He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uneducated and irrational, too provincial, to have thought about ostracism or even to have it perceived. Then, at other times, he believed that she carried in her elegant and irresponsible organism a provocative, passionate consciousness, perfectly observant of the impression she produced. (43)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The socialites of Daisy Miller's world strive for perfection, nobility, and superlative character. But character is a misleading word; interiority is important only to the extent that it reflects the supposed depths that accompany an appearance of refinement, because the relationships in "Daisy Miller: A Study" are formed through observation, not conversation. Winterbourne's penetrating gaze dissects and complicates Daisy's appearance and, subsequently, her personality, beyond what is justified by her own projection of a personality. The narrator of Henry James's story reinforces this atmosphere, peppering visual and even abstract sentences with modifiers and other syntactic features to impose a system of visual refinement on the reader. The reader, however, must use his imagination to form a picture of Daisy, her most obvious quality, while remaining aware of her relatively empty consciousness, thus ensuring an emotional detachment from her that allows him to " see” as it really is. East. The heroine captivates Winterbourne, on the other hand, for most of the story, as he can only conjecture the mystery, or "enigma," as the narrator calls it, of "the ambiguity of Daisy's behavior » beneath its deceptive exterior. 46). His recognition of his dependence on Daisy's gaze, and emptiness, triggers his final disgust and allows him to choose a response from the first passage of this essay or at least to recognize the emptiness of the debate, according to which one or the The other alternative is the product of a negligible character whose "observing consciousness" only functions when it turns in on itself, as all of Daisy's limited comments also imply: an attempted demonstration of refinement that fails does not move forward in a linear fashion, but instead revolves around its solipsistic subject matter. Winterbourne is presented as a participatory voyeur. His greatest talent is to detail feminine beauty into discrete parts, refining his vision of the whole into smaller, more appreciable parts: They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, in fact, Winterbourne had seen nothing for a long time prettier than the various features of his beautiful compatriot, her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great taste for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing it; and on the face of this young lady, he made several observations. (7) Besides the visual blaming that he writes on Daisy as a traditional weapon of subjugation (and which allows him, momentarily, to "mentally accuse" her face of "lack of polish" [7]), Winterbourne attempts something something equally dominant for usurping Daisy's power of vision by judging her eyes purely in aesthetic terms. When they meet, Daisy is at first seemingly pinned down by Winterbourne's appraising gaze of superlatives and particularizations, but her eyes tell another story: "She sat there with her very pretty hands, adorned with very shiny rings, folded on her knees, and with her pretty eyes sometimes resting on those of Winterbourne, sometimes wandering over the garden, the passers-by and the beautiful view" (9). Daisy's action and spontaneity, the qualities that attract Winterbourne after her , areon display here, so clearly, in fact, that Winterbourne's once powerful eyes become lost in the shifting catalog of his line of sight. James makes traceability easier. the origins of Daisy's surveillance mode. Her mother's description contains several clues as to where Daisy retrieved her elusive item. Look: Her mother was a small, simple, slight person, with a wandering eye, a very narrow nose, and a broad forehead, adorned with a certain amount of fine and very frizzy hair. Like her daughter, Mrs. Miller was dressed with extreme elegance; she had huge diamonds in her ears. From what Winterbourne could observe, she gave him no greeting, she certainly wasn't looking at him. (18) Winterbourne's diminished powers of observation highlight another characteristic of Mrs. Miller: Daisy shares her appearance of mystery by opposition. The smallness of his body contrasts with his “wandering eye”, just as his “small nose” plays with his “large forehead”, or even his hair is both “fine” and “very frizzy”. This state of ambiguity, much more attractive in Daisy, is what leads Winterbourne, in a retrospective, to vaguely note that Daisy's face "was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive" (7 ) and, more generally, to question Daisy's motivations. Mrs. Miller's appearance contrasts sharply with that of Winterbourne's aunt, whose natural refinement is pronounced by her extreme constancy: Mrs. Costello was a widow who often suggested that, if she had not been so subject to headaches, she would probably have left a deeper mark on her time. She had a long pale face, a high nose, and lots of bright white hair, which she wore in large puffs and rolls on the top of her head. (13; emphasis mine, except for "rolls") Daisy has the best of both worlds, superlative beauty with contradictory