Discount Daisy Miller

What happened to Daisy Miller, if you don’t know the story, is that she went to Europe and flirted so fast and so hard that she died from it. She appears in the story like a lightning bolt to the prudish young man narrating it. She is wearing a very frilly white dress all covered in ribbons and bows, she has too direct of a gaze, an empty smile. He thinks she is the prettiest girl he’s ever seen, but he deduces she is a “coquette” — which in the 1870s meant simply that you were a “flirt” or an immodest woman, and not whatever it means now. 

What is unusual and also modern about Daisy Miller, the novella, is how sympathetic Henry James is to his heroine. Unlike earlier representations of young women who defy the rules of polite society and are ruined by it, Daisy Miller comes off as both purer and more enlightened than the repressed aristocracy surrounding her. The protagonist, Winterbourne, who briefly tries to court her, realizes at a certain point that he does not owe her respect, since she is not a respectable girl, but he is relieved, rather than upset by that prospect. It allows him to write her off as lax and immoral, rather than having to confront the significance of her directness and independence. When he tries early on in their brief relationship to conceal why his judgemental aunt refuses to meet her, Daisy calls him out on it. Just say she doesn’t want to meet me, she tells him. Why should she want to meet me? Winterbourne is stunned and uncomfortable.

Daisy Miller was described by critics as the model for a new type of girl: the American girl, at once naive and worldwise, uncloistered, unabashed in her pursuit of beauty, luxury, fun. Alexis de Tocqueville was both frightened and impressed by the “boldness” of American women and their independence. That Daisy Miller remains in some ways the most relevant blueprint for this girl is both a reflection of the pitfalls of the kind of imperious American white womanhood she represents and also of a literary culture that is still largely hostile to fresh-faced and socially unaware young women. To the first point, Daisy comes off as enlightened against the backdrop of stuffy European mores, but she is from a wealthy Schenedactady family that moves around the world with blissful oblivion. Her context is relative. To the second point, the rarefied culture of prestige literary institutions more closely resemble the social mores of Winterbourne than they do those of Daisy. If you have ever spent time in such spaces, you have probably witnessed or yourself experienced a mental revelation along the lines of Winterbourne’s: a realization that someone (probably, though not necessarily, a young woman) is not owed respect, because they are not respectable. They have failed to play by the rules. 

I was thinking about Daisy Miller after Dirt released a two-part interview with author Kate Zambreno about the re-release of her 2012 book Heroines in a new edition. Heroines, a genre-defying manifesto about being a woman, a wife, a writer, is a loosely but cannily strung together collection of essays exploring other women in the literary canon who have faced similar binds. Zambreno is particularly fascinated by Zelda Fitzgerald, the stormy wife of Scott Fitzgerald, who, in her late 20s, was diagnosed with “schizophrenia” and institutionalized. (She has been posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder, though such a diagnosis seems hard to support.) She was also a writer, but was demeaned and dismissed by the men around her, including by her husband who accused her novel, Save Me the Waltz, of narcissism and also of drawing plot points from his own manuscript, which would be published as Tender Is the Night. Both books, Scott’s and Zelda’s, depict a young married woman descending into mental illness. Zelda, in other words, had committed the crime of plundering her own life for inspiration. 

Zelda is not an especially sympathetic heroine. Her father was a legislator in the Jim Crow south, where she grew up, and she was famously homophobic to both Scott and to Ernest Hemingway. She had affairs and anger issues. Heroines doesn’t deny her any of that. But it also offers a sense of identification with her. A woman pushed to the brink by a world refusing to recognize her. Zambreno herself, at the time, also felt pushed to the brink. Heroines is incredibly raw and vulnerable. In one sequence, she describes meeting up with a man she knows who has recently written an incredibly long book and who is inordinately proud of its length, of the space he is able to take up in the world. Later on, the book is published and garners glowing reviews, is awarded a prize. Zambreno rages. 

Heroines was heavily criticized at the time of its publication. Sheila Heti tries to sympathize with Zambreno in her review and can’t quite muster it. The problem with Zambreno’s canon, she remarks, is that all the women were mad. She is put off by the sweat and tears and menstrual blood. She falls thereby into Zambreno’s trap. Because the whole point of Heroines, after all, is that women’s writing is often considered diaristic, “authentic,” unsophisticated, where men’s writing might be considered “literature.” There is obviously still some truth to this, a decade later. Essays by women, which touch on the personal, are often read as a form of self-excavation. This is particularly true of essays by women of color, which are widely read as uniquely tied to their identities and incapable of higher literary abstraction. For all that she is interested in the personal lives of women, Zambreno chafes against the idea that their writing is simplistic or overtly personal. Even such a personal book as Heroines is not simply a word vomit. It has a more complex literary project. 

