Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners (review)

Book Reviews 99 In The Golden Bowl, Adam Verver's emotional life is openly equated with connoisseurship; his vision is eminently reifying; he does look upon Charlotte and the Prince as "human furniture"; acquiring a husband or a wife is for him like a purchase of precious objects. Still, Freedman has a strong point in considering Maggie "James's greatest, and most problematic, aesthete" (231) and in exploring in her guise the "dire conflations" of love and cruelty, passivity and power, imaginative freedom and social control that make of her a more frightful femme fatale than Milly. This "timid tigress" with her "blameless egotism" portrays the others as animals and accepts in fuU the Prince's invocation to be sacrificed; she has him caged, "restricted and tied," and sentences Charlotte to be "removed, transported, doomed" (231-32). Her formidable silences are the means through which justice and retribution are meted out. She "starts as a variant of Isabel, but ends as a more powerful Osmond" (240). The way to this conclusion, one may recall, was opened by R. P. Blackmur's second reading of The Golden Bowl: Freedman takes it to its farthest extreme—which is both a sign of the times and of our growing awareness that in James's later fiction deep undercurrents of contrary meaning undermine the polished surface. Thoughtful, penetrating, even brilliant as he is in his discussion of later James in the light of his career-long dialogue with aestheticism and of his foreground position in the professionalization of literature, Freedman is still too much at pains to free him from "the modernist privileging of the formalist, aestheticist James" (255). Yet his book reopens the question of later James in a new fashion and with a new perspective. A richer genealogy of modernism, and indeed postmodernism, begins to take shape, in which both the problematics of British aestheticism and James's relations with it play an important role. James had to the very end a strong sense of the real and a keen, even prophetic, perception of social and cultural developments. This book bears further testimony to it, from a different, fruitful angle. Sergio Perosa Université di Venezia Daniel Mark Fogel. Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners. Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. 122 pp. $17.95. pb $7.95. In this "masterwork" account of Daisy Miller we find the expected critical acumen of Daniel Mark Fogel, located as he is at the heart of James studies. In addition, Fogel's exuberance carries us to where we need to be—aware all over again of Daisy Miller as a complex and major work of American fiction. (An example of exuberance even in the brief chronology of James's life: " 1900—Shaves off beard worn since Civil War. Begins The Ambassadors [novel]" (xvi). Chapters of the book combine the contextual with the textual, in keeping with uie Twayne format. They are sharply varied in subject but remarkably interwoven: Historical Context; The Importance of the Work; Critical Reception; Voice and Point of View; Times, Names, Places, Symbols; Sexual Politics and Social Class; Plot and Structure ; The Revision of 1909—followed by a Conclusion and an annotated Selected Bibliography . A scant hundred pages of discussion, the book is nevertheless a model of comprehensiveness and scholarship, not only appropriate for classroom studies, but an important starting place for all future scholars of Daisy Miller in particular, and James in general. Something about the book, including Fogel's own affectionate interest in Daisy Miller, gets us into a fresh Jamesian spirit In the face of those who may be half-ready 100 The Henry James Review to lay Henry James to rest as a canonized fogey—and, appaUingly, it is possible to find nowadays a syllabus for an American Uterature course that contains not a single work of James—Fogel moves us right back to center. Among other things, he does not allow us to forget the remarkable number of "firsts" attributable to Henry James: (1) mat he not only created the paradigm of "the American girl as free, spontaneous, independent, natural, and generous in spirit," but (2) that Daisy Miller began a series of his works...