Stories Beyond Words: Free Indirect Discourse and the Raw Material of Narrative in Daisy Miller
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2022
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Haverford College. Department of English
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The Newton Prize in English Literature
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Henry James' Daisy Miller follows Frederick Winterbourne's quest to define the true nature of the novella's title character, but James' true interest is the way Winterbourne makes that discernment. James uses third-person narration but tells much of the story through free indirect discourse, so the reader often encounters Winterbourne's thoughts as if they were the author's own. As a result, Winterbourne authors a story within the story, whose myriad flaws reveal the dangers of understanding the world through narrative, but whose power to shape the events of the novella points to the importance of understanding narrative. I take that double-bind as a jumping-off point, examining the societal narratives James embeds in the novella, the way those narratives structure the minds of his characters, and the elusive structures of those narratives. I argue that James' use of free indirect discourse points to narratives as germinating from non-verbal mental processes—momentary apprehensions of meaning that James rarely narrates but toward whose existence he points in his depictions of conversations. I also argue that Daisy Miller suggests that all narratives contain a degree of ambiguity, though they lead people to make unambiguous conclusions, and can obscure evil but also see it when it is not there. An author must elucidate the way narratives operate within the mind without producing an overly certain narrative. Daisy Miller thus foreshadows the form of James' later novels; their careful narration of mental processes and frequent turns toward uncertainty answer the novella's critiques of traditional narrative forms.