, Rhode Island, and Saratoga Springs, New York, were fashionable resort destinations in the nineteenth century. Newport contained a number of palatial mansions, including The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s former summerhouse. Similarly, Saratoga Springs served as a chief social and sporting center, attracting thoroughbred horse racing aficionados, beginning in 1863, and elite gamblers, who frequented a casino built in 1867.
2 (p. 5)
to the Ocean House or to Congress Hall: The Ocean House, built in 1840, was a well-known summer hotel in Newport, Rhode Island. Congress Hall, a fashionable resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, was destroyed in a fire in 1868 and rebuilt in 1870.
3 (p. 6)
the little metropolis of Calvinism: Geneva became an important center of the Protestant Reformation with the arrival of John Calvin, a French theologian and religious reformer, in 1536. Calvinism emphasized the essential sinfulness of man, the salvation of the elect by God’s grace, and the supremacy of Scriptures in the revelation of truth.
4 (p. 6)
he had been put to school there as a boy, and he had afterwards gone to college there: In 1860 the James family lived in Geneva, where seventeen-year-old Henry was enrolled in the Academy as a special student. In Transatlantic Sketches (1875), he confesses an “old-time kindness for Geneva, to which I was introduced years ago, in my schooldays, when I was as good an idler as the best.”
5 (p. 20)
sylph: A sylph is an imaginary or elemental spirit who inhabits the air and is mortal but soulless. The existence of such beings was first stipulated by the medieval physician Paracelsus, who found a dif ferent being to correspond with each of the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth.
6 (p. 29)
the unhappy Bonivard: The Genevan patriot François Bonivard (1493-1570) took up arms against the reigning dukes of Savoy and was subsequently imprisoned in 1530 in the castle of Chillon, where he was incarcerated in an underground jail cell from 1532 until 1536.
7 (p. 32)
that pretty novel of Cherbuliez‘s-‘Paule Méré’: This novel was published in 1864 by French novelist, critic, and historian Victor Cherbuliez (1829-1899). The narrative follows a carefree heroine who is hurt by slander and disappointed by a weak hero. In
Transatlantic Sketches (1875) James described
Paule Méré as “a tale [written] expressly to prove that frank nature is out of favor (in Geneva).” Cherbuliez’s heroine, James wrote, “dies of a broken heart because her spontaneity passes for impropriety.” James eventually met Cherbuliez in Paris, where they were both guests at Gustave Flaubert’s apartment in 1875 and 1876. In a letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, James recalled that the members of Flaubert’s Parisian circle held Cherbuliez in some contempt.
8 (p. 45)
Villa Borghese: This famous villa, surrounded by beautiful gardens, statues, and fountains, was designed by architects Flaminio Ponzio and Giovanni Vasanzio and built at the beginning of the seventeenth century for Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, the favorite nephew of Pope Paul V. 9. (p. 51)
St Peter’s: St. Peter’s Basilica is the church of the popes in Rome. A major pilgrimage site, it was begun by Pope Julius II in 1506 and completed in 1615 under Paul V. Its dome rises directly above the high altar, which contains the shrine of Saint Peter the Apostle.
10 (p. 53)
Doria Palace: The Palazzo Doria Pamphili, in the Via del Corso, dates back to the 1440s, when it was built by the Doria-Pamphili, a prominent Roman noble clan who distinguished themselves by serving the Roman Curia, a group of Vatican bureaus that assist the pope in his jurisdiction over the Roman Catholic church. The palace galleries contain works by Raphael, Caravaggio, and Bernini.
11 (p. 53) the
superb portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez: This portrait of Pope Innocent X, who served as pontiff from 1644 to 1655, was completed by the Spanish artist Diego Velásquez between 1650 and 1651. The painting, considered “too truthful” by its papal subject, depicts a stern, indeed suspicious pope.
12 (p. 57) the Arch of
Constantine: One of three surviving ancient Roman triumphal arches in Rome, it was hastily erected in A.D. 312 by Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, to celebrate his victory over Maxentius.
13 (p. 57)
the Forum: Situated between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, the Roman Forum was the scene of public meetings, legal courts, and gladiatorial combats in republican times. Under the Roman Empire, it was a center for religious and secular spectacles and ceremonies.
14 (p. 57)
the Colosseum: A 50,000-seat oval stadium measuring one-third of a mile around and inaugurated in A.D. 80, the Colosseum was the site of gladiatorial contests, wild animal spectacles, sham battles, and, when flooded, naval displays.
