Why is Daisy Miller a flirt?\u00a0 Her tendency toward romantic levity and playfulness could be considered a part of her personality, but it seems to hint toward a complex and troubled childhood past.\u00a0 Daisy Miller is unable to \u201cgrow up\u201d in her society and act her age.\u00a0 Daisy Miller\u2019s age and maturity is framed for us right away\u2014just before she is introduced to the reader, Mr. Winterbourne thinks of his own infancy (James 6).\u00a0 Henry James\u2019 language draws a focus toward age, as Daisy Miller is frequently referred to as the \u201cyoung girl\u201d and Randalph is dubbed a \u201cvivacious infant\u201d (6).\u00a0 The youth and maturity of Daisy is a strong underlying theme.<\/p>\n
To understood how past childhood experiences affect adulthood, let us turn to Sigmund Freud.\u00a0\u00a0 In Freud\u2019s Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through, <\/em>he states that: \u201cThere is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered.\u00a0 There are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently <\/em>understood and interpreted\u201d (James 149).\u00a0 It seems that Daisy has come to recall past traumatic childhood experiences, and this is the source for her childish tendencies.\u00a0 She feels victimized by past occurrences in her life, and we see this with Daisy\u2019s strained relationship with her overprotective mother, Mrs. Miller.\u00a0 When Mr. Winterbourne and Daisy are out walking, Daisy tells him that her mother disapproves of her out walking with gentlemen, but she decides to do so anyway.\u00a0 She tells him that their walk: \u201c\u2019isn\u2019t for me; it\u2019s for you\u2014that is, it\u2019s for her. <\/em>Well; I don\u2019t know who it\u2019s for!\u00a0 My mother doesn\u2019t like any of my gentleman friends. . . . But I do <\/em>introduce them \u2013 almost always.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t introduce my gentleman friends to mother,\u2019 the young girl added, in her little soft, flat monotone \u2018I shouldn\u2019t think it was natural\u2019\u201d (James 22).\u00a0 Here we see the inner conflict in Daisy Miller between her and her mother.\u00a0 She wants to rebel against her mother\u2019s constraints, but she also feels she must conform with the norms of her society.\u00a0 In this sense, Daisy Miller feels trapped in her own childlike self that her mother has constructed for her, but unable to rise above her society to escape it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why is Daisy Miller a flirt?\u00a0 Her tendency toward romantic levity and playfulness could be considered a part of her personality, but it seems to hint toward a complex and troubled childhood past.\u00a0 Daisy Miller is unable to \u201cgrow up\u201d in her society and act her age.\u00a0 Daisy Miller\u2019s age and maturity is framed for … Continue reading The Psyche of the Adult Child in \u201cDaisy Miller\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","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\/139","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\/3465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}