Throughout Henry James\u2019 Daisy Miller, the character of Daisy Miller is constantly referred to as beautiful by the men she entices. The main character, and arguably the narrator, Mr. Winterbourne struggles to decide whether her appeal, besides her beauty, comes from her free-spiritedness, innocence, or her foreign ignorance. However, the expression of Daisy\u2019s beauty is always followed by the expression of her innocence. Moreover, her innocence is always noted by the men besotted by her, but never by the men would have been rejected by her in some way. Nevertheless, despite his alternating opinions of Daisy, her beauty remains, and in the end of the short novel Daisy\u2019s other suitor, Mr. Giovanelli, also refers to her as \u201cthe most beautiful young lady I [he] ever saw\u201d (82).<\/p>\n
Looking at this, the repetition of beauty and innocence, from a Freudian lens, it is obvious that Daisy has nothing more to her than physical appeal. Moreover, her beauty and \u201cinnocence\u201d is a fa\u00e7ade to hide her conceit and agitating ways. In truth, Daisy is an ignorant foreigner, travelling through some of the world\u2019s most beautiful countries, and is arguably unphased by her surroundings. Instead she remains fixated on the attention she receives from her male suitors, disregarding the custom of women to remain passive to men\u2019s opinions. <\/p>\n
Daisy\u2019s perceived beauty and \u201cinnocence\u201d from the young men who interact with her, says more about them than her. Daisy is obviously unintelligent and manipulative, but still the desire to have her remains high amongst single men. This either means that men are easily enticed by foreign objects, for that is essentially how she is treated, as an object, or, that her beauty, and lack of personality, mimics the lack of plot in the book. I would argue the latter. Like Peter Brooks states, plot is essential in understanding the novel, yet this novel does not seem to have any plot whatsoever. Thus, it is impossible to find the intention of Henry James, for he does not give much to analyze. Though I could analyze the repetition of the words beautiful and innocent, there is not much more to the character of Daisy Miller besides those words, so thus is impossible to analyze this novel under Freud\u2019s or Brooks\u2019 argument. Instead this novel just reasserts gender roles, as the male protagonist is a deep thinker trying to explore the different layers of the main, female character. However, the female character is one dimensional and manipulative, so regarding her layers, there is nothing more than her physical beauty. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throughout Henry James\u2019 Daisy Miller, the character of Daisy Miller is constantly referred to as beautiful by the men she entices. The main character, and arguably the narrator, Mr. Winterbourne struggles to decide whether her appeal, besides her beauty, comes from her free-spiritedness, innocence, or her foreign ignorance. However, the expression of Daisy\u2019s beauty is … Continue reading Daisy Miller – No Plot<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2017","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}