Reassembling Daisy Miller

Abstract When, at the end of the nineteenth century, critics of the “New Woman” discovered in her the features of the androgynethe person who “flirted with hermaphroditism”-their description might have applied just as well to the person who grew up alongside her, the male or the female adolescent (Smith-Rosenberg 260). In this essay I argue that Henry James’s “Daisy Miller: A Study” (1878) figures forth in Daisy the androgynous body constructed in popular nineteenth-century accounts of adolescence. If, as Frederick Winterboume sees it, Daisy Miller oscillates between masculine and feminine identifications, she also oscillates between American and alien, savage and citizen, parvenu and natural aristocrat. Set in Switzerland and in Rome, “Daisy Miller” chronicles the behavior of Americans abroad. But it also depicts a displaced landscape of North American immigration and the nativist’s anxiety about the American girl’s intimacy with a handsome Italian. Although Daisy’s “archetypal” (Welter 3), near “mythic” (Fiedler 298-300) influence has long been recorded, as has her migration from nouvelle to etiquette manual, no study has sufficiently accounted for her staying power as an American type.1 Part One of this essay begins to reinterpret Daisy Miller’s impressive reach by suggesting that her story be read in light of certain transformations in education in the postbellum and post-Darwinian US. Part Two attempts a more detailed explication of “Daisy Miller” to show that as Winterboume steps in to reeducate the flirtatious