15 (p. 57)
Byron’s famous lines, out of “Manfred”: In act 3, scene 4 of Lord Byron’s dramatic poem
Manfred, the eponymous hero, recalling a youthful visit to the Colosseum, meditates on the “ruinous perfection” of the “noble wreck”:
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften’d down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill’d up,
As ‘twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o’er
With silent worship of the great of old,—
The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
As Susan Koprince notes (Arizona Quarterly 42 [1986], pp. 293-304), both Byron and James regard the Colosseum as a site of ambivalence—a place of both beauty and death. Unlike Manfred, however, Winterbourne is derivative to the bone: Rather than express the immediacy of his own heart, he quotes someone else.
16 (p. 58)
this nest of malaria: Originally thought to be the result of the unwholesome atmosphere—foul and poisonous emanations from rotting flesh and vegetation (hence the Italian name
mal‘aria, meaning “bad air”)—that permeated Italy’s marshy districts, malaria was recognized in the early twentieth century to be a group of febrile diseases transmitted by mosquitoes of the genus
Anopheles. 17 (p. 58)
Roman fever: Beginning in the third century, malaria was associated with the marshes of the Roman Campagna (the area immediately surrounding Rome). Familiarly termed “Roman fever,” it frequently protected Rome from foreign invaders felled by the deadly illness.
18 (p. 59)
splendid pills: The pills were probably quinine, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries the best and only remedy for malaria. Made from the bark of the cinchona tree, quinine suppresses the action of malaria parasites and also acts as a preventative.
19 (p. 61)
the little Protestant cemetery: In 1873 James described this burial ground as “one of the solemn places of Rome”: “Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave.” He focused in particular on the gravestone of a young woman named Miss Bathurst, who drowned in the Tiber River in 1824. Her inscription read: “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom.” According to James, this epitaph “affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and beyond all it does say.”
Washington Square
1 (p. 74) the temple of Republican simplicity: In the late eighteenth century, during the years of the early American Republic, citizens showed their independence from British manufacturing concerns by wearing simple, homespun fabrics. In her 1897 biography of Martha Washington, Anne Hollingsworth Wharton reports that visitors to the First Lady frequently “felt rebuked by the plainness of her apparel and her example of persistent industry, while we were extravagantly dressed idlers, a name not very creditable in these perilous times.”
2 (p.
75) a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe: This is a reference to the embellished letter “A” worn by Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel,
The Scarlet Letter (1850). The letter is woven from “fine red cloth” and “surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread.”
3 (p. 75)
within five minutes’ walk of the City Hall: The narrator refers to the affluent New York neighborhood around Lower Broadway, where City Hall was built in 1803. A visiting Englishman, John Lambert, remarked in 1807 that the district’s “lofty and well built” town houses opened onto “large commodious shops of every description.”
4 (p. 86)
Excelsior!: In this 1841 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), a handsome young traveler ignores a village’s offers of help and hospitality, and instead goes forth into a snowstorm, where he dies bearing the banner “Excelsior!”—meaning “Higher!” or “Upward!”
5 (p. 91)
Bellini and Donizetti: Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) was a popular Romantic operatic composer known for his expressive melodies and interpretive sensitivity; among his works are La
sonnambula (1831; The
Sleepwalker) and
Norma (1831). His longer-lived Italian peer, Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848), achieved fame with such Romantic operas as
Anna Bolena, which debuted in Milan in 1830, and
Lucia di Lammermoor, which opened in Naples in 1835.
6 (p. 92) Pasta and
Rubini and Lablache: Three mid-nineteenth-century opera singers: Giuditta Pasta (1798-1865), an Italian soprano; Adelaide Cornelli-Rubini (c.1796-1874), a French, later Italian, mezzo-soprano; and Luigi Lablache (1794-1858), an Italian bass.
7 (p. 122)
“Isn’t there some proverb about a reformed rake?”: The proverb appears in Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747-1748): “To what a bad choice is many a worthy woman betrayed, by that false and inconsiderate notion, That a reformed rake makes the best husband!”
8 (p. 137)
Greenwood Cemetery: Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in rural Brooklyn in 1838. By the
1850s, it was the final resting place of such well-known Americans as Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Henry Ward Beecher. A major tourist attraction in the nineteenth-century, the cemetery drew some 500,000 visitors annually.
9 (p. 173)
the works of Raphael: Italian painter, draughtsman, and architect Raphael Sanzio (1483-1529), one of the most important painters of the High Renaissance, is well known for his decorative painting of the Stanza della Segnatura and other papal apartments in the Vatican.
10 (p. 212)
“the grief that does not speak!”: A reference to Shakespeare’s
Macbeth (act 4, scene 4) in which Malcolm, hearing the news that Macduff’s wife and children have been mercilessly slaughtered, cries out, “Merciful heaven! / What, man! Ne’er pull your hat upon your brows; / Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o‘er-fraught heart and bids it break.”