Daisy Miller Gender Roles

Gender Roles in Henry James’ Novella “Daisy Miller”
The novella “Daisy Miller” is a literary work written by Henry James and was first published in 1879. The novella is about a courtship between a young man called Winterbourne and a young beautiful girl called Daisy. The two meet in Geneva, Switzerland where Daisy, her mother, and younger brother are visiting for a vacation. Winterbourne is a Europeanized American who has stayed in Europe for many years until he has totally been culturally Europeanized, while Daisy is an American who is just visiting Europe and has rejected to blend with the new society. The two ‘lovebirds’ fail to share their affection due to their different cultural values; whereby, while Daisy is pursuing her free and unabated

Daisy is an intelligent young woman and self-reliant, doing what she enjoys most of her freedom despite her society’s negative perception of her reputation as an ‘uncivilized’, because the Elizabethan society confined women to marriage. During the 19th century, men first enjoyed the privilege of acquiring a good education and a higher status on the social ladder compared to women, who came in as second-class citizens. Filled with this view in mind, Winterbourne, a Europeanized male is fully convinced that he is culturally more advanced than Daisy, but then his interaction with Daisy proves him wrong, “Daisy confounds and complicates this conception, producing in him doubts which, as we shall see, cut to the heart of his own, and his century’s, assumptions about the relationship between such notions as progress, mortality, and beauty” (Scheiber 3). James portrays Daisy as a very rebellious character, who does not care much about what people say about her. For instance, Mrs. Costello talks bad about Daisy, "She is a young lady,….who has an intimacy with her mamma's courier,"(23) and normally under the Victorian era, women were supposed to guard their reputation lest people come and taint it. But, Daisy is unapologetic and carries on with her defiant character, James writes “[Daisy] carried about…a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced,” (72) meaning that she knew the censorious attitudes toward her morals and character. Even though women are passive adherents to these code rules, they too are guilty of propagating them and in agreement with the above statement, Ohmann states that “Mrs. Costello’s role within the novella is one of power, and she is endowed with an ability to assign judgment over who is worthy and isolate or eradicate those who are not welcome” (D’Amor