Ignorance In Daisy Miller's Death

710 Words2 Pages

Ignorance Brings Death

In the late 19th century both American and European encountered gender inequality; the males being higher up the hierarchical. During the time period it was exceedingly inappropriate for an unmarried woman to socialize with the opposite gender without the presence of a chaperon. In the novel, “Daisy Miller”, Daisy continuously contravenes these simple European social requirements. It was quite apparent that Daisy Miller death was brought upon herself because she refused to go by European social standards and neglected the warnings.
Despite many of the mistakes Daisy Miller conducted, critics deemed Daisy to still be innocent. These critics assert that Daisy's own death was conceived due to the environmental factors and the American culture she grew up in. That the reason “she was very unsophisticated [was because] she was only a pretty American flirt” (James 6). This, however, is erroneous. The young woman, Daisy Miller, brought forth her own death all because she refused to fit into the European society and in fact even her own American society. In both European and American societies females were expected to protect their virtue. This meant avoiding interaction amongst men and staying late out into the night. However, Daisy fails to follow these simple society guidelines from both …show more content…

She understood her society’s rules but simply overlooked them. Instead she gave into her selfish desires. The case was not that she was naive or innocent, but arrogant. What truly made Daisy ill was her arrogance of not complying with the European social standards and insisting going on a late night stroll to the Colosseum. Daisy's “fate was her carelessness of [her] manners of restraint” (Ohmann 7). If she had only obliged with warnings of those around her and have not gone on a late night stroll or associate herself with foreign men, she would have never been infected with malaria and met her

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