English 015 - Americans Abroad
Prisons
Prisons
Category: 1E: Twain, James, Wharton | Meaghan Tanguay
English 015
Americans Abroad
1st paper, Final Draft
Prisons
By: Meaghan Tanguay
The discovery of new sexual licenses by the women characters, Daisy Miller and Mrs. Ansley, while they are traveling abroad, is a fraud. They both enjoy many sexual adventures with European men which are new and exciting for them. However, these sexual adventures end up imprisoning the girls, to different degrees, rather than setting them sexually free. Revisiting Daisy Miller’s adventures and their impact shows a clear similarity and slight difference to the impact of Mrs. Ansley’s covert rendezvous. Their trysts and affairs are illusions of happiness and sexual freedom. The reality under the illusions is tragic: Daisy dies and Mrs. Ansley ruins her life and the life of her good friend Mrs. Slade.
The pretty, innocent American, Daisy Miller, firsts meets Winterbourne, an older European gentleman, in Switzerland. He judges her as a young, inexperienced, and ignorant American girl. Right away, Winterbourne finds it acceptable to approach her. He is used to the custom that “in Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man wasn’t at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady save under certain rarely-occurring conditions.” (p.8) The rarely-occurring condition, for Winterbourne, is that Daisy Miller is an American girl. Winterbourne is excited to find out from the beginning that her sexual freedom is expansive. She is allowed to visit the Castle of Chillon or possible go out on a boat at night alone with him, and he is “instantly struck with the romantic side of this chance to guide through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl.” (p.31) Winterbourne will later find out just how far Daisy is allowed to take her sexual escapades in Rome.
In Rome, Mrs. Walker sees Daisy “flirting with any man she can pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night” while her mother does nothing about it. (p.55) Daisy also enjoys meeting Giovanelli frequently for late night excursions, flirt freely, “Giovanelli took her parasol out of her hands and opened it. She came a little nearer and he held the parasol over her; then, still holding it, he let it so rest on her shoulder that both of their heads were hidden from Winterbourne.” (p.57) The most explicit example of Daisy’s sexual freedom is with Giovanelli at the Colosseum. Winterbourne stumbles onto Daisy and Giovanelli enjoying the moonlight late at night. He confronts them angrily because of their disregard for Daisy’s health. She is defiant. “’I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be!’ Mademoiselle declares. ‘I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight-I wouldn’t have wanted to go home without that.” (p.76) She is reckless with these “scandalous adventures” (p.77) and they end up constricting her socially and killing in the end.
Despite her flirtatious freedoms and late night trysts with Giovanelli, she is actually constructing her own sexual prison. She is restrained and cannot show her true desire for Winterbourne until it is too late. She becomes a casualty in her prison and a martyr of her sexual freedoms because she is careless with her affection and her health. Her careless public sexual flirtations leave her with a reputation that the European high social class will not let her escape. This reputation precedes her everywhere and eventually suffocates her out of the European society she desperately wants to break into. Winterbourne notices, “Daisy was never at home and he ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because these shrewd people had ceased to invite her, intimating that they wish to make, and make strongly, for the benefit of observant Europeans, the point that though Miss Daisy Miller was a pretty American girl all right, her behavior wasn’t pretty at all-was in fact regarded by her compatriots as quite monstrous.” (p.69) Daisy sacrifices her social life and her relationship with Winterbourne by going around with Giovanelli. She is socially ostracized and locked into a prison of her current social standing. In the constraints of her social and sexual prison she succumbs to a defiant, self destructing and self sacrifice state of mind which kills her. It is at the end when Daisy is on her death bed and liberated to say anything she wants, that she reveals her feelings for Winterbourne. Mrs. Daisy reveals to Winterbourne that Daisy, “wanted you to know she never was engaged to that handsome Italian who was always round. I don’t know why she makes so much of it, but she said to me three times ‘Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then she told me to ask you remember the time you went up to that castle in Switzerland.” (79) It is tragic that the sexual freedom Daisy flaunts all over Rome restricts and ends Daisy life at such a young age. This tragic theme is also carried through Mrs. Ansley’s and Mrs. Slade’s story of sexual freedoms overseas, although they do not share the same abrupt fate as Daisy.
When Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade are young girls in Rome they also experience sexual freedoms like Daisy Miller. In the Forum above the ruins, the two women revisit the past experiences as young sexual girls liberated in Rome. They talk about their sexual freedoms and late night trysts with young European men. Reminiscing about their sexual pasts, Mrs. Ansley reflects on her most freeing sexual rendezvous at the Colosseum, the secret lover’s meeting place at the time. She reminisces, “Yes. It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere.” (p.757) It is this rendezvous, this sexually freeing experience, which Mrs. Ansley has with Mrs. Slade’s fiancé that imprisons her sexually, because she becomes pregnant, and ruins her friendship with Mrs. Slade.
However freeing in the moment Mrs. Ansley’s tryst was with Delphin, Mrs. Slade’s fiancé, the lasting consequences are onerous. Mrs. Ansley becomes pregnant with Barbara. It is the last freedom Mrs. Ansley has. She has no other choice than to quickly be married away to protect the ruining extant of her sexual freedom in Rome on her reputation. Mrs. Slade remembers, “As soon as you could get out of your bed ‘after getting sick with fever’ your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you.” (p.760) Mrs. Slade thinks Mrs. Ansley is jealous and wants to get married before her. However, Mrs. Ansley reveals to Mrs. Slade the truth about the baby, she conceived with Delphin, and the reason for her quick marriage. Mrs. Ansley’s sexual freedom destroys her friendship with Mrs. Slade and sends her into the imprisonment of marriage with a burdensome secret about a child with another man. Although Mrs. Ansley does seem to have some personal redemption in revealing the secret to Mrs. Slade and she does not die because of her sexual freedom overseas, as does Daisy Miller, Mrs. Ansley is imprisoned in a forced marriage because of one night in Rome of sexual freedom.
In these two examples of lives confined and then destroyed by “sexual freedoms” abroad echo in the settings in which they take place. It is not a coincidence that Edith Wharton places Mrs. Ansely’s and Mrs. Slade's meeting at the sight of ancient ruins in Rome. He sets up the scene for their last gathering as friends where their secrets unfold and their friendship is ruined. The ancient ruins, symbolically parallel the lives and the relationship these two women had with each other. Similarly, Henry James places Daisy in the Colosseum for her last self-sacrificing tryst with Giovanelli. Her performance is worthy of a Roman audience. She sets up her death beautifully on the symbolical stage at the Colosseum. At this point Daisy is a slave to her “sexual freedom” which has placed her at center of the Colosseum and the Roman upper class society, to be slaughter as an example of reckless, uncultured, uncivilized Americans abroad.
Posted by on October 02, 2003 at 01:33 PM
Comments
Right out of the gate you prove yourself a deft arguer & a strong reader. Though there are a few awkward patches here – in particular, you need to rid yourself of a habit of sticking in commas where they don’t belong, and sometimes pronouns are confusing – there are also more than a few impressive passages: moments, particularly at each ends of your paragraphs, when it is quite clear that you’re in full control of this argument.
And it’s an interesting argument: not obvious, but quite believable after you take us through these parallel patterns of sexual freedom turned imprisonment. The intro makes a couple of missteps (European men? Mrs. Ansley? And it’s better to mention what that ‘slight difference’ between these stories is, rather than leave it hanging as a mystery), but it does clearly name the pattern you’re out to analyze.
I was surprised that the DM analysis was so Winterboune-centered. While that does allow you to make the point that Daisy is behaving with surprising recklessness, the danger is that you might distract us into thinking about W’s own behavior: was he reckless to abandon the Geneva convention & approach D in the first place? In general you seem a little hesitant to come up with textual evidence of what D might be really thinking & wanting while behaving so freely. That might be a symptom of the novel’s male point of view, but I think you could have better substantiated your claim that D really wanted W even as she imprisoned herself through free behavior.
The RF analysis, on the other hand, is really well-managed: you really dig around in Wharton’s text to come up with clues that might justify your interesting reading of Mrs. A’s life, constricted by a moment of sexual recklessness. It might seem that she triumphs at the end of the story, but your analysis suggest that it’s no accident that she’s so timid-seeming throughout the tale.
The conclusion is great: you hone in on the Coliseum and sensible leave us thinking about sacrifice. We put down this essay with a strong vision of Americans both seduced and sacrificed by the same foreign ground.