Saturday, August 3, 2019
Comparing Daisy Miller and The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James Essay
     Henry James' Daisy Miller and "The Beast in the Jungle" are first and foremost powerful tragedies because they employ such universal themes as crushed ambitions and wasted lives. And the appeal of each does not lie solely in the darkening plot and atmosphere, but in those smallest details James gives us. Omit Daisy's strange little laughs, delete Marcher's "[flinging] himself, face down, on [May's] tomb," and what are we left with? Daisy Miller would be a mere character study against the backdrop of clashing American and Euro- pean cultures and "The Beast in the Jungle," a very detailed inner diary of a completely self-absorbed man who deservingly meets his fate in the end. It is only when we consider the unfulfilled social ambitions of Daisy Miller and the hopeless, empty life of John Marcher as tragedies that we begin to feel for these two works and discover the unmistakable depths that make them so touchingly, and sometimes disturbingly, profound. Their tragic conclusions are about the only thing these stories share, though; there is a stark difference in the way Henry James approached his narrative and characterization technique to convey most fully the underlying tragedies. And yet, despite such differences, which draw mainly from the use of opposing tones of voice in the two stories, the bleakness of the stories of Daisy and Marcher is unmistakable.      Edith Wharton proposes an interesting theory as to what makes a tragedy, and it has very much to do with our reading experience. What we know about the events slowly unfolding before us, or what the author allows us to know, heavily influences the way we feel about the story and its characters, ... ...knowing that comes from reading is sometimes also granted to the characters we are reading about. Despite the differences in narrative techniques, the two stories do converge here. It is sad to leave these stories knowing that part of the blame for the fates of the two main characters must actually be put on themselves, but even sadder to see that they are not allowed to remain ignorant forever, to know that they, too, finally realize how they have become their own worst enemies. And herein lies the essence of their tragedies: this "illumination" (54), "this horror of waking" (673).                              Works Cited James, Henry. "The Beast in the Jungle." The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. ______. Daisy Miller. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1995.
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