Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?
We have qualified writers to help you.
We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.
You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)
NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.
NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.
The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and the short story Daisy Miller by Henry James center on independent women who lack a strong female model while growing up and, perhaps for that reason, develop their own ideas of how the world in general and men in particular should treat them. As a woman who must work to support herself it may be that Jane Eyre is the more heroic of the two heroines. Yet Daisy Miller is also a true heroine in choosing to die rather than settle for a conventional relationship. These two characters are aware of social conventions but put their own need for love before all else. As Q. D. Leavis says about Jane Eyre, she sees ‘the relations [between man and woman] as one of mutual need in which the woman is not idealized but is recognized as an active contributor’ (17), and the same can be said of Daisy. Jane is much more explicit about her needs, at least once she herself recognizes them. Daisy’s behavior, even though it mystifies everyone, also sends her chosen mate clear signals on how to proceed. It is left up to the narrator in each case has to bridge the gap between these women’s expectations and the social conventions they violate in the process.
Both stories are told with the benefit of hindsight. Jane recounts her life after she marries Rochester, describing her own development as a series of lessons she had to learn before she could enter into a true marriage. The narrator of Daisy Miller looks back at Frederick Winterbourne’s infatuation several years after the fact, when the young hero has settled back in his comfortable Geneva life of having affairs with older women. The narrative voice in Daisy Miller is that of a bystander who merges with Frederick Winterbourne, the rather stiff, conventional young man who admires Daisy without ever understanding her. The narrator uses the first person pronoun only now and then, preferring to present the story from Winterbourne’s point of view, as if to make her more mystifying. Jane tells her story as explicitly as she can and yet much of the substance of that story is given in the descriptive passages where she uses natural symbolism to convey the mysteries of her heart and her subconscious mind.
Jane Eyre was published in 1847 under Brontë’s pseudonym, Currer Bell. The narrator in Jane Eyre is the heroine herself, observant, critical of herself and others and very conscious of social boundaries. When Rochester has guests she accepts her status as the employee. When he condescends to her she acknowledges he has that right. Yet she does not doubt for a moment that she is his equal. She is a woman who knows herself well enough to free herself from conventional behavior patterns and to demand that the man she loves accepts her needs for what they are, and adjusts his behavior to them. It is Rochester she loves but he cannot be the superior, self-possessed and insensitive male she first met; rather he must be the ill, badly wounded and almost ruined wreck of a man she finds towards the end of the novel. At this point, says Sandra M. Gilbert, the injured Rochester ‘draws his powers from within himself rather than from inequity, disguise, deception … and now, being equals, he and Jane can afford to depend on each other with no fear of exploiting the other’ (177). In this way Rochester is brought up to Jane’s moral level, whereas before he operated on conventional social morality.
Daisy Miller, one of Henry James’s early stories and still one of his most popular, was published in 1878 and turned him into an international celebrity. Daisy is much younger than Jane at the telling, and is widely regarded as an innocent. For many critics, it is a tale about the role of convention and stereotyping in the human community, about our vulnerability to self-deception’ (Fogel 8) but it is much more than that. Daisy aspires to the same honesty and equality in marriage as Jane does and when compared to Jane she is actually far advanced in terms of her knowledge of herself and of men. During her first meeting with Winterbourne the narrator gives the reader the sense that she has come to an important decision about the stiff young man, perhaps recognizing that he could be the man who would make up for her absent father and absentminded mother as well as become the father to children who would not be like her anarchic little brother.
