Contemporary reviews: Harper's Magazine, December 1878: “Daisy Miller is an impossible daughter, who regards her mother as a cipher, and who, besides, is an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence, elegance and vulgarity. A young person of bad manners.”
Discuss the two contemporary views of James' Daisy Miller copied below. How and/or why could we arrive at such divergent understandings of the protagonist? With which one do you side and why? Is Daisy Miller an innocent, unaffected young woman? Are there hints of her self-awareness? Does she demonstrate a desire to manipulate others?
Contemporary reviews:
Harper's Magazine, December 1878: “Daisy Miller is an impossible daughter, who regards her mother as a cipher, and who, besides, is an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence, elegance and vulgarity. A young person of bad manners.”
Henry James himself in an August 1880 letter: “Poor little Daisy Miller was, as I understand her, above all things innocent. It was not to make a scandal, or because she took pleasure in a scandal, that she went on with Giovanelli. She never took the measure really of the scandal she produced, and had no means of doing so: she was too ignorant, too irreflective, too little versed in the proportions of things. She was a flirt, a perfectly superficial and unmalicious one....I did not mean to suggest that she was playing off Giovanelli against Winterbourne--for she was too innocent for that.”
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