[mohammad_4909]

4- Some of James’s contemporaries thought his portrait of Daisy insulting to Americans. Can you suggest why?

Daisy Miller is an image of the Americans in Europe. Those Americans who started to visit Europe after the Civil war and the clash between the two cultures was a novel and widespread phenomenon.
James was more sympathetic with the European way of life, with its emphasis on culture, education, and the art of conversation. Like most Europeans, he saw his compatriots as boorish, undereducated, and absurdly provincial, unaware of a vast and centuries-old world outside their new dominions.
James in his novella presents Daisy as a pretty American girl who wants to be exposed to European high society but refuses to conform to old world notions of propriety laid down by the American community there. In this image, he depicts the Americans as ignorant of the customs of Europeans of comparable social status. Therefore, James’s contemporaries thought that portraying the Americans in Daisy’s character as young, fresh, ingenious, clueless, naïve, innocent, well-meaning, self-centered, untaught, scornful of convention, unaware of social distinctions, utterly lacking in any sense of propriety, and unwilling to adapt to the mores and standards of others is insulting to all Americans; since Daisy is often seen as representing America. She was seen as a tiresome flirt. She has no social graces or conversational gifts, such as charm, wit, and a talent for repartee, and she is only interested only in manipulating men and making herself the center of attention. They consider all of these traits as faults.
In short, James’s contemporaries thought that Daisy’s image distorts the American picture and America in general in one way or another rather than giving an example of that poignant innocence of the American national character with its emphasis on earnestness rather than artifice.

Discuss the importance of setting in Daisy Miller.

Daisy Miller’s setting in the capitals of Italy and Switzerland is significant on a number of levels.
For the purposes of Daisy Miller, the two countries represent opposing values embodied by their capital cities, Rome and Geneva. Geneva was the birthplace of Calvinism, the fanatical protestant sect that influenced so much the American culture, New England in particular. Geneva is referred to as “the dark old city at the other end of the lake.” It is also Winterbourne’s chosen place of residence.
Rome has many associations for cultivated people like Winterbourne and Mrs. Costello. It was a city of contrasts. As a cradle of ancient civilization and the birthplace of the Renaissance, it represented both glory and corruption, a society whose greatness had brought about its own destruction. Rome is a city of ruins, which suggest death and decay. Rome is also a city of sophistication, the Machiavellian mind-set. In a sense, Rome represents the antithesis of everything Daisy stands for ـــ freshness, youth, ingeniousness, candor, innocence, and naïveté.
In sum, selecting such a setting is a great deal since Geneva and Rome at that time were the main Capitals in Europe that most Americans had headed to. It is Where either to “do as the Romans do” or to meet a downfall there as Daisy had met.

Is Daisy Miller more about our discovering what kind of person Daisy is or what kind of person Winterbourne is? Defend your answer.

In Daisy Miller, the heart of the novel would be Winterbourne’s character, not Daisy herself. He is as central a character as Daisy and may very well be the story’s true protagonist. Certainly, he is the novel’s central consciousness, the character through whose we experience and see everything.
Early on, we were told that Winterbourne is “addicted to observing and analyzing” feminine beauty. However, he does not appear to be a very deep or discriminating thinker. He seems to hold in high regard what his aunt tells him, about the Millers as much as anything else. Out loud he defends Daisy, albeit rather feebly, but the whole novel is, in a sense, the story of Winterbourne’s attempts and inability to define Daisy in clear moral terms. Winterbourne is preoccupied with analyzing Daisy’s character. He wants to be able to define and categorize her, pin her down to some known class of woman that he understands. Daisy is a novelty to him. Her candor and spontaneity charm him, but he is also mystified by her lack of concern for the social niceties and the rules of propriety that have been laid down by centuries of European civilization and adopted by the American community in Rome. He befriends Daisy and tries to save her but ultimately decides that she is morally beyond redemption.
In this novella, the protagonist, not Daisy but Winterbourne, owing to some aspect of his own character, such as an unconscious fear or a lack of passion or feeling, lets some opportunity for happiness go by and realizes it too late. Winterbourne spends his entire novel trying to figure out Daisy. In fact, it has been argued that Daisy Miller is not really so much about Daisy herself as it is about Winterbourne’s wholesale failure to understand her.

Why do you think James chose to call his heroine “Daisy Miller”? Do the names “Winterbourne,” “Mrs. Walker,” and “Giovanelli” seem significant or perhaps ironic in any way?

Henry James heard a piece of gossip from a friend in Rome about a young American girl traveling with her wealthy but unsophisticated mother in Europe. The girl had met a handsome Italian of “vague identity” and no particular social standing and attempted to introduce him into the exclusive society of expatriate Americans in Rome. The incident had ended in a snub of some sort, a “small social check….of no great gravity,” the exact nature of which James promptly forgot. Nevertheless, he never knew the young lady in question or heard mention of her again, but he proceeded to immortalize the idea of her in Daisy Miller.
The name “Winterbourne” refers to that type of Europeanized expatriate. He is closely associated with New England Puritanism: he makes his home in Geneva, “the dark old city at the other end of the lake” that James is at pains to identify as the wellspring of Calvinism not out of necessity but by choice. His name refers to the image of conforming to old- world notions of propriety laid down by the expatriate community there. He is so strict to the values and to what his aunt, Mrs. Costello, tells him.
Mrs. Walker is an American widow who lives in Italy. She knows Winterbourne from Geneva, and has befriended Daisy. Mrs. Walker shares the values of the rest of the American expatriate community, but she genuinely seems to care what happens to Daisy and tries to save her. She was among the Americans who have been scandalized by Daisy’ behavior. She is also at the center of Rome’s fashionable society.
Giovanelli is an Italian of unknown background and origins. His indiscreet friendship with Daisy is misinterpreted by the American community and leads, directly or indirectly, to Daisy’s ostracism and death. His name as it means “handsome gentleman” refers to that kind of people whose daisy is attracted to away from that type of American Expatriate in Europe who tries to imitate the European society with its values and notions. He refers to that kind of European personality that starts giving up all the old values that old Europeans and Americans believe in.