读Daisy Miller所想

Bearing some similarity to A Rose for Emily, the portrait of Daisy Miller is knitted in the narration told by Winterbourne, even her illness is from second-hand information and the description of her subsequent death is confined into one single sentence. (Somehow it reminds me of Mrs. Ramsay’s death is also in one sentence, in brackets.)

Conflicts are running through the novella. We can easily catch the viral between various groups, like Daisy and Mrs. Costello, Randolph and Eugenio, Winterbourne and Mr. Giovanelli and so on. A rift lurks in its beginning and end. The novella begins with landscape description, yet very strangely, by adopting the phrases “being distinguished from” and “are much at variance with”, consistency is broken into 2 confrontations. Moreover, in the end, the word “contradictory” is stressed, leaving tint of uncertainty.

So why? Actually, the identity of Winterbourne is noteworthy, which, I believe, is the root of all these conflicts. Winterbourne’s old attachment for Calvinism is in a fierce rivalry with his cultural identity as an American, yet did he 100 percent identify himself as an American? In fact, he was quite anxiety about himself because he didn’t know which group he could belong to or fit in. it can be illustrated by his narration, in which he was always trying to answer his question about Miller and solve it. Just take a look at this key sentence, “Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss. Daisy Miller”, we can boldly presume that his swayed evaluation about Miller is similar to his hesitation and anxious about his own identity. Since he couldn’t accept uncertainty, once he temporarily found the type she (actually he) belonged to, as a result, a gust of reassurance was surging.

Now it’s safe to put forward that the character of Daisy Miller is a psychological projection of Winterbourne’s anxiety. But here comes the paradox. On the one hand, by embodying his abstract anxious as a concrete character, he continued to solve it, in the hope of its clarity; on the other, the more he dug into, the more disorder and confusion he found. It is suffused with tragedy, because it might give a reasonable account for Miller’s death. One of the two sides is bound to be destroyed, as the pain and anxiety caused by the coexistence of multi-cultures is something that Winterbourne tries to escape.

Such anxiety is weaved into the narration told by “the implied author”. The hidden “I” shows up in the beginning. “There are indeed many hotels”, “but after all, he had no enemies”, “what I should say is”, “indeed I think none”—all these tiny clues seemingly serve as a block in the lines, creating ups and downs, which becomes a store of anxiety. The more obvious evidence is the second appearance of “I”, “…I may affirm…he had a pleasant sense that he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller.” The negation actually implies an opposite subconsciously. He was afraid of Daisy Miller, afraid of another culture identity, afraid of all these anxiety, struggle, hesitance followed by it.

Yet it’s interesting to note that with the help of Randolph, Daisy and Winterbourne successfully made their first acquaintance. And the exchange of their name comes it with Randolph too. The interpretation of Randolph will turn reasonable if we know that the meeting of the two selves never come at ease. Thus Randolph, as a buffer zone, eases their anxiety hidden in the sub-context, which makes it possible for the plot to develop.

Although the novella is suffused with uncertainty, there still lie some kinds of certainty structurally. The novel that Mrs. Costello picked up, Paule Mere, and Byron both foreshadow how the novella goes. Thus such certainty and uncertainty becomes another pair of confrontations.