Daisy Miller

DAISY MILLER, the pretty girl from Schenectady who defies European conventions and dies of the Roman fever and a broken heart, is the only one of Henry James’s characters to have achieved national renown. For that there is reason enough. Daisy embodies the spirit of her country in a more direct and simple manner than any of her sisters in the Jamesian gallery of native types. And no one has ever offered a better explanation of her great popularity than Edmund Wilson when he said that it is due to the impression somehow conveyed by her creator that “her spirit went marching on.”

It should be recalled that originally the story of Daisy Miller was considered by a good many patriots to be a disloyal criticism of American manners and an outrage on American girlhood. Rejected on some such grounds by an editor in Philadelphia, it was first published in England, in The Cornhill Magazine (1878). But before long America reclaimed its own, for Daisy was destined to be enshrined in the national pantheon. Not long after her author’s death, William Dean Howells wrote in a preface to a new edition of the story that “never was any civilization offered a more precious tribute than that which a great artist paid ours in the character of Daisy Miller.” Thus through her phenomenal rise in public favor she finally received what amounted to almost official recognition.

The principal quality of this famous heroine is her spontaneity—a quality retained by her successors in James’s novels and stories and invariably rendered as beautifully illustrative of the vigor and innocence of life in the western world. In picturing Daisy, James was mostly concerned with exhibiting her “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence,” for that was the essential characteristic making possible her entry into literature as an altogether new type. Before James no such light had ever been thrown on the character of the American young lady; in Hawthorne, for instance, boldness in the feminine nature is simply the equivalent of badness, and his “good” young ladies (e.g. Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance and Hilda in The Marble Faun) have literally nothing but their innocence to recommend them. In the observation of his compatriots at home and abroad, James, however, was able to bring to bear the new method of realism absorbed in his study of writers like Balzac, Thackeray, Turgenev and Flaubert. As character creation Daisy is a triumph of the novelist’s faculty at work on materials drawn directly from experience. It is interesting, too, to trace the lines of force that radiate from this early Jamesian heroine to later heroines of American fiction. One example that may be cited is Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy in The Great Gatsby, who has quite a few features in common with her namesake. And the continuity is primarily of the national experience rather than of literary influence.

One cannot say, however, that in the main it is the quantity of “real life” in Daisy Miller which accounts for her vitality. The mere imitation of life has seldom produced great results in a work of art. The truth is that Daisy—as her author once observed—is at one and the same time a typical little figure and a piece of pure poetry. That is the real secret of her lasting charm—the charm of “a child of nature and freedom.”