“Daisy Miller” is a short novel tells the tale of a relationship that developed between the story’s main character Winterbourne, an American man who had lived in Europe for a long time, and Daisy Miller, an innocent and beautiful American girl, who was traveling in Europe with her mother and brother in the late 1800’s. Daisy lives by her own rules without considering the European local customs. The relation between Winterbourne and Daisy is unsuccessful because Winterbourne can not understand Daisy’s character. His misperceptions about Daisy are colored by his expatriate status, lack of social experience, and class and gender issues.
Winterbourne claims that his misperceptions about Daisy are because he had lived too long in foreign parts.…show more content… The first category is that of the nice young innocent girls like daisy. The second category is for the naughty non innocent ladies like the genevan woman. Everyone has assumptions about how young ladies should act. When Daisy defy those assumptions Winterbourne does not know what to make of her. It all emerges when she starts telling Winterbourne with reference to her life in Schenectady, city in New York, and the history of her family in Europe. She poorly expressed herself and said what she did not mean which led Winterbourne to mistake her innocent thoughts, stories and ideas for being worldly. For example, she tells him that she “‘always had a great deal of gentlemen’s society’” (202). The innocent girl was merely bragging about how popular she was back in the US. The “poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed” (202). He misconceives her statement for an invitation to flirt with her thought “he had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion” (202). Although “Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent, Winterbourne was “inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt –a pretty American flirt”(202).
Another illustration of when Daisy does not inform Winterbourne that she wasn’t engaged to Giovanelli, which supports his misperception about her relationship with the Italian man. She decides to tell Winterbourne the truth when she succumbed to sickness so she “sent [him] a message before her death” telling him that “she never was engaged to that handsome Italian” (237). Winterbourne had confessed to his aunt that “he had done her injustice” for he “‘didn’t understand at the time; but [he has] understood it since’”:after Daisy’s death
