{"id":148,"date":"2017-02-18T01:40:21","date_gmt":"2017-02-18T01:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/?p=148"},"modified":"2020-08-31T20:39:01","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T20:39:01","slug":"a-fearful-frightful-flirt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2017\/02\/18\/a-fearful-frightful-flirt\/","title":{"rendered":"A fearful, frightful flirt!"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt,’ said Winterbourne gravely.<\/p>\n

‘Of course they are,’ she cried, giving him her little smiling stare again. ‘I’m a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not? But I suppose you will tell me now that I am not a nice girl.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the quotations I found striking in <\/span>Daisy Miller<\/span><\/i> was Daisy\u2019s announcement: \u201cI\u2019m a fearful, frightful flirt!\u201d While the other characters in the novel try to define themselves by their position and actions in society, Daisy definitively identifies herself as a \u201cflirt.\u201d She places herself outside of the upper class society norms that she enters into whilst in Europe. In a novel that otherwise avoids concretely labeling its characters, Daisy declares her identity with a level of self-awareness far more developed than any other character.<\/span><\/p>\n

In contrast to Daisy stands Mr. Winterbourne. Although Daisy is ready and able to identify herself as a \u201cflirt,\u201d Mr. Winterbourne can only state his emotional reaction: \u201cI am afraid your habits are those of a flirt.\u201d He cannot tell directly her she is a flirt, only that he fears that she is. Further, after he states that he is afraid of her\u00a0flirtatious habits, he contradicts himself in stating that he does not mind her flirtatious nature, if she directs it towards him: \u201cI wish you would flirt with me, and me only\u201d (James 49). Throughout the novel Mr. Winterbourne is constantly contradicting himself and his identity. For example, the narrator makes a claim that \u201che [Mr. Winterbourne] should never be afraid of Daisy Miller,\u201d and yet his aunt blatantly tells him that he is \u201cvery much pre-occupied\u201d because of Daisy (52).<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, Daisy does not suffer from\u00a0this identity crisis. She demonstrates that she understands not only herself extraordinarily well, but also the two different societies she and Mr. Winterbourne come from. After disarming Mr. Winterbourne by her frankness regarding her character, she addresses the difference in what both she and Mr. Winterbourne consider to be a \u201cnice girl.\u201d For Daisy, being a \u201cnice girl\u201d in New York can also include spending copious amounts of time with gentlemen, such as attending \u201cseventeen dinners […] three of them were by gentlemen\u201d (11). She is free to be a flirt in her usual habitat, and even if it is to\u00a0to the extent of being \u201cfearful\u201d and \u201cfrightful,\u201d it is still possible that society considers her a nice girl. However, she also realizes that Mr. Winterbourne does not consider her a nice girl. For Mr. Winterbourne, a nice girl includes someone who does spend so much alone time with a single man. David Lodge writes that the \u201cunspoken reason for this rule was to guarantee the woman\u2019s virginity when she married\u201d (xviii). Mr. Winterbourne\u2019s upper-class society expects women to live a sheltered and covered existence. <\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, Daisy goes against this expectation quite strongly, even in her own name. She is a flower like the flower she is named after. She is meant to be seen and appreciated; this is a fact which she accepts and acknowledges.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt,’ said Winterbourne gravely. ‘Of course they are,’ she cried, giving him her little smiling stare again. ‘I’m a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not? But I suppose you will tell me now that I am not a … Continue reading A fearful, frightful flirt!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","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\/148","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\/2137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}