vi). His readers were not to confuse art with life: “My supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else” (p. viii). This effort to contain Daisy’s multiple meanings, however, seems nothing if not a self-conscious parody of Winterbourne’s own effete aestheticism. As Winterbourne strolls into the malarial Roman arena, blithely quoting Byron, he belatedly recalls that “if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors” (p. 57). As a fictional character himself, Winterbourne’s insistence on the difference between art (the poets) and life (the doctors) is an awkward one. An aesthetic taxonomist of the worst kind, his empirical observations are too little and too late.

In probing such distinctions between art and life, and the generic and the specific, Daisy Miller exposes the tension between what Russ Castronovo has called the conservative “true democrat” and the more revolutionary “radical democrat.” According to Castronovo, the true democrat is the citizen who imagines freedom as a freedom from society. His activist counterpart, the radical democrat, however, sees freedom as the “freedom to participate in the daily forms and activities that constitute community” (Necro Citizenship, p. 142). Winterbourne is, in this respect, the cautious “true democrat.” Because he worships conformity, stasis, and polite restraint, he relies on the bland certitude of standard categories. Faced with Daisy’s “extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity,” Winterbourne can only accuse her of “a want of finish” (p. 10). Displaying the true democrat’s antipathy toward inconclusiveness and disorder, he rejects her unfinished appearance—an appearance that threatens democratic consensus and closure (see Nelson, p. 240).

Unlike Winterbourne, who begins and concludes Daisy Miller in the same place—“‘studying’ hard” in Geneva and rumored to be “much interested in a very clever foreign lady” (p. 62)—Daisy herself charts a dynamic path through the text. Resisting the docent culture of museums where “dreadful old men ... explain about the pictures and things” (p. 38), she insists instead upon unscripted, unmediated encounters with the real. She rejects tour guides of all sorts, balking at the repeated interference of the “vigilant matrons” who would police her behavior. Like her literary successor, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Daisy wants to “see for [her]self ” (James, The Portrait of a Lady, p. 203). She longs to generate “a little fuss”—to experience the messy turmoil of direct, democratic engagement (p. 26). Thus, when the American ingenue bids goodnight to Winterbourne after their second meeting, she playfully remarks, “I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something!” (p. 27). Craving dissent, Daisy seeks a public sphere in which one can speak one’s mind without the stifling intervention of self-styled representatives or chap erones. Hers is a world of direct democracy. Unlike Winterbourne, who cloaks his desire to see her beneath the conventional pretense that he has come to Rome to visit his aunt, Daisy is alarmingly direct: “I don’t want you to come for your aunt, ... I want you to come for me” (p.