SOURCE: "Death of a Hero? Winterbourne & Daisy Miller," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 6, Fall, 1969, pp. 601-8.

Draper is an English author and educator. In the following essay, he studies the character of Winterbourne, and demonstrates the ways in which he is the central figure in Daisy Miller.

"She goes on from day to day, from hour to hour," says Mrs. Costello of the heroine of Daisy Miller, "as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar." This unconscious echo (unconscious, that is, as far as Mrs. Costello is concerned) of As You Like It lends a comic absurdity to her notion of vulgarity. It is perhaps true that to lead the free, untrammelled life of the Forest of Arden in the formally moral, but, in reality, cynical atmosphere of Rome is a kind of sentimental indulgence possible only to the unsophisticated, "vulgar" mind...