Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Americans
Abroad
Daisy Miller was one of James’s earliest
treatments of one of the themes for which he became best known:
the expatriate or footloose American abroad. Americans abroad was
a subject very much of the moment in the years after the Civil War.
The postwar boom, the so-called Gilded Age, had given rise to a
new class of American businessman, whose stylish families were eager
to make “the grand tour” and expose themselves to the art and culture
of the Old World. Americans were visiting Europe for the first time
in record numbers, and the clash between the two cultures was a
novel and widespread phenomenon.
James was of two minds about the American character. By
temperament, he was more sympathetic with the European
way of life, with its emphasis on culture, education, and the art
of conversation. Like most Europeans, he saw his compatriots as
boorish, undereducated, and absurdly provincial, unaware of a vast
and centuries-old world outside their own new and expanding dominions.
However, he was also fascinated by the poignant innocence of the
American national character, with its emphasis on earnestness rather
than artifice. In later novels, such as The Portrait of
a Lady and The American,James
would continue to explore the moral implications of an artlessness
that, like Daisy’s, cannot defend itself against the worldliness
and cynicism of a decadent society based, necessarily, on hypocrisy.
The
Sadness and Safety of the Unlived Life
If the American abroad was James’s signature theme, that
of the unlived life was his almost perpetual subtext. Repeatedly
in James’s novels and stories, characters focus their attention
on an abstraction, an ideal or idea they feel they could figure
out or achieve if only they could devote their spirit or intellectual
faculties to it with sufficient understanding or patience. Again
and again, they realize too late that whatever it was they sought to
understand or achieve, whatever they waited for, has passed them
by and that they have wasted their whole life—or, like Winterbourne,
they never fully arrive at that realization. One way of looking
at Daisy Miller is to conclude that the whole issue
of Daisy’s character is beside the point, a red herring that distracts
Winterbourne from the business of living. In that case, the heart
of the novel would be Winterbourne’s character, and the fear or
lack of passion that causes him to hide from life behind the ultimately
unimportant conundrum of Daisy’s innocence, or lack thereof.
