SOURCE: "Daisy Miller: An Abortive Quest for Innocence," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 59, Winter, 1960, pp. 114-20.

In the following essay, Gargano contends that Daisy Miller, considered as Winterbourne's and not Daisy's story, is "essentially the study of a young man's quest for innocence, a virtue for which his society has alienated itself '

When John Foster Kirk rejected Daisy Miller as "an outrage on American girlhood," he unhappily misled critics of Henry James's novel into an obsessive preoccupation with its heroine. In his preface to the New York edition, James himself, perhaps still smarting from his rebuff, waives consideration of other aspects of the novel in his excessive concern with justifying his portrait of the maligned Daisy. Howells, too, because of the nature of his subject in Heroines of Fiction, focuses discussion of the novel on the appealing heroine.

Critical preoccupation with Daisy has fostered the view that...