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영어

This essay explores how Henry James’s Daisy Miller dramatizes the tension between Winterbourne (studying Daisy to place her in the proper social category) and Daisy (evading Winterbourne’s spying eye to celebrate her sexuality). The narrative starts with Winterbourne’s determination to learn more about “foreign” Daisy to put her into the oppositional category of a good and bad “girl.” However, in the story, Daisy hybridizes her identity by standing in between the oppositional category. The ambiguity of Daisy’s behaviors produces “classificatory confusion” and, for that matter, Winterbourne continue to fail in finding the right formula that can successfully apply to Daisy. Importantly, in the moment Winterbourne thought that he found the right formula that applies to Daisy, Daisy once more escapes from Winterbourne’s definition by disappearing into death. The story ends with Winterbourne’s self-reflective statement that he has been too dependent on conventional values to explain the new womanhood that Daisy expresses. Consequently, it is not Daisy but Winterbourne who is troubled by the “audacious” and resistant gestures Daisy made and learns a lesson in the end of the story. Thus, Daisy Miller starts with a story of Daisy who goes beyond convention and conformity but ends up to be a story of Winterbourne who fails to place Daisy in the social category because he too heavily depended on convention and conformity.