It was said that she was too light and childish, too uncultured and unreasonable, too provincial, to have thought about ostracism or even to have felt it. Then at other moments he believed that he carried within his elegant and irresponsible organism a provocative, passionate conscience, perfectly attentive to the impression it produced. (43) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The socialites in Daisy Miller's world aspire to perfection, nobility, and superlative character. But character is a misleading word; interiority is important only insofar as it reflects the supposed depth that comes from an appearance of sophistication, since the relationships in “Daisy Miller: A Study” are formed by observation, not conversation. Winterbourne's penetrating gaze analyzes and complicates Daisy's appearance and, by extension, personality, beyond what her projection of a personality requires. The narrator of Henry James's story furthers this atmosphere, peppering visual and even abstract sentences with modifiers and other syntactic features to impose a system of visual sophistication on the reader. The reader, however, must engage his imagination to form an image of Daisy, her most noticeable quality, while being kept aware of her relatively empty consciousness, thus ensuring an emotional detachment from her that allows him to "see" her as it really is. AND. The heroine fascinates Winterbourne, on the other hand, for much of the story, because he can only guess at the mystery, or "enigma," as the narrator calls it, of the "ambiguity of Daisy's behavior" behind her deceptive appearance. 46). The recognition of his dependence on the gaze, and otherwise on Daisy's vacuity, triggers his final disgust and allows him to select a response from the opening passage of this essay or at least to recognize the vacuity of the debate, that both alternatives are a product of a negligible character whose "observing consciousness" only works when it loops back on itself, as all of Daisy's limited comments also imply: an attempt to demonstrate a sophistication that fails to advance linearly, but instead revolves around its solipsistic subject . From the beginning, Winterbourne is shown as a participatory voyeur. His greatest talent is in particularizing female beauty into discrete parts, refining his vision of the whole into smaller, more appreciable pieces: They were wonderfully beautiful eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had long seen nothing more beautiful than the various features of his fair countrywoman—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great taste for female beauty; he was devoted to observation and analysis; and regarding the face of this young lady he made several observations. (7)In addition to the visual blazon he writes on Daisy as a traditional weapon of submission (and which allows him, for a moment, to "mentally accuse" her face "of lack of refinement" [7]), Winterbourne attempts something equally dominant to usurp Daisy's power of sight by judging her eyes only in aesthetic terms. In their meeting, Daisy is initially blocked by Winterbourne's appraising gaze of superlatives and particulars, but his eyes tell another story: "She sat there with her extremely pretty hands, adorned with very brilliant rings, folded in her lap , and with her hands beautiful eyes now resting on those of Winterbourne, now wandering over the garden, over the people passing by and over the beautiful view" (9). Daisy's agency and spontaneity, the qualities that draw Winterbourne after her, are on display here, so prominently, in fact,that Winterbourne's once powerful eyes are lost in the changing catalog of his line of vision. James makes it easy to trace the origins of Daisy's surveillance mode. Her mother's description contains several clues as to where Daisy picked up her evasive eyeballing: Her mother was a small, gaunt, light person, with one wandering eye, a very small nose, and a broad forehead, adorned with a certain amount of fine hair. and very frizzy. Like her daughter, Mrs. Miller was dressed with extreme elegance; he had huge diamonds in his ears. As far as Winterbourne could observe, she did not greet him and certainly was not looking at him. (18) Winterbourne's reduced powers of observation highlights another characteristic of Mrs. Miller with whom Daisy shares her appearance of mystery through opposition. The smallness of his body contrasts with his "wandering eye", just as his "small nose" plays with his "broad forehead", or even the fact that his hair is both "thin" and "very frizzy ". This state of ambiguity, much more attractive in Daisy, is what leads a retrospective Winterbourne to confusingly note that Daisy's face "was not at all bland, but it was not exactly expressive" (7) and, more generally, to wonder about the Daisy's motivations. Mrs. Miller's appearance contrasts sharply with that of Winterbourne's aunt, whose natural refinement is pronounced by her extreme coherence:Mrs. Costello was a widow who often implied that, had she not been so terribly prone to headaches, she would probably have left a deeper imprint on her time. He had a long, pale face, a high nose, and a great deal of striking white hair, which he wore in great puffs and rouleaux on the top of his head. (13; italics mine, except 'rouleaux') Daisy has the best of both worlds, a superlative beauty with a contradictory ambiguity, but her lack of the nobility that Mrs. Costello has in spades is why, in the eyes