Customer Reviews:
 Miller on trial... July 14, 2007
I disagree with Luc's review. The book owes its plot to a very popular contemporary novel (the name of which I forget but you can look it up in the new penguin edition), which was certainly guilty of the conventionality that Luc prescribes to James' novella. The charge that this book meters out justice to a puerile woman guilty of reckless behaviour is erroneous in the ultimate extreme. The book isn't about Daisy Miller at all. All we know about her is through the judgements and perceptions of the other characters, judgements that James allows to grow, infect and ultimately strangle the life of Miller who lives in the borderlands of old world manners and nouveax riche alike. The main characters project their fears and desires onto Miller, whom they cannot understand. Mrs. Costello is repulsed, Mrs. Walker uses Miller to outline what is reasonably expected of her own existence and actions, Winterbourne is the intrepid moralizer/cad.
Contrary to what Mary Whipple says, I would say that Winterbourne cares very little about his own reputation, it is partly his arrogance, partly his unassailable position of wealth and breeding that gives him the audacity (a charge he levels at Miller!) to shape and protect her, to impart sophistication. In the end, it is just his pride and vanity that is bruised when Miller, whose openness which he takes for coquetry, is shown to Giovannelli. This is thrown into greater relief when Giovannelli is able to square up to his own selfish intentions at Miller's funeral; he is the only character whose grieving seems genuine or cathartic. In contrast, Winterbourne's pain is skin deep, and he moves on to another `project'.
 "I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do." June 29, 2006
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
One of Henry James's earliest novellas, Daisy Miller (1878) follows the activities of a wealthy, and brashly confident, young American woman as she audaciously challenges European society in Vevey, Switzerland, and in Rome, having fun, doing what pleases her, and leaving staid European society gasping in her wake. Daisy Miller, whose father is in the US and whose mother is her ineffectual "chaperone," is a free spirit in a society bound by unstated but rigid "rules," determined to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with whomever she chooses.
Frederick Winterbourne, an ex-patriot who has spent most of his life in Geneva, is attracted to Daisy, but his bonds with his stuffy aunt, Mrs. Cosgrove, and her friend, Mrs. Walker, both of whom govern ex-patriot society in Europe, leave him ill-equipped to deal with Daisy's flouting of society's conventions. When she is obviously attracted to Mr. Giovanelli, a singer/musician of no social standing, and when she is seen with him publicly in places that a "nice" girl would not grace at night, her reputation is threatened, and anyone associated with her is tainted. Winterbourne is uncertain how to protect her, while, not incidentally, protecting his own reputation.
Developing his most famous theme, James considers the conflicts between American and European values and the naivete of the Americans and their spontaneity as it contrasts with the old world formality of the Europeans. Daisy, who is often foolishly nave, is also seen as brash and ego-centric, a young woman whose destiny cannot be avoided (or even predicted) because of the strength of her own, often wrong, willfulness.
James focuses on two characters here--both Daisy and Winterbourne--and though the story is told from Winterbourne's point of view, Daisy is often the more vibrant of the two characters. Though she is shallow and assertive, he is hidebound by convention, leaving both characters with limits in terms of reader identification. When a night-time dalliance leads to serious consequences for Daisy, the reader is neither surprised nor shocked.
Filled with trenchant observations about Americans and their differences from Europeans, the novel incorporates significant symbols--the Coliseum (associated with innocent Christian martyrs), malaria (to which Americans are particularly susceptible), Randolph (Daisy's rude and undisciplined 10-year-old brother, the ugliest of Americans), and Mrs. Cosgrove and Mrs. Walker (converts to the European way of life). Carefully observed and critical of American naivete, Daisy Miller is the "preface" to Portrait of a Lady and many of James's more fully developed novels. Mary Whipple
 Lawless passions February 9, 2006
0 out of 19 found this review helpful
This story is extremely conventional.Daisy Miller, its main character, shows 'reckless behaviour': 'Flirting with any man she could pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the time with the same partners; receiving visit at eleven o'clock at night. Her mother goes away when visitors come.'
For the American community in Europe, Daisy Miller is 'running absolutely wild'. Her behaviour is totally inadmissible and abnormal.
But, no problem, morality is saved. Daisy visits the Colosseum, a nest of malaria, with her Italian friend. She dies a week later, not without leaving a message that 'she would have reciprocated one's affection', that of a solid American, who 'had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism'. Death is a well-deserved punishment for a 'POOR girl'. For Henry James, Daisy's mixture of 'audacity, puerility and innocence is inscrutable.' This moralist story can be read in all school classes studying Victorian upper class conventions.
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