Daisy Miller: Cowboy Feminist

"[C]ertain (not all) male texts merit a dual hermeneutic: a negative hermeneutic that discloses their complicity with patriarchal ideology, and a positive hermeneutic that recuperates the utopian moment--the authentic kernel--from which they draw a significant portion of their emotional power."

--Patrocinio Schweickart

Daisy Miller shoots from the hip. This directness--her great flaw, according to her social circle (and many of her readers)--is what compels me most. She speaks her mind and forces others to speak theirs, offering rare relief in the oppressive Jamesian atmosphere of unspoken but ubiquitous and unbending cultural rules. Her story of enculturation and personal defiance, on the surface a cautionary tale for wayward girls, contains what Patrocinio Schweickart calls an "authentic kernel" or "utopian moment." From this seed of rebellion, feminist readers draw out a counter-narrative of American womanhood defined by freedom despite social constraints. Within James criticism feminist critics consistently emphasize the liberatory dimension of Daisy's story, placing the evidence of patriarchal control--Daisy's death--in brackets. While traditional critics repeat Winterbourne's fatal mistake of evaluating Daisy in terms of regulatory categories of womanhood (good or bad, innocent or wild), calling her "the wonder and horror of all decorous people," asking "What is one to do with such a contrary girl?," feminists embrace Daisy's integration of these qualities, recognizing the protest coiled inside her indecorousness. ¹

Judith Fryer focuses on this integration of contrary values in Faces of Eve, arguing, "James gives us here a type of American girl who is both bold and good," marking a new era in depictions of womanhood in American literature. Daisy's self-reliance as a woman is, according to Fryer, what Americans like--and what they fear--about this novella (97-101). Louise Barnett likewise reads Daisy with believing eyes, presenting her as a figure of "Jamesian feminism":

Daisy remains the most uncompromising and uninhibited of James's many freedom-seeking heroines, a resister of patriarchal authority who "has never allowed a gentleman to dictate to [her] or to interfere with anything [she does]." She breaks rather than bending to social demands. (287)

Finally, Virginia Fowler contributes to this recuperative feminist force, asserting, "of James's American girls: what survives in our memory of these fictional heroines is not the 'strain' they encounter on the European stage, but the 'resistance' they display in their dramas" (61). I join these women in affirming the textual impact of Daisy's resistance to physical and psychological enclosure. Her moments of defiance linger long after the sting of her death subsides. For this reason, I focus on the center of her narrative instead of the end, in a sense writing beyond the ending by connecting Daisy Miller with a variety of feminist contexts to reveal its potential as a parable for gender outlaws. ²

The seeds for such a reading lie in Tristram Coffin's 1958 piece (after which my title is modeled), "Daisy Miller: Western Hero." Coffin's brief article, which appeared first in Western Folklore, points out that Daisy Miller follows the "cowboy formula" of Western American literature: "[T]he independence of thought and action, the self-imposed morality, the laudable innocence, the straightforward distrust of subtlety and 'front' that have become hallmarks of the western hero are all carefully drawn into Daisy Miller to give her her American nature" (136). "This was the era," writes Coffin, "of [. . .] the glorification of the outlaw" (137). Although he flirts with gender-bending effects by calling Daisy "a western hero with parasol and bank account" (136), Coffin does not pursue the implications of placing a woman at the center of an American mythology, much less an adventure genre. Modleski's study of women heroes in Western movies fills this gap:

There was a significant subgenre of nineteenth-century dime-store Westerns featuring women dressed as men. These women did not appear on the scene all at once, however, but were part of a more...