James and the “No-Comma”: Punctuation and Authority in “Daisy Miller”

While Scribner’s series The Novels and Tales of Henry James features new prefaces to each of the works, photographic frontispieces, and opulent bindings, the New York Edition has held critics’ attention for its alterations as well as its augmentations. The most noticeable changes appear in James’s early fiction, including his 1878 novella “Daisy Miller,” which he revised “with extreme minuteness” (qtd. in Horne 8). The “Daisy Miller” that appears in the New York Edition offers a wholly different reading experience from its 1878 predecessor. Though James later downplayed the extent of the revisions, critic J. Stephen Murphy counters, “the reality is that he changed characters, speech, action, and plot” (174). Murphy’s catalogue appears exhaustive, but I would append a seemingly insignificant item to the list: punctuation.

Even ignoring all other textual revisions, the altered punctuation alone of the 1909 “Daisy Miller” creates a text that differs visually and interpretively from its earlier rendition. The table below charts the variances between the commas and semicolons in the two editions of “Daisy Miller”: ¹

Cornhill (1878) ( DM1 )		New York (1909) ( DM2 )
287 commas	→	deleted
36 semicolons	→	commas
27 semicolons	→	dashes or colons
7 semicolons	→	deleted

Like the new binding and frontispieces, the altered punctuation of the New York Edition works to create a visually distinctive presentation of “Daisy Miller”—its appearance on the page offers the reader a physical marker of difference. ² But its impact extends beyond the visual. This paper suggests that James’s new punctuation assists in rewriting his characters, helping to make their motives less opaque and their personalities less ambiguous. In doing so, I will argue, the modified punctuation works to take away agency from the reader of “Daisy Miller” and reassert James’s control over the text.

Scholars examining the revisions to “Daisy Miller” have largely chosen to focus on James’s re-rendering of characters and events, often explicitly ignoring his changes to diction and punctuation. Viola Dunbar’s influential 1950 essay, “The Revision of Daisy Miller,” dispenses with all “stylistic” variation in a single sentence, never mentioning punctuation: “The stylistic changes are not considered in this article because they are of the same general character as those described in the studies of the revision of Roderick Hudson” (311). ³ In a prefatory note to his 1990 study, Philip Horne makes brief note of James’s punctuation revisions but does not include punctuation in his analysis. Even when evaluating two versions of the same sentence in meticulous detail, he makes no mention of the deviations in punctuation (260). In the appendix to her study of “The Turn of the Screw,” E. A. Sheppard brings up the “ancillary matter of punctuation” but maintains that such revisions were “merely stylistic in intention . . . [they] effect no changes whatever in the impression conveyed to the reader” (253). Yet Sheppard herself quotes an important 1914 letter from James to his agent, J. B. Pinker, in which James made clear how strongly he felt about the punctuation of the New York Edition. James wrote to Pinker that he was willing to grant his permission for yet another edition of “The Turn of the Screw,” “on the distinct understanding, please, that he [the proposed editor, Martin Secks] conform literatim and punctuation to the [New York Edition] text—to the last comma or rather, more essentially, no-comma” (qtd. in Sheppard 254). James’s injunction suggests that his “no-commas” and other punctuation changes are indeed “essential” to reading his revised text. Close examination of revised passages shows that the pervasively altered punctuation serves much more than a stylistic purpose: it is neither accidental nor irrelevant to readings of the revised text. ⁴

Norman Macleod includes an insightful discussion of James’s “no-comma” in his examination of the revisions to “The Turn of the Screw,” which is worth quoting at length. He asserts that we must read the no-comma

not as an alternative to the preceding “comma”—contrasting the places where punctuation is absent with those others where it is present—but as refining and specifying a narrower meaning in contrast...