Do we dare disturb the universe?

Don't measure your life in coffee spoonsWhen discussing travel and its "fictions," a recurring theme is superficiality and its consequences. As a "travel" novel, Henry James' Daisy Miller is accordingly replete with stereotyping and surface-level ideals that he uses as tools for social commentary. Reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the society James describes is one laced with tea parties and high-society, of casual, completely uninformed talk of Michelangelo, and a pathetic lack of moral or intellectual substance. In “Prufrock”, this superficiality leads the main character to look back on a life "measured out […] in coffee spoons" (Eliot, stanza 50), a sad, fatal conclusion. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, leisurely travel was a relatively new phenomenon that allowed for a new level of isolation and premature judgment. In a new place, amongst unknown people, we can easily escape reality and forego it instead for pretense. James himself said, “You don’t observe – you know – you imagine” (Gooder).

So where does this leave the reader in regards to Daisy Miller, a vapid and somewhat ambiguous character who we witness society pin against a wall like a butterfly, beautiful and perhaps helpless? While James allows us to gather information for ourselves about Daisy from her use of language, including the oft repeated “ain’t,” and her unsteady temperament, James deliberately includes the surface-level descriptions of the young girl to reveal his opinions about society and its violent traps. The story’s main male character, Winterbourne, is overcome with her physical attributes, and his entire interest in her is based upon her “sweet eyes, and how “wonderfully pretty” she is, despite her being “completely uneducated” (21), something that apparently matters to him. His aunt, Mrs. Costello, exemplary of a high-society snob, complements his superficiality with her own. “Of course she’s very pretty,” she remarks to her nephew, “but she’s of the last crudity” (20). This is after hardly any time of knowing the girl or her family.

We can easily see how this type of gossipy nonsense fits perfectly into a work that moves from “foreign” country to country; with each new place comes the unknown, and naturally fear of the unknown for such hypercritical, indeed dense characters. Although the action of the novella takes place in historically interesting and relevant places, for example at the Chateau de Chillon in Switzerland, James chooses to have his characters focus on their own self-indulgent, mindless absorption in gossip and outward appearances. Had Daisy, for example, actually learned something about the place she visits at the story’s conclusion, the Coliseum, she perhaps would have chosen another spot to pass the evening. Instead, she has been too enveloped in her selfish folly, and her ignorance leads to her death. Though James sets up a choice for us to make: Is she responsible? Or is she truly “the most innocent!” (80) as Winterbourne proclaims? he makes it clear through his focus on superficiality that we must learn from Daisy and act responsibly for ourselves, despite society’s strong tug, or our lives will be as tragic.