Friday, May 4, 2012
Who's the corrupt one in Daisy Miller?
So who's the corrupt one? Who's the fool? Henry James's great short (for him) story Daisy Miller would is very tricky: the surface information of the story, the facts as presented by the seemingly objective 3rd-person narrator, would suggest that Daisy Miller, a 20ish American woman touring Europe with her indifferent, narcissistic mother and her bratty kid brother, is irresponsible and even, in the terms of the day, "loose": she goes out in public accompanied by a young man without a chaperone, she's even willing to walk about an park in Rome with an Italian man, finally she sits with the Italian guy under moonlight in the Coliseum. This just isn't done - and many people, including the 27-year-old American Winterbourne (no first name) advise her about this. But she's typically youthful and typically American: she'll do things her own way, and she gets the "cold shoulder" from the American community in Rome and, ultimately, in a bit of symbolism far too heavy-handed, she gets "infected" by the Italian miasma and comes down with a fever and dies. OK, she's the one who suffers - but is she wrong? I think her behavior, though unconventional, is acceptable and were she a stronger (or luckier) character she would be heroic rather than tragic. The corrupt one is Winterbourne - seeming to offer her advice and counsel, but actually in my view more or less stalking her, jealous that she's turned her affections elsewhere (even though it's obvious that the Italian guy pursuing her is no good and is only after the Miller fortune). Everyone remembers that Daisy dies, but the last moments of the story had slipped from my memory, at least - Winterbourne realizes that he blew it, that he could have had Daisy's love if he hadn't been, in her words, such a "stiff." At the end, he goes off into his meaningless life - we never learn about his family or his fortune or what it is he does all day other than allegedly "study" - apparently last heard of (by the narrator) back living in Geneva and interested in a "foreign lady" - he's no different from the Italian fortune-hunter who pursued Daisy Miller. The real corruption is the total lack of a sense of purpose or role in society other than one's own self-advancement. As Winterbourne realizes, too late, he'd lived abroad too long.
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