Daisy Miller And Washington Square

From Jennie A. Kassanoff's Introduction toDaisy Miller and Washington Square Like Winterbourne and his cohort of reproving Americans, early critics ofDaisy Millertook pains to classify and typologize James's heroine. TheNation, marveling that "no American book of its size has been so much read and so much discussed," saw the story as a cautionary tale. "It is a perfect study of a type not, alas! uncommon." Daisy was the garish American tourist par excellence. The journal could only hope thatDaisy Millerwould find its way aboard "all the ocean steamers" that set sail across the Atlantic, and thereby "be so presented to the 'moral consciousness' of the American people that they, being quickwitted, may see themselves here truthfully portrayed, and may say, 'Not so, but otherwise will we be'" (James's "Daisy Miller,"p. 106). The critic for theNorth American Review, Richard Grant White, agreed that "in Daisy Miller Mr. James has undertaken to give a characteristic portrait of a certain sort of American young woman, who is unfortunately too common." The text, he hoped, would have a "corrective effect" on American travelers: "It is perhaps well that [James] has made this study, . . . which should show European critics of American manners and customs the light in which the Daisy Millers are regarded by Americans themselves" (James's "Daisy Miller,"p. 107). Other readers, however, were not so sanguine. Daisy Miller was "an outrage on American girlhood," they declared (James,Daisy Miller; Pandora; The Patagonia; and Other Tales, p. v). Indeed, her story was so scandalous as to cast doubt on James's patriotism.The New York Times, for one, took this charge seriously enough to mount a spirited rebuttal. Mr. James, theTimesinsisted, was obviously "possessed by a sincere patriotism": Only someone truly committed to his country could "[consecrate] his talents to the enlightening of his countrywomen in the view which cynical Europe takes of the performance of the American girl abroad" (James's "Daisy Miller,"p. 103). For his own part, James grew weary of the debate and eventually tried to put the matter to rest. In the twenty-four-volume New York Edition (1909), he summarily dropped the story's subtitle, "A Study," and insisted that the tale had neither prescriptive nor descriptive designs on American womanhood. "My little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms," James explained (Daisy Miller, p. vi). His readers were not to confuse art with life: "My supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else" (p. viii). This effort to contain Daisy's multiple meanings, however, seems nothing if not a self-conscious parody of Winterbourne's own effete aestheticism. As Winterbourne strolls into the malarial Roman arena, blithely quoting Byron, he belatedly recalls that "if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors." As a fictional character himself, Winterbourne's insistence on the difference between art (the poets) and life (the doctors) is an awkward one. An aesthetic taxonomist of the worst kind, his empirical observations are too little and too late. In probing such distinctions between art and life, and the generic and the specific,Daisy Millerexposes thJames, Henry is the author of 'Daisy Miller And Washington Square', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593081058 and ISBN 1593081057.