Discount Daisy Miller

What happened to Daisy Miller, if you don’t know the story, is that she went to Europe and flirted so fast and so hard that she died from it. She appears in the story like a lightning bolt to the prudish young man narrating it. She is wearing a very frilly white dress all covered in ribbons and bows, she has too direct of a gaze, an empty smile. He thinks she is the prettiest girl he’s ever seen, but he deduces she is a “coquette” — which in the 1870s meant simply that you were a “flirt” or an immodest woman, and not whatever it means now. 

What is unusual and also modern about Daisy Miller, the novella, is how sympathetic Henry James is to his heroine. Unlike earlier representations of young women who defy the rules of polite society and are ruined by it, Daisy Miller comes off as both purer and more enlightened than the repressed aristocracy surrounding her. The protagonist, Winterbourne, who briefly tries to court her, realizes at a certain point that he does not owe her respect, si…