"Mr. Winterbourne suffered from "his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her extravagance was generic and national and how far it was crudely personal." (64)

This is indeed the very question Henry James is incapable of answering in his "study" of American girlish innocence that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic. If he himself cannot distinguish between audacity and innocence, of generic versus personal extravagance, then he cannot aspire to convey to us anything meaningful about it, either. He shares his glimpse from the window, but, as he cannot make out the words of the street-goers' conversations, leaves us in the dark about the substance.

It is not a moralizing book, nor a critical one. James, as he confesses innocently in the preface, doesn't aim to denounce the flirty behavior of Daisy or the self-serving interests of Mr. Giovanelli, her youthful, "shiny... but not greasy" Roman companion. No, the work is a "poetic" one, as he himself declared in the same preface. Not a portrait of real life, no, rather a dramatized exploration of girlish whims that combine foolishness and sagacity. One cannot help but think of James' own softness, like helpless Mr. Winterbourne's, for the girl's purity, amid his painfully slow recognition (if he ever indeed reaches one) of her lack of scruples for the customs of his society, despite her occasional blush indicating her inner distaste for being talked of.

Is it a fair portrait? It is hard to say because the character of Daisy is so unrealistic that one strains to imagine her as a real person and not just a study composed of various sketches of a life. How can someone exhibit, in her simultaneous actions, innocence yet self-awareness, recklessness yet intentionality, audacity yet penitence? But I suppose the beauty of art, of fiction, is that it allows us to step into the realm of the imaginary; to amuse ourselves, yes, and occasionally to reflect on our own realities, decades or centuries separated from our instructors'. Yet in the case of Daisy Miller I must say I don't have a clearer picture of youthful innocence, nor of Americans in Europe, as one gets with, say, The Age of Innocence. Similarly, I cannot praise the prose for any particular formulations that will stick with me, either for their form or for their content. To put it in Virginia Woolf's prescient words, one cannot cross the narrow bridge of art (between prose and poetry) with all the tools in one's hands for risk of dropping them, or in James' case, of overbalancing and being drowned oneself.

Despite all this, I cannot say I am not curious to read "mature" James, most keenly in The Portrait of a Lady, in which I imagine James tackles the same topic only a few years later but with a more developed sense of what he wants to impart to his reader. Or indeed, in his short stories, seeing as he is credited for liberating the novel from its "traditionally ubiquitous and often garrulous narrator" interfering with the reader's interpretation of the story (xii). Even if the reader is freed from the discussion of the narrator, unfortunately in Daisy Miller we are not able to move beyond his perspective.

Perhaps I am so critical of James' early work merely because I have so recently read Jane Austen's masterpiece, Emma, and am spoiled by her perfection of language, her astute creation of characters, and, of course, her uncanny ability to make the most profound commentaries with a character's gesture, a tiny phrase, a glance. Hers, too, is a society based on morality, often artificial, and social class. But there the pain of the protagonist in any rupture of these social standards is felt, despite disapproval of them or partiality to dear friends. Mr. Winterbourne, by contrast, is intentionally meant to be of two minds about Daisy, loving her yet not understanding her. But, rather than incurring a sense of ambiguity and tension, the reader is left with a detachment to the haughty world of American expatriates in Vevey and Rome. When characters abound in incertitude, the reader must be forced to swim deeply with them in their passions, or stand firmly on the shore, fully aware of where the current will take them. One cannot be both in the water and beside it, at least not in the same instance. If readers are looking for more satisfying contemporary social commentary, I would point them to Edith Wharton, for an American perspective, and Tolstoy, for a Russian one, but, by his genius, for humanity.