Daisy Miller and Chaucer's "Daisy" Poem: The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women

Daisy Miller and Chaucer's "Daisy" Poem: The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women By Adeline R. Tintner, New York City There are many ways of looking at Daisy Miller, as the centenary essay of Richard Hocks and the recent book by Daniel Mark Fogel, Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners, demonstrate. The only justification for introducing yet another way of looking at James's celebrated story is that it may illuminate certain aspects of the tale about which people are still arguing. Daisy Miller belongs to the poetical tradition of flower poems and leaf ballads of the medieval courtly world, reaching back to the marguerite or "daisy" poems of the French fourteenth-century poets Eustaches Deschamps and Guillaume de Machaut, poems in which the daisy is the object of adoration and worship connected with the God of Love: "An introduction of a marguerite poem into the English court by Chaucer, one of the court poets, would attract general attention" (Jefferson 406). This tradition was transmitted to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, an account of women famous for having been martyrs to love. It was brought into the nineteenth century by Tennyson's "The Dream of Fair Women" and by Robert Browning's Balaustion's Adventure, but without the daisy symbolism. My placement of Daisy Miller in this poetic tradition should not be surprising, for James himself saw his heroine as a matter of poetry. He tells us in his preface about his wonder at the response the tale received in America, where it was called an "outrage on American girlhood." "My supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else." And James The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 10-23. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press Daisy Miller and Chaucer's "Daisy" Poem 11 adds that, "My little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms" (DM vi). As usual, most critics do not take what James says seriously, especially today when what he says and what he does are seen at variance. There are certain inescapable symbolic elements in the tale that are not treated allegorically, for James was opposed to allegory, as he wrote in his book on Hawthorne published soon after Daisy Miller. Those elements revolve around the name Daisy (which we are told is not the given name of the heroine) presumably so that the reader will see its symbolic force in its repetition after her death as well as in the frequent references to flowers and gardens. The reader finds along the way attributes that conform with Miss Miller's role as a daisy—"fresh," "free," "common," and "uncultivated." There are flowers aplenty in this story, and Daisy's meetings with Winterbourne take place in the garden of the hotel in Vevey and in the Pincian Gardens; there is her suitor, Giovanelli, who wears a "bouquet in his buttonhole" (CT 196), changed to "a stack of flowers" in the New York Edition (DM 79). The word "pretty," an attribute of flowers par excellence and that of this girl when she is flowerlike, occurs at least forty-five times in the tale and at least twice in the preface. The flower element and the daisy character of Daisy herself, as Richard Hocks and Daniel Fogel have remarked, is pertinent to the girl and is pointed out by James as often as it is possible to interrupt the realism of the plot. The "common" element in the common daisy is used as a strategy of opprobrium by Winterbourne's aunt, Mrs. Costello. The terms "fresh" and "sweet" occur over and over again, and in the end, confronted with the "raw protuberance" of her grave in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, we read that the girl lies amid the other wild perennials, among "the April daisies." As for other sources, the presence in the tale of Cherbuliez's novel Paule Méré has directed critics to see this novel of a girl whose heart is broken for love as a sign that that is what Daisy's story is about and...