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Literature Term
Paper - Daisy Miller
The socialites in Daisy Miller's
world seek to perfection, nobility, and an excellent of
character. But character is a deceptive word; interiority is
significant only insofar as it reflects the assumed depths that
come with a look of modification, for the relationships in Daisy
Miller: A Study is formed by surveillance, not by discussion.
Winterbourne's penetrating gaze dissects and complicates Daisy's
appearance and, consequently, personality, beyond what her own
outcrop of a personality merits. The storyteller of Henry
James's story supplementary this atmosphere, sprinkle visual and
even abstract sentences with modifiers and other syntactical
caresses to force a system of visual modification on the reader.
The reader, however, must engage
his mind's eye to form a picture of Daisy, her most obvious
excellence, while he is kept privy to her relatively blank
awareness, thus ensuring an emotional aloofness from her which
allows him to see her as she really is. The heroine enthralls
Winterbourne, on the other hand, for most of the story, because
he can only surmise as to the mystery, or riddle, as the
raconteur calls it, of the vagueness of Daisy's behavior beneath
her deceptive exterior. His credit of his dependence on the
gaze, and on Daisy's vacuity or else, triggers his final
revulsion and enables him to select an answer from the opening
passage of this essay‹or at least be familiar with the
hollowness of the debate, that either option is a product of a
insignificant character whose observant awareness only functions
when it loops back on itself, as all of Daisy's limited
comments, too, imply: an attempt at demonstrating modification
that fails to advance linearly, but in its place circles its
solipsistic subject.
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From the start, Winterbourne is shown as a participatory voyeur.
His greatest talent is in specifying female beauty into discrete
parts, refining his vision of the entire into smaller, more
substantial pieces:
They were magnificently pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne
had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair
countrywoman's a variety of features her complexion, her nose,
her ears, her teeth. He had a great enjoy for feminine beauty;
he was addicted to observing and analyzing it; and as regards
this young lady's face he made more than a few observations.
(Henry James, Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of
Manners, Macmillan Library Reference, 1990.)
Besides the visual blazon he writes on Daisy as a traditional
weapon of subjugation and which permits him, for a moment, to
mentally accuse her face of a want of finish, Winterbourne tries
amazing equally dominating to usurp Daisy's own power of sight
by moderator her eyes only on visual terms. In their meeting,
Daisy is at first ostensibly pinned by Winterbourne's evaluative
gaze of superlatives and particularization, but her eyes tell
another story: She sat there with her very pretty hands,
ornamented with very luminous rings, folded in her lap, and with
her pretty eyes now latent upon those of Winterbourne, now
itinerant over the garden, the people who passed by, and the
beautiful view. Daisy's agency and impulsiveness, the qualities
that draw Winterbourne after her, are on display here, so
highly, in fact, that Winterbourne's own formerly powerful eyes
get lost in the uneven catalog of her line-of-sight. (Henry
James, Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of
Manners, Macmillan Library Reference, 1990.)
James makes it easy to trace the origins of Daisy's mode of
surveillance. The account of her mother contains several hints
as to where Daisy chosen up her evasive eyeballing: Her
mother was a small, spare, light person, with an itinerant eye,
a very exiguous nose, and a large forehead, bedecked with a
certain amount of thin, much-frizzled hair. Like her daughter,
Mrs. Miller was dressed with great elegance; she had huge
diamonds in her ears. So far as Winterbourne could watch, she
gave him no greeting she surely was not looking at him.
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Winterbourne's reduced powers of surveillance highlights another
feature of Mrs. Miller's which Daisy shares her look of mystery
through opposition. The smallness of her body contrasts with her
wandering eye, just as her exiguous nose plays against her large
brow, or even that her hair is both thin and much-frizzled.
Mrs. Costello was a widow who often intimated that, if she were
not so terribly liable to sick-headaches, she would probably
have left a deeper impress upon her time. She had a long pale
face, a high nose, and a great deal of arresting white hair,
which she wore in large puffs and rouleaux over the top of her
head. (Henry James, Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark
Comedy of Manners, Macmillan Library Reference, 1990.)
Daisy has the best of both worlds, excellent beauty with
contradictory ambiguity, but her lack of the dignity Mrs.
Costello has in spades is why, in the elder's eyes, she’s
pretty. But she is very common. Even the word attractive, used
extensively for Daisy, connotes a lesser, more willingly
available form of beauty and hints at the simple awareness
Winterbourne will later uncover.
