geometric and constella tional vantage point that offered few consolations. In orbit around the cultures of Britain and France, America was troubled by a lurking “sense of relativity.” While Europe’s ancient monarchies luxuriated in a “quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards [their] own position[s] in the world,” the United States was forced to renegotiate its national contract with every election, submitting to vote decisions that, in Europe, were the divine right of kings.
Like many of his contemporaries, James saw democracy as an ongoing challenge not only to traditional politics and aesthetics, but equally to America’s national identity. In the decade following the Civil War, as the country’s centennial loomed on the horizon, Americans found themselves deliberating anew on the core possibilities of democracy. As James himself admitted in Hawthorne, the postwar world was “a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult.” Within this increasingly pluralist context, democracy seemed less an abstract aspiration than a hardscrabble process. As Dana D. Nelson has ob served, citizens had to “develop their social and political subjectivi ties in relation to multiple, local, and nonidealized relationships with others,” rather than in accordance with a single, stylized, aristocratic model (“Representative/Democracy,” p. 220; see “For Further Reading”). In coming to terms with the postwar period’s unwieldy new “sense of proportion and relation,” James found himself faced with two competing models of democratic practice: an “abstract universality” associated with antebellum democracy, and the “embodied particularity” of direct, postwar political engagement (Berlant, “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife,” p. 144). Drawing on the curiously relevant debates circulating around late-nineteenth-century mathematics, James offered a critique of America’s “great political undertaking” in both Daisy Miller: A Study and Washington Square.
James described Daisy Miller as the “little tragedy ... of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed as it were to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head and to which she stood in no measurable relation” (quoted in Edel, The Life of Henry james, p. 520; emphasis added). The story is indeed a meditation on measurability. When the American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne first encounters the “strikingly, admirably pretty” Daisy Miller, he straightaway sets out to quantify and categorize her. From the outset, she is not singular, but plural—an aggregated type rather than a distinctive individual: “How pretty they are!” he thinks (p. 8). In his quest for “the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller” (p. 14), Winterbourne is not alone. The majority of his American colony similarly seeks to account for Daisy’s particularity in mathematically generic terms. Like Mrs. Walker, the American hostess who collects “specimens of her diversely-born fellow-mortals to serve, as it were, as text-books” (p. 46), and Mrs. Costello, who can barely distinguish Miss Miller from her nearly identical cohorts (“that young lady‘s—Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler‘s—what’s her name?” [p. 51]), so Winterbourne himself struggles to identify “how far [Daisy’s] eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal” (p. 55). “Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society?” (p. 14). When the members of his expatriate circle in Rome accuse “poor little” Miss Miller of “going really ‘too far,’” Winterbourne’s regret takes a predictably fixed form: “It was painful to hear so much that was pretty and undefended and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder” (p. 53). Like his itemizing compatriots, Winterbourne cannot imagine disorder beyond its paradoxical categorization.
Winterbourne judges Daisy according to a set of conventional norms rather than a cluster of metaphysical truths. For all his inner debates, he ultimately agrees with the verdict of those who “intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative—was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal” (p. 54). In the normative world of Daisy Miller, there can be no decree more damning. Daisy’s behavior is not so much wicked as it is atypical. As Winterbourne’s aunt Mrs. Costello blandly observes, “Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough” (p. 33).
Like Winterbourne and his cohort of reproving Americans, early critics of Daisy Miller took pains to classify and typologize James’s heroine. The Nation, marveling that “no American book of its size has been so much read and so much