Scholarly Source Analysis Of Daisy Miller

The short story “Daisy Miller” by Henry James is about a young girl who flirts with several of the guys in her town and who does not hold herself up like the typical lady. In the time period when the story was written, women were very proper and were known to cater to their father’s or husband’s every whim. That is not the case with Daisy. Daisy did not like to be held down; she liked to be able to prove that she was able to get through life on her own and to make her life decisions by herself. Daisy Miller was a girl that most literature readers and writers had not come into contact with yet, but Lynn Wardley and Henry James change all of that.
In a scholarly source article titled “Reassembling Daisy Miller” by Lynn Wardley, Daisy is represented …show more content…
She says “This may help us to explain Leslie Fiedler’s peevish intuition that Daisy Miller is ‘innocent by definition, mythically innocent’, but it renders unaccountable Daisy’s explicit immodesty-the fact that she makes a spectacle of herself, as Mrs. Costello puts it, or that Daisy, like the rest of her family, is ‘bad enough to blush for’ (244). This relates back to her thesis because she defined Daisy as “mythic”. The thought I get from this when I start to think about how Daisy could be, but not be a fantasy at the same time is when I began to realize that she is described as mythic because she is not the typical girl. On the outside, yes, she may be considered the “All American Girl” because she has the bows in her hair and the ribbons on her dresses, but she acts extremely immature. Throughout the story, she is hanging around unmarried men. Grown men! What kind of men would want to hang around a young, immature girl? I think it is the ones who can relate to Daisy because she is acting like their childhood and they are able to relate to her more than they could relate to a woman who is “proper” and acts like a real