James's Daisy Miller

Book Reviews character and coincidental depiction of his death, and thought Lawrence had been both ungrateful and cruel. Jeffrey Meyers University of Colorado James's Daisy Miller Daniel Mark Fogel. Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. χ + 118 pp. $17.95 THE MAKING OF BOOKS about Henry James has become a small industry, by which nobody can possibly be more surprised than he would be, who once remarked that publishing a book was like taking it out and dropping it into the mud. But surely nothing else could have raise his eyebrows higher than the knowledge that the editor of the Henry James Review should have found it necessary to devote a book-length explication to so brief and comparatively simple a tale as "Daisy Miller." The first three chapters place the story in its historical context and in what Professor Fogle sees as its relationship to James's complete ouevre and reviews its critical reception early and late, and the rest of the volume is devoted to a "reading" whose purpose is to "expand and deepen" the reader's pleasure "by exploring the text from a variety of vantage points—styHstic and technical as well as thematic and historical." There is also a chronology of the author's Hfe and works that is elaborate enough adequately to serve the needs in kind of a fuU-length biography. The author himself expounds the meaning of his title: Daisy Miller is a dark comedy, in my view, not only because of its sad ending, not only because of the pathos (not the tragedy) of Daisy's death, but also because of the cultural determinism it presupposes, because not one of its characters—not Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, certainly, nor Winterbourne, the most open-minded of the "conventional" characters, not Daisy, the supposedly "natural" American girl—can overcome the environmental determinism that finally makes it impossible for Daisy and Winterbourne to meet each other halfway, she by growing beyond the crude provinciality of Schenectady and he by growing beyond the stifling proprieties of Geneva and of the American colony in Rome. Fogle generously acknowledges his debt as interpreter to Motley Deakin and, to a lesser extent, Lauren Cowdery and dissents sharply 123 ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 from Carol Ohmann's view that Daisys death is not adequately prepared for. He believes that the lady in Geneva to whom Winterbourne has been reported as "extremely devoted" is a mistress, but he states his reasons for this behef fairly, not foUowing the example of those of his critical contemporaries who indine to advance an hypothesis in one chapter and treat it as established fact when they have occasion to refer to it in the next. He sees "Daisy Müler" as both "pivotal" in James's writing career and as marking a "turning point" in American fiction, with the heroine as not only the forerunner of Isabel Archer, MUIy Theale, and Maggie Verver but as "the paradigm of a central American myth," that of the American girl as "free, spontaneous, independent, natural, and generous in spirit." Like most modern readers of James, Fogle loves Daisy and is sure James loved her, despite aU her ignorance and gaucherie, but he is careful not to sentimentaHze her. In seeing her as a forerunner of Isabel Archer and her successors, he does not assume that she is their equal; he also makes her less a rebel without a cause than she has sometimes been represented. As he sees her, she is not wholly unaware that she flouts the conventions and therefore not quite unable to grasp the significance of the pother that the Costellos and the Walkers create over her poor Httle head; thus he gives her at least a minor share in her own destruction. ("Daisy's not caring about convention ... can be seen in part as her not caring about communication.") Though I am sure many readers wül find Fogle's analysis overdone here and there, I cannot beHeve that anyone wül faü to enjoy it or profit by it. Mrs. Humphry Ward's name is misspeUed, and in referring to a character in The American, Fogle...