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3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Read for a class. Decent outlook on American modernism and culture shift at the turn of the century. Kinda bland but at some times quite clever writing
I didn’t enjoy it and I don’t care about it. Henry James so far is disappointing me. I felt pretty much nothing whilst reading. Void! Empty! Bored! Haha!
Everyone character was dislikable. Virtually no plot. 27-year-old man becoming interested and excited by a most likely 16-year-old girl. She’s an infantilized flirt, therefore the talk of the town. But gossip has its consequences!
I think this time period is really interesting though. Rich Americans post the Civil War head to Europe and blend into that society. The Guilded Age! Everyone spending lots of money and flirting up a societal scandal-filled storm.
Everyone character was dislikable. Virtually no plot. 27-year-old man becoming interested and excited by a most likely 16-year-old girl. She’s an infantilized flirt, therefore the talk of the town. But gossip has its consequences!
I think this time period is really interesting though. Rich Americans post the Civil War head to Europe and blend into that society. The Guilded Age! Everyone spending lots of money and flirting up a societal scandal-filled storm.
emotional
informative
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The book seems reflective of the debate around women’s actions of the time. We see a lot of gothic literature around this time that poses women to be mysterious and witchy if they choose to venture outside of typical social circles or norms. Daisy seems to be a girl that cannot be understood by the frame of a proper Victorian woman showing a shift in the place of women in society. The older more ‘respectable’ members of society look down upon Daisy for her actions yet she does not care as her freedom is not something she is willing to give up in favor of what is expected of her. The narrator continues to misinterpret her as naive or innocent while she is truthfully neither. Yet she is not trying to trick him, those qualities that he assigned to her are all his own projections of what she ought to be. Daisy Miller shows a change in women, not just American women but all women, as society moved away from the ‘angel in the house’ sphere for women.
This book makes me glad I was not born during this era. Of course a white guy writes a book where the beautiful, flirtatious woman has to die at the end. Watch yourselves, ladies — don’t be a floozy. Yawn.
So I digressed slightly, staying in chronological order, from reading James's novels to add this novelette to my encounter with the author, given its fame and status as the text that made his name. Well, I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting, but this was not it. Thus my meager three stars (good/OK) might have more to do with expectations than substance, but, well, that's how I felt about it.
In terms of reader reception theory, no, this 61-year-old writer and literature instructor isn't the ideal audience for this tale of young infatuation, innocence, and flirtation. Whenever someone makes reference to my nearness to so many attractive young women in my job I always cringe. Love and sexual attraction for me have always been a combination of visual signals of my tribe (fellow punks and avant-garde artists of the time of my young adulthood, the 1980s) and especially people of higher intellects and great wit. Thus I'm extremely rarely attracted to young people in a sexual way: they all dress alike in the US suburban bourgeois way and they are simply as-yet too unlettered to match me in a really meaty intellectual conversation for the most part. Oh, I like them a great deal and really enjoy helping them find their way into the history of Anglo-European literature, but they don't usually turn me on, to put it in a 1960s way, and, well, many of them are automatons at uni., just going through the motions of study with a great deal of smug disdain for nerds like me and I find this willful vacuity repugnant.
Thus Daisy Miller, as a character, in her gross vacuity and great beauty is, to me, somewhat repugnant. Not that I don't get the idea of the thing, that its her innocence rather than any sort of wicked heartlessness (as in the Noemie character in the previous novel The American), that society seeks to misinterpret and punish, but the vacuity of her dialogue and the repetitive insistence on her great beauty from the nearly equally superficial POV character here, Winterbourne, kept me at a rather disgusted distance.
As to this, I have begun to notice, at least in the novels and tales named for a character, that James's strategy is to show a character's true self--a sort of Joycean epiphany--through their encounter with a wildcard character. This wildcard is thus the name of the text, but the text is really mostly about the real protagonist, through whose POV we see the plot's action, even if we remain in the traditional 19th century third person narrative. Given this technique, "Daisy Miller" was weaker than the others that preceded it (Gabrielle de Bergerac and Roderick Hudson) insomuch as the narrator seems pretty unaffected by Daisy's example. He is a pure stand-in for the reader. But I brayed at this since I was not at all fascinated with Daisy as he was--but again, I'm neither young, facile, or all that interested in traditional beauty. I am also of another century.
P.S. I imagine that the mention of the famous Roman fever here (malaria supposedly brought on by visiting the damp, mosquito-ridden ruins of the ancient city at night) diffused knowledge of the malady among US readers. I have to imagine Edith Wharton's terrific short story "Roman Fever" probably then followed this novelette. Note how much deeper and more clever is her story. It seems that female writers know a lot more about women than male writers. What a surprise (sarcasm alert). Skip "Daisy Miller" and read "Roman Fever."
In terms of reader reception theory, no, this 61-year-old writer and literature instructor isn't the ideal audience for this tale of young infatuation, innocence, and flirtation. Whenever someone makes reference to my nearness to so many attractive young women in my job I always cringe. Love and sexual attraction for me have always been a combination of visual signals of my tribe (fellow punks and avant-garde artists of the time of my young adulthood, the 1980s) and especially people of higher intellects and great wit. Thus I'm extremely rarely attracted to young people in a sexual way: they all dress alike in the US suburban bourgeois way and they are simply as-yet too unlettered to match me in a really meaty intellectual conversation for the most part. Oh, I like them a great deal and really enjoy helping them find their way into the history of Anglo-European literature, but they don't usually turn me on, to put it in a 1960s way, and, well, many of them are automatons at uni., just going through the motions of study with a great deal of smug disdain for nerds like me and I find this willful vacuity repugnant.
Thus Daisy Miller, as a character, in her gross vacuity and great beauty is, to me, somewhat repugnant. Not that I don't get the idea of the thing, that its her innocence rather than any sort of wicked heartlessness (as in the Noemie character in the previous novel The American), that society seeks to misinterpret and punish, but the vacuity of her dialogue and the repetitive insistence on her great beauty from the nearly equally superficial POV character here, Winterbourne, kept me at a rather disgusted distance.
As to this, I have begun to notice, at least in the novels and tales named for a character, that James's strategy is to show a character's true self--a sort of Joycean epiphany--through their encounter with a wildcard character. This wildcard is thus the name of the text, but the text is really mostly about the real protagonist, through whose POV we see the plot's action, even if we remain in the traditional 19th century third person narrative. Given this technique, "Daisy Miller" was weaker than the others that preceded it (Gabrielle de Bergerac and Roderick Hudson) insomuch as the narrator seems pretty unaffected by Daisy's example. He is a pure stand-in for the reader. But I brayed at this since I was not at all fascinated with Daisy as he was--but again, I'm neither young, facile, or all that interested in traditional beauty. I am also of another century.
P.S. I imagine that the mention of the famous Roman fever here (malaria supposedly brought on by visiting the damp, mosquito-ridden ruins of the ancient city at night) diffused knowledge of the malady among US readers. I have to imagine Edith Wharton's terrific short story "Roman Fever" probably then followed this novelette. Note how much deeper and more clever is her story. It seems that female writers know a lot more about women than male writers. What a surprise (sarcasm alert). Skip "Daisy Miller" and read "Roman Fever."
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes