Daisy Miller (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

One of Henry James's earliest novellas, Daisy Miller (1878) follows the activities of a wealthy, and brashly confident, young American woman as she audaciously challenges European society in Vevey, Switzerland, and in Rome, having fun, doing what pleases her, and leaving staid European society gasping in her wake. Daisy Miller, whose father is in the US and whose mother is her ineffectual "chaperone," is a free spirit in a society bound by unstated but rigid "rules," determined to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with whomever she chooses.

Frederick Winterbourne, an ex-patriot who has spent most of his life in Geneva, is attracted to Daisy, but his bonds with his stuffy aunt, Mrs. Cosgrove, and her friend, Mrs. Walker, both of whom govern ex-patriot society in Europe, leave him ill-equipped to deal with Daisy's flouting of society's conventions. When she is obviously attracted to Mr. Giovanelli, a singer/musician of no social standing, and when she is seen with him publicly in places that a "nice" girl would not grace at night, her reputation is threatened, and anyone associated with her is tainted. Winterbourne is uncertain how to protect her, while, not incidentally, protecting his own reputation.

Developing his most famous theme, James considers the conflicts between American and European values and the naivete of the Americans and their spontaneity as it contrasts with the old world formality of the Europeans. Daisy, who is often foolishly na've, is also seen as brash and ego-centric, a young woman whose destiny cannot be avoided (or even predicted) because of the strength of her own, often wrong, willfulness.

James focuses on two characters here--both Daisy and Winterbourne--and though the story is told from Winterbourne's point of view, Daisy is often the more vibrant of the two characters. Though she is shallow and assertive, he is hidebound by convention, leaving both characters with limits in terms of reader identification. When a night-time dalliance leads to serious consequences for Daisy, the reader is neither surprised nor shocked.

Filled with trenchant observations about Americans and their differences from Europeans, the novel incorporates significant symbols--the Coliseum (associated with innocent Christian martyrs), malaria (to which Americans are particularly susceptible), Randolph (Daisy's rude and undisciplined 10-year-old brother, the ugliest of Americans), and Mrs. Cosgrove and Mrs. Walker (converts to the European way of life). Carefully observed and critical of American naivete, Daisy Miller is the "preface" to Portrait of a Lady and many of James's more fully developed novels. Mary Whipple

This is one of Henry James's earliest works, a charming novella of high-society manners and attitudes. Some reviewers focused on the differences between American and European social standards, but that seemed to be only a sub-set of issues; the main theme involved the eternal struggle of free-spirited youth, abutting the structures of a well-entrenched establishment. For the timid, the book is a wonderful introduction to James, who, as one reviewer put it, is famous for his dense, convoluted prose. I found only one sentence that would hint of the later James, a sentence replete with classic James qualifications: "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."

The central character, the young American woman, with the title's name is judged by some, as James dryly asserts, to possess a "...certain laxity of deportment." By today's standards she would be judged to have an excessive amount, by either European or American measures. In an exchange with Winterbourne, who is an American contemporary infatuated with her, but whom she judges "stiff," and who has charged her with being a "flirt," which is not appropriate for "young unmarried women" she retorts: "It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried women than in old married ones." It is an attitude which results in her rejection by the society matrons of the time.

The entire novella involves characters from the very elite, a tiny flake of humanity, that move from hotel to hotel, the ultimate in the leisure class unconcerned by financial matters. No, almost certainly this is not the manners and morals of our own ancestors, who were scraping by in the factory and the fields to make this lifestyle of the modern day "sun-kings" possible. Still, it is this "flake" that draws the disproportionate attention of the rest of us, just like the entire sections of the news devoted to the lifestyles of the famous in Hollywood.

Judging the book by James's standards, in its time and place, I would still only give it only a 4-star. How could Daisy's younger brother, who moves in these elite hotels with her family, be wandering unsupervised, and be judged an "urchin," while losing most of his teeth? Would the strains of malaria extant in Europe at the time have dispatched the patient that quickly? And "opacity" would be an understatement in James's treatment of the relationship between Winterbourne and Mrs. Walker, and in turn, the latter's concern with Daisy's "deportment."

Still, the book might rate a plus on the "4" for the Rumsfeldian lines from Daisy's younger brother, Randolph: "My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe... My father's in Schenectady."

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on April 20, 2009)

Written in 1878, the attitudes on display in Daisy Miller may now appear to be rather dated in relation to modern social behaviour, but at the same time, Henry James's delightful little novella departs from his earlier conventional depictions of European and American female protagonists, marking a significant change not only in the changing social attitudes, but also in the acuteness of observation that James would innovate particularly in regard to the female psychology.

That wouldn't appear to be the case from the early observations that Frederick Winterbourne, an American travelling in Europe makes about a "completely uncultivated ...but wonderfully pretty" fellow American young lady, the daughter of a rich businessman, that he encounters in Vevey in Switzerland. This hopelessly forward and vulgar young lady, who scandalously admits that she enjoys the society of gentlemen, not only allows Winterbourne, whom she scarcely knows, to take her to see a famous Chateau, but she goes with him alone, unaccompanied and without a chaperone. Despite the warnings of his aunt and other influential members of society, Winterbourne pursues his interest of the fascinating Daisy Miller in Rome, without being quite prepared for what he is letting himself in for, finding her behaviour "an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence".

It's all doomed to end in tragedy, but despite having all the appearances of a cautionary tale, Henry James makes some fine observations on a new breed of woman and the declining influence that society holds over their thoughts, actions and behaviour that would be expanded through Catherine Sloper in Washington Square (1880) through to some of his most celebrated work in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Bostonians (1886).