“Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society?” (p. 14). When the members of his expatriate circle in Rome accuse “poor little” Miss Miller of “going really ‘too far,’” Winterbourne’s regret takes a predictably fixed form: “It was painful to hear so much that was pretty and undefended and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder” (p. 53). Like his itemizing compatriots, Winterbourne cannot imagine disorder beyond its paradoxical categorization.

Winterbourne judges Daisy according to a set of conventional norms rather than a cluster of metaphysical truths. For all his inner debates, he ultimately agrees with the verdict of those who “intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative—was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal” (p. 54). In the normative world of Daisy Miller, there can be no decree more damning. Daisy’s behavior is not so much wicked as it is atypical. As Winterbourne’s aunt Mrs. Costello blandly observes, “Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough” (p. 33).

Like Winterbourne and his cohort of reproving Americans, early critics of Daisy Miller took pains to classify and typologize James’s heroine. The Nation, marveling that “no American book of its size has been so much read and so much discussed,” saw the story as a cautionary tale. “It is a perfect study of a type not, alas! uncommon.” Daisy was the garish American tourist par excellence. The journal could only hope that Daisy Miller would find its way aboard “all the ocean steamers” that set sail across the Atlantic, and thereby “be so presented to the ‘moral consciousness’ of the American people that they, being quickwitted, may see themselves here truthfully portrayed, and may say, ‘Not so, but otherwise will we be’” (James’s “Daisy Miller,” p. 106). The critic for the North American Review, Richard Grant White, agreed that “in Daisy Miller Mr. James has undertaken to give a characteristic portrait of a certain sort of American young woman, who is unfortunately too common.” The text, he hoped, would have a “corrective effect” on American travelers: “It is perhaps well that [James] has made this study, ... which should show European critics of American manners and customs the light in which the Daisy Millers are regarded by Americans themselves” (James’s “Daisy Miller,” p. 107).

Other readers, however, were not so sanguine. Daisy Miller was “an outrage on American girlhood,” they declared (James, Daisy Miller; Pandora; The Patagonia; and Other Tales, p. v). Indeed, her story was so scandalous as to cast doubt on James’s patriotism. The New York Times, for one, took this charge seriously enough to mount a spirited rebuttal. Mr. James, the Times insisted, was obviously “possessed by a sincere patriotism”: Only someone truly committed to his country could “[consecrate] his talents to the enlightening of his countrywomen in the view which cynical Europe takes of the performance of the American girl abroad” (James’s “Daisy Miller,” p. 103).

For his own part, James grew weary of the debate and eventually tried to put the matter to rest. In the twenty-four-volume New York Edition (1909), he summarily dropped the story’s subtitle, “A Study,” and insisted that the tale had neither prescriptive nor descriptive designs on American womanhood. “My little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms,” James explained (Daisy Miller, p.