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Daisy Miller, Backward into the Past: A Centennial Essay by Richard A. Hocks, University of Missouri Here you have the work of a great psychologist, who has the imagination of a poet, the wit of a keen humorist, the conscience of an impeccable moralist, the temperament of a philosopher, and the wisdom of a rarely experienced witness of the world. —W. D. HowelIs on Henry James I. The Present Although there Is a lingering untrue truism that, with the publication in 1878 of Daisy Mi I 1er, James "invented the international novel," what Is both enduring and true is that, with the character of Daisy Miller herself, James auspiciously identified as his special imaginative territory the plight of the international American girl.' WeI I after he had transmuted her into Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady and, much later, into MIIIy Theale of The Wings of the Dove—by which time he was willing to consent to the view that "my supposedly typical little figure [Daisy] was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else"--even then James was likely to be identified as the author of Daisy M i 11 er .2 A tale that was pirated immediately in this country, that sold twenty thousand copies in pamphlet form in weeks, that was oft reprinted, translated, and given a different form as a play and even as a hat, and that generated some heated discussion when it first appeared, Da isy Mi I 1er was as close as Henry James ever came to becoming a popular novelist in his own lifetime. To committed Jamesians, especially in the American academy, Daisy Mi 11er has frequently seemed like a mixed blessing within the novelist's momentous and Immense body of work, for it occupies, along with The Turn of the Screw, perhaps, a somewhat disproportionate importance in that canon. Yet that importance still persists and will, I should think, continue to do so. For one thing, those who teach Henry James often discover each year that, as with The American, so much a piece of the same vintage, university students respond exceed Ing Iy wel I to Daisy Mi I 1er, respond to it despite--! shalI shortly argue even because of—the outmoded manners that constitute the narrative conf I let. For another thing, the tale itself remains accessible to students and teachers alike because of its beautifully swift focus on the antagonism between Daisy and the Europeanized "gang" abroad, because of the vividly convincing "moral muddlement" rendered by James of his register Frederick Winterbourne, and because of the yet uncomplicated syntax of James's prose id iom--another element in common with the much-taught book The American. For still another thing, Daisy's plight, her character, and her willingness to take risks against the conventional mores al I appeal Immediately to the deep feminism of these times; the specific issues may seem tame, even quaint, but a great many young women college ' Roderick Hudson (1875) is possibly James's first extended treatment of an American/European conflict, but The American (1877) Is probably the best "all round" choice for the honor. Neither "Four Meetings" (1877) nor The Europeans, published just ahead of Daisy, qualifies; and An International Episode appeared just after Palsy. The most interesting competitor within James's early canon is Madame de Mauves (1874), a work which, as Christof Wegelin pointed out a number of years ago In The I mage of Europe In Henry James (DaI las: Southern Methodist UnIv. Press, 1958), p. 46, "points across the whole of [James's] career to the latest novels." 2James*s comment, from his Preface to the New York Edition volume of Daisy Mi I 1er, is in The Art of the Nove I, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 270. 164 students, upon read ing Da i sy M i I I er for the first time, are convinced at once that she is their "sister." They see in her not on I y a victim of Victorian views about the conduct of women, but more generally a sacrificial victim of some amorphous "societal" set of "female expectations...

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