Discussion Topics: "Daisy Miller"

I. Discussion Topics

1. Henry James has often been called a psychological realist, more interested in the development of consciousness than in portraying character types and social reality. Discuss the extent to which this observation holds true in "Daisy Miller."

2. Explain the themes of the innocence of Americans in Europe and the way individuals are bound by convention.

II. "Daisy Miller": Story and Commentary

Henry James, with his intense concern for the psychological life of his characters and with his development of a novelistic technique centered in the representation of the effect produced in the inner self by external forces, may be said to have created the modern psychological novel. According to James, the artist should render the complex human personality in all of its psychological subtleties, truly and plausibly. James is not invoking the dictum of "art for art's sake"; rather, he is insisting that the artist has a responsibility to report his observations accurately, filtering them through his imagination to give them form and meaning. The writer is a product of his times, James insists, and the interaction of the artist with his surroundings is essential to the production of true literature.

The point of view is also important for the psychological depiction of his characters. For James, the way in which a story is presented is of equal interest to the story itself: the mind of the character through whom events are narrated to the reader is as crucial to understanding the totality of meaning that a story conveys as are the incidents which are narrated. Not comfortable with first-person narration, James finds that the best stories are those in which the principal action is filtered through a single consciousness of an observer who is usually not a main player in the action. In his own fiction, James himself uses numerous devices to achieve the illusion he wished to create while still providing essential details needed for the reader. Most notable among these devices is his use of a character whose presence in the story may be only tangential but who functions as a willing auditor or reporter to the central figure narrating the tale.

From Laurence Mazzeno 

James implicitly links realism with point of view and with the "quality of the mind of the producer." He writes, "a novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression." Thus, reality is subjective for Henry James, and he suggests that, far from being referential, realism reveals aspects of life that cannot be seen. He insists on "the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern," and he writes, "experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue."

Many of the readers will have difficulty seeing realism in Henry James. However, they can try to follow the psychological complexity of the relationships James creates--for example Daisy and Winterbourne in "Daisy Miller"--as well as to see his interest in relationships, per se, as an aspect of realism that makes James stand out among many of his contemporaries.

In "Daisy Miller," James is dramatizing the dangers and responsibilities of innocence. In the Novel, Daisy Miller, American and dazzling pretty, travel in Switzerland and then Italy with a mother so uncomprehending and permissive that her child gets into trouble because of different social mores. She flirts both with Frederick Winterbourne, a Europeanized American who is too reserved to respond heartily, and with Giovanelli, an oily Roman fortune-hunter who is quite eager to respond. Daisy seems simply to like the company of attractive young men. But social leaders of the American colony in Rome see her as immoral and calculating, and freeze her out. When Winterbourne turns critical as well, the bewildered girl goes with Giovanelli late at night to the Coliseum in Rome, catches the deadly Roman fever, and dies. Readers to this day are undecided as to whether Daisy was foolish to defy the customs of a foreign land, whether Winterbourne should have interpreted her more emotionally, whether Giovanelli was vengeful.

From The Continuum Encyclopedia