If anything has changed in the intervening decade, it is perhaps the tendency to read a wider swath of writing as unfiltered authenticity. This is certainly exacerbated by the internet and by our greater access to writers as online personalities, as I wrote previously about autofiction. In a recent Vulture essay, Tajja Issen detailed the expectation that as a part of their book promotion cycle, authors will write op-eds or personal essays that essentially reduce their books to soundbites. In the case of a memoirist or essayist drawing on personal material, that requires the writer to format their life into a buzzy article which taps into the current zeitgeist and draws clicks. Issen, whose essay collection, Some of my Best Friends, is about how the language of social justice has entered our lexicon without the actual supporting commitment to change, describes how her promotional essays were pegged to “public failures of diversity. Literary figures who were ripe for cancellation.” It forced her, in other words, to become a kind of warrior in an online ecosystem dedicated to brutal infighting. 

In the Dirt interview with Zambreno, editor Daisy Alioto wonders out loud if the contemporary state of women’s writing, “the millennial novel,” relies too heavily on women self-pathologizing; on dissociation, on masochism, on self-loathing, on heteropessism. If so, this may be the grim inheritance of modernism. In “Tenderhearted Men,” an essay published in The New York Times in 1990 and then in her essay collection, The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick reads a series of stories by mid century male writers, which leave her “with the taste of ashes” in her mouth. Liberated from the misogyny of earlier writers such as Hemingway, Carver, Ford, and Dubus all see women, in Gornick’s reading, as fellow victims of modernity. But they are unable to really identify with the women they write. Their only way of accessing women is through the fantasy and nostalgia of a romantic ideal. For these men, trapped in the prison of stoic masculinity, romantic love holds the tantalizing promise of a richer emotional life. But the kind of connection they yearn for is foreclosed precisely by the structures to which they adhere. The protagonist of Ford’s short story “The Sportswriter,” divorced and on the cusp of middle age, floats around in the world, “lost, empty, shocked to the bone by the way it’s all turned out. He feels compassion for women but not empathy. At bottom, they do not remind him of himself.” 

At the book launch I went to for the reissue of Heroines, someone got up midway through the question section and lurched into the conversation to ask Kate Zambreno and Jamie Hood (who was moderating) and maybe anyone else who was there: do you ever still think about Marie Calloway?

We were at a small Ridgewood bookstore and everyone there had choppy bangs and was very elegant and edgy and did, definitively, still think about Marie Calloway. I think Jamie Hood said something polite about how Kate Zambreno had written about Marie Calloway. Zambreno did indeed write a passionate defense back in 2011 of Marie Calloway and of confessional writing and of the kind of conscious self-deprecation Calloway does, stealing back her own space. Zambreno calls her a “cipher girl taking back her own story” and offering a “dumb cunt” answer (paraphrasing from Chris Kraus) to the lofty self-narration of intellectual men.

“If someone wanted to build a young woman specifically for the purpose of being hated by the internet, Calloway was what they would’ve wrought,” wrote Scaachi Koul in a 2021 Buzzfeed reassessment of Calloway’s work and reception. Her one and only book, what purpose did i serve in your life?, which was published by Tyrant Books in 2013, was received with disproportionate anger and derision. Interspersed with the painfully personal, strange, and funny stories that make up the book are a series of black and white collage art pieces that depict parts of Calloway’s naked body, her face with cum on it, her face with insults written over it — insults about her looks, about her intelligence, about her social skills, about her sex life. One simply says “Slut.” They point out the voyeurism of the reader, voracious to consume Calloway as a young girl participating in her own objectification. They anticipate their own critique. 

Reviews from the book’s original publication vary in tone, but tend to criticize the artistic merits of her project, which was read as a simple stream of consciousness diary and as softcore porn, or its ethical quandaries, since some of the men she dated or slept with were clearly identifiable to anyone in the know. Among these, the sad, manipulative man in her best known story “Adrien Brody,” who cheats on his girlfriend with her. She convinces him to meet her by sending him her writing and also photos of herself. He is kind but also patronizing. He shares parts of himself with her that feel hidden and vulnerable, his insecurity about his looks and his social anxiety. Then he gets tired of her, becomes less kind. He is disgusted by himself, you sense, by his desire to have illicit sex with a much younger woman who sees him as an intellectual star. He feels like a stereotype. He breaks it off. 

