Daisy Miller and Washington Square Read Online

He is nursed by his siblings Alice and William, with whom he returns to Cambridge. He visits New York, where he receives psychiatric care.

INTRODUCTION

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact,” Henry James remarked in 1879, “that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world.” This striking claim was delivered the year his first success, Daisy Miller: A Study, was published in book form, and a year prior to the serial publication of his quintessentially New York novel, Washington Square (published in book form in 1881); it highlights James’s fascination with his native land and equally reveals his own share in its self-consciousness. As James remarked in Hawthorne (1879), his extended study of the writer, the “experimental element” had not “as yet entirely dropped out of the great political undertaking” of the United States, and as a result, Americans were singularly “conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family.” Like adolescents exiled to the children’s table at some big family celebration, Americans felt themselves the victims of an international “conspiracy to undervalue them.” As James noted, they had been “placed on the circumference of the circle of civilization rather than at the centre,” a geometric and constella tional vantage point that offered few consolations. In orbit around the cultures of Britain and France, America was troubled by a lurking “sense of relativity.” While Europe’s ancient monarchies luxuriated in a “quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards [their] own position[s] in the world,” the United States was forced to renegotiate its national contract with every election, submitting to vote decisions that, in Europe, were the divine right of kings.

Like many of his contemporaries, James saw democracy as an ongoing challenge not only to traditional politics and aesthetics, but equally to America’s national identity. In the decade following the Civil War, as the country’s centennial loomed on the horizon, Americans found themselves deliberating anew on the core possibilities of democracy. As James himself admitted in Hawthorne, the postwar world was “a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult.” Within this increasingly pluralist context, democracy seemed less an abstract aspiration than a hardscrabble process. As Dana D. Nelson has ob served, citizens had to “develop their social and political subjectivi ties in relation to multiple, local, and nonidealized relationships with others,” rather than in accordance with a single, stylized, aristocratic model (“Representative/Democracy,” p. 220; see “For Further Reading”). In coming to terms with the postwar period’s unwieldy new “sense of proportion and relation,” James found himself faced with two competing models of democratic practice: an “abstract universality” associated with antebellum democracy, and the “embodied particularity” of direct, postwar political engagement (Berlant, “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife,” p. 144). Drawing on the curiously relevant debates circulating around late-nineteenth-century mathematics, James offered a critique of America’s “great political undertaking” in both Daisy Miller: A Study and Washington Square.

James described Daisy Miller as the “little tragedy ... of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed as it were to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head and to which she stood in no measurable relation” (quoted in Edel, The Life of Henry james, p. 520; emphasis added). The story is indeed a meditation on measurability. When the American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne first encounters the “strikingly, admirably pretty” Daisy Miller, he straightaway sets out to quantify and categorize her. From the outset, she is not singular, but plural—an aggregated type rather than a distinctive individual: “How pretty they are!” he thinks (p. 8). In his quest for “the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller” (p. 14), Winterbourne is not alone. The majority of his American colony similarly seeks to account for Daisy’s particularity in mathematically generic terms. Like Mrs. Walker, the American hostess who collects “specimens of her diversely-born fellow-mortals to serve, as it were, as text-books” (p. 46), and Mrs. Costello, who can barely distinguish Miss Miller from her nearly identical cohorts (“that young lady‘s—Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler‘s—what’s her name?” [p. 51]), so Winterbourne himself struggles to identify “how far [Daisy’s] eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal” (p. 55).