Picturing Daisy: Narrative in Henry James’s Daisy Miller
Picturing Daisy: Narrative in Henry James’s Daisy Miller

Summary/Abstract: With a background resembling both an abstract stage and a tapestry Daisy Miller is at first glance a seemingly facile story. There is certainly a sense of open, stage-like space surrounding the main characters and their performative actions, which resemble the blurred but vivid forms of live figures frozen in the aesthetic stillness of the scenic foreground in Vevey, Switzerland and Rome. In spite of the story's accessibility, however, its stage seems to be set, scene after scene, for veiled allusions, sustained imagery, and allegorical meanings. Under the guise of a story about a young American girl's attempt to establish and assert her sense of identity in the Old World, Daisy Miller is also an encoded text whose strong allegorical dimension yields rich insights into James's intention to imagine in his own fiction the artistic possibilities embedded in the fin de siecle's aestheticist agenda.

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