The modifiers chiefly, indeed and extremely even the reminder to
tourists and the ensuing recommendation all add up to produce a
world whose inborn elegance must be tapped by the refining eye
of the observer. The same self-importance applies to the
metaphors of Daisy already cited. But since prose descriptions
do not grip him as much as the visual does an actual observer,
the reader is conscious of the showiness of these judgments long
before Winterbourne understands them. Halfway from side to side
the story, angry with Daisy's ungratefulness for his visit,
Winterbourne recalls the chestnut that pretty American women are
at once the most demanding in the world and the least endowed
with a sense of thanks. Demanding in more way than one, since
Daisy is demanding of others and of the precise sort of
attention paid to her. Her insistence that Winterbourne go round
with her is one of the many uses of the phrase, a visual
portrayal of the social revolution a meaning quite contrary to
that of 1789 France of wheeling about on a selfish axis and
ignoring the modification of linear, thinker thought that
Winterbourne demonstrates. (Henry James, Daniel Mark Fogel,
Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners, Macmillan Library
Reference, 1990.)
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The minute variations of the beat of each section between four
and five beats, with two exceptions intensify her incapability
to deepen her thought beyond the unique statement. She runs into
an by accident humorous ambiguity I guess she sleeps more than
she thinks she does I guess she spends more time sleeping than
thinking, and the recurrence of "she" stalls the subject
pronominally where it could be used to expand account of her
mother. Her inability to make headway is most obvious in her
cumbersome use of to four times after the semicolon the activity
is continually being put into effect through the infinitive,
rather than coming to fruition and, though it ends as a
prepositional expression, continues the infinitive theme.
Finally, she concludes with a statement nearly the same to the
opener, framing her outline with empty declarations.
Caught in the world of the visual, Winterbourne is unable to
detect these limits. He cannot pierce the showiness of Daisy's
character, and when he does find amazing he dislikes, as when he
spies on her and Giovanelli, he is still too enamored of Daisy
to tackle her, either physically or in his own judgment. James
delicately toys with the dissimilarity between Winterbourne's
judgment of the visible and the interior with a few
cleverly-placed semicolons:
Winterbourne stood there; he had turned his eyes towards Daisy
and her offhand. They obviously saw no one; they were too deeply
occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden-wall
they stood for a moment looking off at the great flat-topped
pine-clusters of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli seated
himself intimately upon the broad ledge of the wall. (Henry
James, Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of
Manners, Macmillan Library Reference, 1990.)
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Clearly, we are meant to read the topic they as Daisy and
Giovanelli. But James withholds any proper names awaiting
Giovanelli seats himself on the wall, and this comes in a divide
clause. It is likely for them to mean Winterbourne's eyes. In
this reading, his eyes obviously do not see Daisy, because they
are too deeply busy with each other in other words, his eyes are
enraptured with their own convergence of the gaze to see through
Daisy's demeanor. When they reached, then, continues to describe
their nomadic path over the scenery; that they stood for a
instant clarifies that the pair is really human, but the damage
is done: She came a little nearer and he held the parasol over
her; then, still holding it, he let it rest upon her shoulder,
so that both of their heads were hidden from Winterbourne. He is
blinded, while the person who reads retains vision and most
probable, at this point, couldn't care less what Daisy and
Giovanelli are doing under the sunshade.
Winterbourne, stuck in a visual system of ruling I have noticed
that they are very close, Winterbourne observed, only smashes
free from it and sees the truth when his vision is impaired:
He stood there looking at her‹looking at her friend, and not
shiny that though he saw them vaguely, he himself must have been
more brilliantly able to be seen. He felt angry with himself
that he had worried so much about the right way of regarding
Miss Daisy Miller. (Henry James, Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy
Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners, Macmillan Library Reference,
1990.)
The language of observational terms which can double as
evaluative verbs reflecting, concerning strikes the
philosophical change in Winterbourne's literal outlook, as does
his using her full official name as a way of sapping her of any
suggestive secrecy behind the vague she. He later repents
somewhat after Daisy's death, but seems not to take the lesson
to heart. The real study of Daisy Miller: A Study, then, is
Winterbourne, whose undecided attempts to study Daisy we go
after until his brief redemption, and of whom the final line of
the description reinforcing his return to the gaze, albeit now
directed at an ostensibly more worthy, but still very refined
foreigner should come as no shock: he is studying hard' an hint
that he is much paying attention in a very clever foreign lady.
References
Henry James,
Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners,
Macmillan Library Reference, 1990.
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