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 gear and foremost powerful tragedies because they employ suchuniversal themes as crushed ambitions and wasted lives. And theappeal of each does not lie solely in the darken plot and atmosphere,but in those smallest details James gives us. Omit Daisys strange littlelaughs, delete foot soldiers flinging himself, face down, on Maystomb, and what are we left with? Daisy Miller would be a merecharacter study against the backdrop of clashing American and Euro-pean cultures and The Beast in the Jungle, a very detailed inner daybookof a completely self-absorbed man who deservingly meets his fate inthe end. It is only when we consider the unfulfilled social ambitions ofDaisy Miller and the hopeless, empty life of John Marcher as tragediesthat we begin to feel for these two works and discover the unmistakabledepths that make them so touchingly, and sometimes disturbingly,profound. Their tragic conclusions are about the only aff air thesestories share, though there is a stark difference in the means Henry Jamesapproached his narrative and characterization technique to convey most to the full the underlying tragedies. And yet, despite such differences, whichdraw 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 atragedy, and it has very much to do with our reading experience. Whatwe know about the events slowly unfolding before us, or what theauthor allows us to know, heavily influences the way we feel about thestory and its characters, ... ...knowing that comesfrom reading is sometimes also granted to the characters we are readingabout. Despite the differences in narrative techniques, the two storiesdo fit here. It is sad to leave these stories knowing that part ofthe blame for the fates of the two main characters must actually be puton themselves, but even sadde r to mark off that they are not allowed toremain ignorant forever, to know that they, too, finally realize how theyhave become their own worst enemies. And herein lies the essence oftheir tragedies this illumination (54), this detestation of waking (673). Works CitedJames, 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.