Symbolism in Daisy Miller Daisy

Symbolism in Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller is a novella that is replete with symbolism. Part of Henry James' appeal is that he is, arguably an existentialist absorbed in pointing out the uselessness of people's lives and the pity that so many of our lives end up unfulfilled and directionless. Henry James, brother of the famous William James, was an astute psychologist in his own rights with the streams of self-consciousness that his characters indulged in and the actions of his characters being replete with keen psychological insights.

Daisy James, alongside those of any of the other Jamesian stories contains similar morals. Daisy James is another allusion to the unlived life where Winterbourne's focus is placed, for the majority of the story, on a red herring.

Winterbourne is, in fact, peripheral to the story. The entire story is taken up with his obsession with Daisy Miller, not that he wishes to marry her but that he is intrigued with her actions and seeming innocence. His impressions with Daisy fluctuate, first seeing her as a flirt, then intrigued, then seeing her as an artless, unprotected innocent in Italy, and eventually defending her when he feels she runs the risk of death. The story culminates with Daisy dying and we are left with a feeling of incompleteness; we fail to see the hero's connection with the heroine. Winterbourne never arrives at a consummate realization of Daisy's character -- and even if he had of what use are his musings to us or to him - and, therefore, the whole narrative seems to be inconsequential, empty and symbolic of Winterbourne's foppish drifting through life. Daisy Miller, in short, seems to be a motif and symbolism of the unlived life unraveled in aimless pursuits of diversionary red herrings.

This aimless pursuit of life may also be indicated by the background context that strings throughout the story. Gossip is an inherent part of the unraveling of the narrative where Daisy Miller itself is a story of gossip transmitted as a datum of gossip. The whole is handed to us as a meaningless diversion. Someone -- a girl - who possessed the earnestness and naiveness of the typical American as James saw it was taken in and manipulated by the worldliness and hypocrisy of European society. Unfamiliarity with its norms led to her death and, saddest of all, no one seemed to care about her death. This is the unfairness of life shown in symbolic terms in the context of gossip and an aimless, artless existence.

James was in two modes regarding the American individual. On the one hand, he saw him as earnest, sincere, and well meaning if not naive, clueless, ignorant, self-centered, lacking in sense of proprietary, and unwilling to adapt to so-called social mores and conventions. All of this was represented in the figure of Daisy Miller. On the other hand, James also perceived this American entity as being and ugly American' who was uncultured, crude, ego-centered, and grasping. Randolph, Daisy's younger broth, perfectly epitomizes this other allusion.

Other symbolisms appear in the Coliseum where the place itself is symbolic of the ruins of a decadent empire -- again the symbolism of a meaningless, drift less life. Famed for centuries of martyrdom and meaningless cruelty and barbarity as site of gladiatorial games, the Coliseum is fitting scene for Daisy's young life to have met its abrupt end.

Daisy, herself, may be said to have been a symbol of martyred innocence, reminiscent of the Christian (and other) martyrs brutalized in that spot.

Interwoven in the scene is Winterbourne's act of analogically throwing Daisy to the lions (as the Romans did their victims long ago) as witnessed when daisy tells Giovanelli that "he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs!" In a way, Winterbourne did as much when he rendered Daisy's innocence as non-existent and her life not worth worrying about.

Rome and Geneva, too, can be aptly presented as symbolism with Rome with its decadence, glory and corruption possibly symbolizing the worldliness, artifice and insincerity on the one hand with culture and education on the other of the European. Geneva, on the other hand, referred to in Daisy Miller as "the dark old city at the other end of the lake," simple and pristine may have symbolized the American, aka Daisy Miller's character, as artless, naive, and yet, uneducated, and provincial. Geneva, too, is closely linked with American values in that it is the birthplace of Calvinism, the forerunner and contributor to Puritanism, that later merged into the American Protestantism that so characterizes its nation and leads, at least according to Weber's theory, to its absorption with work and sobriety.