What is interesting to me about what purpose did i serve in your life? is how much of it deals explicitly with sex work, which Calloway was doing at the time. Although it was read as a kind of prurient exploration of a young woman’s sex life, a lot of it is actually about labor. In this sense, it is distinct from most of the alt lit of its time, which tends to stay focused on what James Duesterg recently called “a mix of status anxiety, self-deprecation and bad-faith moralism—an elitism that has lost the language to justify itself and thus must dissolve into an acid bath of irony.” Calloway’s self-awareness feels more structured and more purposeful since it is also an awareness of exploitation. She is aware she can easily be reduced to a sex worker or a girl who is regularly fucked and that there is no literary quality that can undo that damning lack of respectability. All she can really do is lean into it, point out how the reader is dismissing her, is sexualizing her, is tearing her apart. When she meets Tao Lin (Jeremy Lin, in the story), she is hurt that he doesn’t hit on her since to her it signals a lack of interest in her as a person. He tells her he is only attracted to girls who weigh “like a hundred pounds.” A mutual friend tells her she should take it as a sign of respect. She expects men to just want to sleep with her. But he sees her and admires her as a writer.

For all that Tao Lin has been dragged down by his own controversies, in certain literary circles, his star has endured. By contrast, Marie Calloway’s book is out of print now. She has not continued to write, at least not under the name of “Marie Calloway” (a pseudonym). Although her style of explicit, disaffected writing is very popular now, she has to an extent remained in the shadows. It is hard not to conclude that some of the continued sidelining of her work is precisely because it chronicles her sex work. Zambreno, who has assimilated to the New York literary world for better or for worse and now teaches at Columbia, is married to an art critic. Chris Kraus, the patron saint of young women trying to fuck and also be respected by intellectual men, was married to Sylvère Lotringer until his recent passing. Sylvia Plath, suicidal girl poet par excellence, is inextricably bound up with Ted Hughes even after her death. Daisy Miller, a girl of loose morals, nonetheless had money and social ease backing her up. Women are allocated different levels of expectable messiness before they are truly deemed irredeemably unworthy of respect or before they are totally pathologized. Vivian Gornick argues that with the relegation of adultery or other kinds of illicit sex from a total social transgression to the realm of feeling, the stakes of desire have been lowered. Certainly this is true to some extent. But there are still taboos, ways of being or writing or thinking that condemn you, forever, socially or creatively, to be a woman writing and not simply a writer. 

And that ultimately is the shortcoming of this fucked up girl canon. It cannot really accommodate for the limits of messiness, the kinds of girls who are able to access messiness and bounce back from it and the kinds who are erased and ostracized by it. I would like to think there is a place within it for both, that it is expansive enough to recognize the outcasts. But that requires also reimagining this canon, away from the mad but wealthy socialites or the pseudo-academics reading a lot of Sade or the alienated women who experience their sexual freedom as abjection but are really more disaffected when it comes down to it. It requires a canon that is darker and more desperate and more transgressive, a canon that gives voice to the real strange and creeping corners of womanhood.

I read The End of the Novel of Love recently after a friend recommended it to me. We were in a bar in Chinatown and I was telling her a story about someone who had hurt me and the creative work that had helped me overcome the hurt. I had written my way out of it essentially. She got The End of the Novel of Love out of her bag and read a section out loud to me about Jean Rhys.

“She had known from the time she was young that men and women, especially men, fear their own sensuality, that this fear cuts deep, slicing through intelligence and ordinary decency. If you were passionate, and you aroused passion in a man, he hated youhated and punished and abandoned you She remained vulnerable to this insight all her life, felt herself a sexual innocent repeatedly crushed by the Ford Madox Fords of life and the Mr. Mackenzies of her fiction: men of power who were aroused by her and then turned on her, reviled and humiliated her, left her "all smashed up.”

Not to say, said my friend at the end, that you’re all smashed up. I told her I was well and whole and thriving. But I thought later that maybe I am smashed up. That the beauty of growing up and growing older is that you can be smashed up and still come back together like one of those earthworms that can regrow itself.