Daisy Miller

Summary

Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family. Daisy chatters freely, flirts openly and does exactly as she likes. Winterbourne is charmed and puzzled: is she an innocent American girl, or a vulgar flirt, or something worse? His snobbish aunt Mrs Costello refuses to meet the Millers. Daisy persuades Winterbourne to take her, unchaperoned, to the Château de Chillon, which shocks the hotel and delights her, and she is annoyed when he says he must return to Geneva. The second part takes place in Rome that winter. Winterbourne finds Daisy surrounded by Italian admirers, especially Mr Giovanelli, a handsome, gallant but socially doubtful man. The American expatriate community, led by Mrs Walker, is scandalised by her walking on the Pincio with Giovanelli; Mrs Walker tries to rescue her in a carriage, Daisy refuses, and Mrs Walker later cuts her at a party. Winterbourne, torn between attraction and disapproval, hovers on the edge, unable to decide what she is. Late one night, walking through the Colosseum by moonlight, he finds Daisy there with Giovanelli. Knowing the danger of the 'Roman fever' from the night air, he is also relieved, because her presence there seems finally to settle the question of her character: she is not respectable, and he need not trouble himself about her. He tells her coldly that it does not matter whether she is engaged to Giovanelli or not. Daisy contracts the fever and dies within days. Before her death she sends Winterbourne a message that she was never engaged to Giovanelli. At the graveside Giovanelli tells him she was the most innocent of girls and that he never hoped to marry her. Winterbourne admits to his aunt that he made a mistake, that he had lived too long in foreign parts, but soon returns to Geneva and his old habits.

Top Lessons

• Judging by codes we half-understand

  Winterbourne cannot read Daisy because he sees her only through European social codes. The novella shows how judgment can masquerade as perception.

• The cost of exclusion

  Society punishes Daisy for breaking rules that do no one harm, and the expatriates are more rigid than the Europeans they imitate. James exposes the cruelty of conformity among those anxious about status.

• Relief in certainty

  Winterbourne is relieved when he can finally classify Daisy as improper. James suggests how readily people prefer a simple verdict to living with ambiguity.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The plot turns on 'Roman fever', the period name for malaria contracted in and around Rome, which travellers were warned to avoid by staying indoors after dark. The story reflects miasmatic theory (the danger is attributed to night air) only a couple of years before Laveran identified the malaria parasite and well before mosquito transmission was established. Mrs Miller's chronic dyspepsia and her reliance on a home physician, Dr Davis, give a comic glimpse of the invalid American traveller. Daisy's rapid death after the night in the Colosseum also illustrates how fever deaths figured in 19th-century fiction as moral judgments.

• Part I

  Mrs Miller's dyspepsia and her faith in her doctor at home in Schenectady.

• Part II (Colosseum scene)

  Winterbourne warns Daisy of the danger of the Roman fever from the night air.

• Part II (closing pages)

  Daisy's illness, the doctor's attendance, her death and burial in the Protestant cemetery.