Daisy may be clear on what she wants but Winterbourne is conflicted. Consciously he focuses on her physical attributes yet he feels more for her than for the women he knows in Geneva. The narrator’s tendency to understate things fits in perfectly with Winterbourne’s character. He reveals, for example, that Winterbourne didn’t take his usual leisurely trip through Italy en route to Rome but ‘had stopped neither at Bologna nor at Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience’ (165). His inability to define her, much as he tries, is shown by the narrator’s record of his and other people’s speculations on Daisy’s character which often include the trait of innocence matched with another quality. One example comes early in the story as Winterbourne observes Daisy and thinks she ‘looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt–a pretty American flirt’ (144). On another occasion ‘she seemed to him … an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity’ (160-161) and later he wonders whether she is innocent or ignorant. The innocence in this case refers to her unwillingness to abide by social conventions. The older women such as Winterbourne’s aunt and Miss Walker are appalled by her unorthodox behavior, which they regard as the sign of inadequate parenting and a lack of self-respect. In fact, Daisy is well aware of social boundaries but she places her own needs before those of others.
Daisy senses Winterbourne’s “stiffness,” his inability to understand her so that, even though she loves him, she will not give in to him. She herself has her passions well under control. The narrator comments on her monotonous tone and smile more than once and notes her unwillingness to respond to any comment or question that might take her out of her comfort zone. Yet even Daisy breaks down on two important occasions, giving the narrator if not Winterbourne a sign that she too feels deeply about this young man, and that she has been playing an elaborate game to bring out the man in the boy.
That game may be compared to the penance Jane forces on Rochester. Daisy likes to make Winterbourne say ‘such things’, as she tells him on page 159 but she also makes him do such things as seem designed to shake him out of his stiffness. A good example of this is when she asks him to accompany her to a meeting with her Italian suitor. Even before that, Daisy has shown a strange liking for the family’s courier, Eugenio, a formally dressed Italian who condescends to Winterbourne. On this occasion she asks Mrs. Walker if she can bring ‘an intimate friend of mine to her party, ‘without a tremor in her clear little voice or a shadow on her brilliant little face’, as the narrator says (166). Winterbourne does not react; in fact, for over a page the narrator does not refer to him. When he does reappear he stands ready to accompany her to meet her friend, ‘Mr. Giovanelli – the beautiful Giovanelli’, as Daisy says (167). They are driven to the Pincio along with the ‘ornamental courier’. When he tries to prevent her from meeting her suitor Daisy tells him she has “never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me” and continues on her way. Although Winterbourne wants to follow, regardless of the unconventional and embarrassing situation, he is dissuaded by Mrs. Walker who has come to take Daisy home. She refuses; and for the first time in the story shows that her emotions are running high through her ‘violent laugh’ in response to his gentle request for her to get into the carriage. Against his will, Winterbourne gets in instead and Mrs. Walker ends his speculations on Daisy’s character by describing her as ‘crazy’ (171).
Later, when Winterbourne runs into Daisy and Giovanelli at the Colosseum he makes the mistake that convinces Daisy he will never be the man she needs by shunning her. She calls him over but she has seen him act as so many others have behaved towards her and now understands that he is too conventional for her. At that point she stops caring about her own life; or, as she puts it, ‘I don’t care … whether I have Roman fever or not!’ (190) At her grave Giovanelli tells Winterbourne that Daisy would never have married him (Giovanelli), at which Winterbourne leaves Rome and returns to his old life.
The similarity between Daisy and Jane is not immediately obvious but these two rigorously honest women refuse to let social convention stand in the way of their objectives. In both cases the narrator creates greater sympathy for these characters than their society feels for them. Jane’s dreams, such as the one about the infant, give the reader an insight into her subconscious. Daisy’s chronicler notices the occasional contradictions in her behavior, with the same result. It becomes clear that Daisy’s casual relationships with ‘third-rate Italians’ were a mere diversion as she waited for Winterbourne to see her as she saw him. Jane’s spiritual detour served the same purpose. Perhaps Winterbourne did not hear Daisy call him to the center of the Colosseum but he was drawn there as surely as Jane was drawn to Rochester. The difference was that Rochester was ready; Winterbourne was not.
Works Cited
Fogel, Daniel Mark. Daisy Miller: A Dark Comedy of Manners. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.” Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
James, Henry. Daisy Miller and Other Stories. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
Leavis, Q. D. Introduction to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. 1847. London: Penguin Classics, 1985.
Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?
We have qualified writers to help you.
We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.
You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)
NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.
NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.