Daisy Miller 611slave and hatches a plan to build a small, secluded
house for her. While he tells her that moving into
the house will help make her a lady, she knows that
he wants to have here there so that he can have
unchecked sexual access to her. It is at this point
that she decides to have sex with another man in
order to show him that she is not interested in him.
It is interesting that their relationship in this section
of the narrative is more like a romance novel, with
Linda painted as the object of desire between two
romantic rivals.
Even though the slaveholding culture does not
respect her right to sexual autonomy, the women in
the narrative hold convictions about sexual propri-
ety. As a result, Linda’s narrative oscillates between
dealing with the realities of sexual abuse and the
pull to be a proper 19th-century woman, chaste and
pious. Linda is afraid to tell her grandmother about
becoming pregnant by a white man because she feels
that she will be ostracized for rejecting the values
her grandmother instilled in her. These are the same
values that she claims Dr. Flint tried to destroy
when she was younger. At this point in the narra-
tive, Jacobs also begs her readers not to judge her too
harshly. She does not go into details about the sexual
relationship she has, but she says that slave women
should not be held to the same sexual standards
as white women because their sexual propriety is
not respected by the culture. They are taught to be
duplicitous and secretive.
Jacobs’s text reminds us that enslaved men are
also subject to sexual abuse. In the chapter on the
Fugitive Slave Law, Luke is chained to his master’s
bed and partially clad (only a shirt). When his mas-
ter becomes sick and too weak to beat him, he sends
for the constable. The abuse Luke suffers is tinged
with sexual impropriety. He thinks “Some of these
freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated.” By
including his story, Jacobs demonstrates the ways
in which slave laws regulated sex and used it as a
weapon.
Courtney D. Marshall
jamES, HEnry Daisy Miller (1878)
When Daisy Miller appeared in 1878, it became
Henry James’s most popular story, and it still ranks
among the most-often read of his works today. In
this novella, James explores the international theme,
studying ways that Americans act toward each other
in communities abroad. At the end of his career,
between 1907 and 1909, James revised Daisy Miller
and included the new version in his collected works,
known as the New York Edition.
This story follows Annie P. “Daisy” Miller, a
young woman from New York, as she travels with
her mother and her brother, Randolph, on her first
European tour. Although the Millers are wealthy,
other Americans in Europe consider them inferior
because they do not understand the social rules of
the upper class. In Vevey, a resort town in Switzer-
land, Daisy meets Winterbourne, a fellow American,
who is surprised that she acts so independently.
Studying her actions, he first labels her an innocent,
uneducated girl but later considers her a calculating
flirt. Winterbourne’s aunt, Mrs. Costello, refuses
to meet the Millers, and his friend in Rome, Mrs.
Walker, also rejects Daisy, because she will not fol-
low social conventions. For instance, Daisy ignores
Mrs. Walker’s warning by choosing to walk in public
with Mr. Giovanelli, a lower-class Italian man. After
the two visit the Colosseum, a site rich in symbol-
ism, one evening, Daisy will die of malaria; Winter-
bourne learns of her innocence—too late.
Through Daisy’s tragic story, James explores
themes of community, freedom, identity, inde-
pendence, individual and society, innocence
and experience, rejection, responsibility, sac-
rifice, and social class.
Melanie BrownFreedom in Daisy Miller
Freedom emerges as a significant theme in James’s
novella when Daisy, flirtatious but naïve, chafes
against the social expectations of American expatri-
ates she meets in Vevey and Rome. There, Daisy
finds that middle-aged socialites and seemingly
eligible bachelors conduct themselves according
to social rules that she does not understand. The
rules governing young women’s behavior prove
more restrictive than those she grew up with in
New York, where Daisy was free to move about in
public and to choose with whom she spent her time.
Although valued in America, her nouveau-riche