Miller’s dyspepsia, Randolph’s tooth loss, Mrs. Costello’s headaches), Daisy alone falls victim to a genuine contagion so fierce that it withstands the palliations of Eugenio’s “splendid pills” (p. 59). Although she is “dying to be exclusive,” it is Daisy’s flesh-and-blood genericism that ultimately seals her fate. Transformed from a cause célèbre into “a terrible case” (p. 61), she experiences the inevitable mortality of the embodied subject. Despite her nine-year-old brother’s childish insistence on American exceptionalism (“in America there’s always a moon!” [p. 60]), Daisy’s death transforms national identity into a matter of clinical epidemiology. The “dusky circle of the Colosseum” (p. 57) mocks “that self-enclosed exception alist circle” wherein Americans consider themselves of paramount importance (Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” p. 72). As mosquitoes trump manifest destiny, so the body seals Daisy’s radically democratic fate: “The poor girl died” (p. 61).

Ever the conventional true democrat, Winterbourne balks at the material historicity crudely evinced by the “raw protuberance” of Daisy’s grave (p. 62). Seizing upon Giovanelli’s assertion that Daisy “was the most innocent” (p. 61), he tries instead to embalm his fair young compatriot in the sublime rhetoric of transcendence and purity, abstracting her virginal body “beyond the touch of history” (Castronovo, Necro Citizenship, p. 122). For Winterbourne, Daisy’s metaphysical innocence annuls malaria’s ghastly effects. Her death becomes less a bodily phenomenon than a singular act of Christian martyrdom, a beatific sacrifice in a realm of latter-day Roman tyrants. Unlike the notoriously misnamed Pope Innocent X, a pontiff whose duplicity was presciently captured in the “superb portrait ... by Velasquez” (p. 53), Daisy is, in Winterbourne’s eyes, genuinely, epiphenomenally pure. Armed with this conviction, he all but exonerates himself from his own political inaction. Noting that “it was on his conscience that he had done her injustice,” he mildly confides to his aunt that Daisy “would have appreciated one’s esteem” (p. 62). Yet Winterbourne’s passive retreat from first-person accountability and his withdrawal into the anonymity of the pronoun “one” speak more loudly than words. Content with the idealized identifications of symbolic citizenship, and repelled by the messy responsibilities of actual intervention, Winterbourne can only acknowledge that he was “booked to make a mistake” (p. 62). As with everything else in his life, his errors are literally and figuratively made with reservations.

Two years after Daisy Miller appeared in book form, James brought out a novel entitled Washington Square. Like its predecessor, the 1881 publication would stage a conflict between two kinds of democracy—the calculating abstraction of a man and the spontaneous empiricism of a woman. The geometric precision of the novel’s title is significant, for Washington Square charts the subtle machinations of a mathematically minded doctor, Austin Sloper, as he systematically prevents his lovelorn daughter, Catherine, from marrying a handsome fortune hunter, Morris Townsend.