ambiguity, but her lack of nobility that Mrs. Costello has in spades is the reason for which, in the eyes of the eldest, "'[S]he is pretty. But she is very common'" (13). Even the word "pretty," widely used to refer to Daisy, evokes a lesser, more easily accessible form of beauty and hints at the direct consciousness that Winterbourne later discovers. But in the meantime, Winterbourne is in the very pretty hands of Daisy, and sometimes her voice seems to blend into the story to invite the reader to observe the world as he does. The opening of the story initiates the process of particularization and refinement in the casual description of the seaside resort: In the small town of Vevey, Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are indeed many hotels; for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place which, as many travelers remember, is situated on the shore of a remarkably blue lake, a lake which it is the responsibility of every tourist to visit. (3) The modifiers "particularly", "indeed" and "remarkably" and even the reminder to tourists and the recommendation that follows add up to produce a world whose innate elegance must be exploited by the refined eye of the observer. The same conceit applies to the descriptions of Daisy already cited. But since the prose descriptions do not captivate him as much as the visual does for a true observer, the reader is aware of the superficiality of these judgments long before Winterbourne understands them. In the middle of the story, annoyed by Daisy's ingratitude for her visit, Winterbourne blandly recalls that pretty American women are "both the most demanding in the world and the least endowed with a feeling of indebtedness" (28). “Demanding” in more than one way, since Daisy is demanding of others and onthe precise attention given to it. Of course, she rarely gives him this attention, a fact the reader is aware of before Winterbourne, as in the narrative description of her indifference to his history lesson: "'I never saw a man who knew as much!” Bonivard's story was obviously, as they say, entered in one ear and out the other. But Daisy went on to say that she wished Winterbourne had traveled with them and 'gone around' with them” (23). Daisy reconfigures Winterbourne's knowledge into the familiar world of the visual ("I've never seen...") while her words of wisdom pass as uneventfully as the cliché James self-consciously employs. Her insistence that Winterbourne "go round" with her is one of many uses of the phrase, a visual description of the social revolution (a meaning quite contrary to that of 1789 France) consisting of turning on an egocentric axis and to ignore the refinement of linear and intellectual thought that Winterbourne demonstrates. Daisy's speech patterns reveal her linear futility and a tendency toward recurrence. She talks about her mother's bedtime habits: "No, she doesn't like to go to bed," says the young girl. “She doesn’t sleep three hours. She says she doesn't know how she lives. She is terribly nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. She left somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to put him to bed. He doesn't like going to bed. (15) The tiny variations in the rhythm of each proposition (between four and five beats, with two exceptions) amplify his inability to deepen his thought beyond the original statement. She encounters an unintentionally humorous ambiguity ("I guess she sleeps more than she thinks" / "I guess she spends more time sleeping than thinking"), and the repetition of "she » blocks the subject pronominally where it could be used. to develop the description of his mother. His inability to progress is most evident in his tedious use of "to" four times after the semicolon; the activity is constantly carried out by the infinitive, rather than coming to fruition (and, although it ends by a prepositional phrase, continues the infinitive theme). Finally, she concludes with a statement almost identical to the one at the beginning, framing her synopsis with empty statements. Caught in the world of the visual, Winterbourne is unable to detect these limits. He can't see through the superficiality of Daisy's character, and when he finds something he doesn't like, like when he spies on her and Giovanelli, he's still too in love with Daisy to confront her, which either physically or according to his own judgment. James subtly plays with the difference between Winterbourne's discernment of the visible and the internal with a few cleverly placed semicolons: Winterbourne stood there; he had turned his eyes towards Daisy and her date. They obviously didn't see anyone; they were too busy with each other. When they reached the garden wall, they stood for a moment gazing at the large clusters of flat-topped pine trees of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli sat down familiarly on the broad edge of the wall. (36) Obviously, we are meant to read the subject "they" like Daisy and Giovanelli. But James withholds any proper names until Giovanelli sits on the wall, and that is the subject of a separate clause. It is possible that "they" refers to Winterbourne's eyes. In this reading, his eyes "obviously" do not see Daisy (or Giovanelli), because they are "too deeply occupied with each other; in other words, his eyes are delighted with their own convergence of the look to see through Daisy's behavior. When they are." (50).