of the old man, "'[S]he is nice, but she is very ordinary'" (13). Even the word "pretty," used extensively of Daisy, connotes a lesser, more readily available form of beauty and hints at the candid conscience that Winterbourne later discovers. But until then, Winterbourne is in Daisy's extremely gracious hands, and at times her voice seems to blend with the narrative to invite the reader to observe the world as she does. The opening of the story begins the process of particularization and refinement in the casual description of the tourist location: In the town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. In fact, there are many hotels; entertaining tourists is the business of the place which, as many travelers will remember, is located on the edge of a stunningly blue lake, a lake that every tourist must visit. (3) The modifiers "particularly", "indeed" and "extraordinarily" also the reminder to tourists and the subsequent recommendation all add up to produce a world whose innate elegance must be exploited by the refined eye of the observer. The same presumption applies to the descriptions of Daisy already cited. But because prose descriptions do not captivate him as much as visual ones captivate a real observer, the reader is aware of the superficiality of these judgments long before Winterbourne understands them. Midway through the story, angered by Daisy's ingratitude for his visit, Winterbourne recalls the quip that beautiful American women are "at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness" (28). “Demanding” in more than one sense, since Daisy demands from others and the precise kind of attention that is given to her. Of course, she rarely returns this attention, a fact of which thereader is aware of Winterbourne first, as in the case of the narrative description of his indifference to his history lesson: "'I never saw a man who knew so much!' Bonivard's story had evidently, as they say, gone in one ear and gone out the other. But Daisy went on to say that she wished Winterbourne would travel with them and 'go about' with them" (23). Daisy reconfigures Winterbourne's knowledge into the familiar world of the visual ("I never saw...") as her words of wisdom pass as uneventfully as the cliché James self-consciously employs. Her insistence that Winterbourne "go about" with her is one of the many uses of the phrase, a visual description of the social revolution (a meaning quite contrary to that of France in 1789) of spinning on a self-centered axis and ignoring the refinement of linear and intellectual thought that Winterbourne demonstrates. Daisy's speech patterns reveal her linear futility and a tendency towards recurrence. She talks about her mother's bedtime habits: "No, she doesn't like going to bed," the little girl said. «He doesn't even sleep three hours. He says he doesn't know how he lives. She's terribly nervous. I guess he sleeps more than you think. She went somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to convince him to go to bed. He doesn't like going to bed." (15)The slight variations in the rhythm of each sentence (between four and five bars, with two exceptions) amplify his inability to delve deeper into his thought beyond the original statement. It comes across an unintentionally humorous ambiguity ("I guess you sleep more than you think you do" / "I guess you spend more time sleeping than thinking"), and the repetition of "she" locks the subject pronominally where it might be used to expand on his mother's description. His inability to make progress is most evident in his awkward use of "a" four times after the semicolon, the task constantly being enacted through the infinitive, rather than coming to fruition (and, although terms like a prepositional phrase, continues the theme of the infinitive). Finally, he concludes with a statement almost identical to his opening one, framing his synopsis with empty statements. Caught in the world of the visual, Winterbourne is unable to detect these limitations. He cannot penetrate the superficiality of Daisy's character, and when he finds something he doesn't like, as when he spies on her and Giovanelli, he is still too in love with Daisy to confront her, either physically or in his own judgment. James subtly plays with the difference between Winterbourne's discernment between the visible and the internal with some cleverly placed semicolons: Winterbourne was there; he had turned his gaze towards Daisy and her knight. Evidently they saw no one; they were too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden wall they stood for a moment looking at the great clusters of flat-topped pines of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli sat down familiarly on the wide ledge of the wall. (36)Clearly we must read the subject “they” as Daisy and Giovanelli. But James withholds any proper names until Giovanelli sits on the wall, and that comes under a separate clause. It is possible that "they" means the eyes of Winterbourne. In this reading, his eyes "evidently" do not see Daisy (or Giovanelli), because they are "too deeply occupied with each other, in other words, his eyes are enraptured by their own convergence of gaze to see through the Daisy's behavior." When they arrived", he then continues to describe their wandering path over the landscape; that "they stopped for a moment" makes it clear that the couple is indeed human, but the damage is done: "She came a little closer and he held the parasol up" (50).