Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ian Kennedy

Critical Essay by Ian Kennedy

SOURCE: "Frederick Winterbourne: The Good Bad Boy in Daisy Miller," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer, 1973, pp. 139-50.

In the following essay, Kennedy examines the character of Winterbourne, concluding that he is puritanical and hypocritical

As James Gargano pointed out in his excellent article, "Daisy Miller: An Abortive Quest for Innocence," critical attention has concentrated obsessively on the heroine of James's most popular nouvelle and has consequently ignored the fact that its central character is, in fact, Frederick Winterbourne [South Atlantic Quarterly, Winter, 1960]. From the time of John Foster Kirk's denunciation of Daisy Miller as "an outrage on American girlhood" [found in Gargano's essay] the debate over the character of Daisy has rolled on inconclusively, but as soon as one recognizes that the only character in the story whom we see from the inside is Winterbourne, and that it is through him that we receive most...
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