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O 4 } Deadly Deferrals Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and the Exhaustion of Flirtatious Desire james’s “innocent american flirt”: daisy miller and the perils of the unconscious life By the end of the nineteenth century, in works as different in tone, style, and subject matter as James’s Daisy Miller, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, novelists increasingly represent the female flirt as a social menace, her strategies not only perniciously insincere, a threat to customary methods of unraveling identity, but unnatural as well. The coquette looms large as an individual whose connotations of danger—an admixture of theatricality and power—coupled with her status as a connoisseur of male beauty, shape her as an insurgent who wreaks havoc with nature’s courtship plot and its aim of species procreation. Simultaneously, the plot of flirtation takes on intensified significance as a disreputable avenue of erotic pursuit as writers increasingly figure it a plot “against nature .” As suggested earlier, by the end of the century the cultural weight adhering to flirtation in the high Victorian novel had become insupportable , to the point that it was left to the comic duo of Gilbert and Sullivan to puncture the received wisdom of flirting as a fate-determining activity. With the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton, however, the novel continued to require the figure of the coquette in order to refine the aesthetic aims of realist fiction. In James, that refinement took the form of a rebuke of European social manners that also saw flirting as a means of expressing a modernist conception of experience as necessarily subjective. The “innocent American flirt” Daisy Miller, supremely unreadable in the swirl of overly sophisticated “readers,” is the paradigmatic modernist cipher . With Wharton, the “innocent enough adventure” of flirtation became in The Age of Innocence a morbid investment in pointless desire that had devolved into a moribund set of European literary conventions.1 Even as she devised a trademark ambivalent bachelor, inThe House of Mirth her naturalist sympathies led her to stress flirtation as a zero-sum game. This chapter departs from what largely has been an account of European fiction in order to explore how James and Wharton, because they are the two major modern American writers most energetically engaged with the tradition of the European novel, dramatize the differences between European and American notions of flirting as they complicate how flirtation determines plot and character. With the figures of Daisy Miller and Lily Bart, the tragicomic dimension of the professional flirt Becky Sharp’s behavior is shorn of much of its comic resonance. The image of Becky as a survivor in the final pages of Vanity Fair fairly oozes with ironies, yet in tenaciously overcoming financial ruin and social opprobrium , she demonstrates the value of flirty artifice over heartfelt sincerity. For James and Wharton, however, coquetry is a life-and-death conflict and as such remains centrally caught up in the very enterprise of fiction. The issue of unconscious motivation that was so often only tacit in Victorian fiction, whether in Steerforth’s admiration for David Copperfield’s physique or Sue Bridehead’s vacillation between two suitors, is the commanding matter of public debate in Daisy Miller. In what proved to be James’s most controversial venture into fiction, the heroine captivates others in large part because she perplexes, undermining the conventions of European coquetry that have been shaped by centuries of drawing-room practice. Winterbourne and the American exiles of the Swiss resort of Vevey must come to terms with whether Daisyknows what she is doing. By supplying Daisy with a family fortune (her father, we are told by her brother Randolph at the outset, is in “big business” in Schenectady, New York), James frees his Daisy of the burdens of flirting professionally, as Thackeray could not with Becky and as Wharton later refused to do with Lily Bart. In James’s novella, the Puritan preoccupation with virtue gives way to a new understanding that motivations may be “innocent” in being outside of consciousness. But if James demonstrates a pre-Freudian preoccupation with unconscious motivation—and goes so far as to link unconscious flirting with a death wish—his representative American flirt refuses to surrender herself to analysis. His heroine dies an enigma, a martyr to a school of realism that James himself now found exhausted. “The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our...

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