An analytical essay on Henry James' "Daisy Miller." This essay debates Daisy's innocence.

Subject  > Literature Research Papers  > North American

A Cultural Conflict         Daisy Miller, a young American woman traveling abroad, falls into problems with European society and its social standards. An independent young woman, Daisy does not want to simply succumb to these constraining ideas, as many other Americans living abroad such as Winterbourne are inclined. Representing a freer and more natural method of social interaction, she struggles in a rigid, conservative society. Henry James exposes Winterbourne's problems in understanding Daisy's eccentric behavior throughout his novella Daisy Miller: A Study. Winterbourne's inability to find a category suitable for Daisy's flirting is the central problem of the text. Most of the book's action focuses on Daisy's social miscues and the discussion of those miscues. ...

... As Winterbourne, Mrs. Costello, and Mrs. Walker debate her innocence, the Europe versus America problem presents itself as the question of whether one should conform to the customs of the land that one is visiting, or whether one should be natural and maintain one's standards. James writes to Lynton, "The whole idea of the story is the little tragedy of a light, thin, unsuspecting, creature being sacrificed to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head & to which she stood in no measurable relation." Daisy Miller represents the willful ignorance of young Americans in the late nineteenth century. In this interpretation, then, as Daisy carries on with Mr. Giovanelli and

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