SOURCE: "Daisy Miller and the Metaphysician," in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Autumn, 1980, pp. 270-79.

In the following essay, Wilson and Westbrook investigate the metaphysical aspects of Daisy Miller, as well as its resemblance to certain mythological stories.

According to Henry James, "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." James's fiction, consistently faithful to this thesis, seems to contain always one more nuance, one more complexity.

Critics writing on Daisy Miller, however, accept the judgments of characters who, by the Jamesian definition of experience, are not qualified to judge. Mrs. Costello has no desire to explore complications but the critical consensus accepts her simplistic analysis of Winterbourne: his problem is that he has been living...