Discreetly Depicting "an outrage": Graphic Illustration and "Daisy Miller"'s Reputation

Abstract

" was rejected by a Philadelphia magazine because (a friend surmised) "it could only have passed with the Philadelphia critic for 'an outrage on American girlhood'" (NT 18: v). It was serialized, nonetheless, by one magazine in London, pirated by another in Boston, and published as a book on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as included within James's short-story collections. The novella divided the world (William Dean Howells claimed) into "Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites" and was adapted for the stage but never produced. In its most recent form, "Daisy Miller" appeared as Peter Bogdanovich's 1974 motion picture, in which Bogdanovich's then-girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd, embodied the pouting ingénue. "Daisy Miller" also appeared in a hitherto neglected, visual, but pre-cinematic Jamesian form. The artist Harry Whitney McVickar and the editors at Harper and Brothers published the first illustrated "Daisy Miller" in 1892, fourteen years after readers formed their initial mental pictures of Daisy but some eighty years before Shepherd's movie portrayal. Daisy's first illustrator probably knew her as "an outrage on American girlhood" when he staged her visual-arts debut. The heroine and the novella already had a reputation, one might say, when Daisy Miller made her first appearance in visual illustrations. One might well say that-if, indeed, she had fully appeared in the edition's illustrations. In truth, she does not. McVickar's images for his 1892 "Daisy Miller" virtually omit the heroine. They consign her to a stylish frontispiece that depicts her at a distance (and shows her from the back). They never once picture her face directly nor grant readers a view of her profile. McVickar seems in fact to present everything but Daisy, as fancy curlicues, elaborate calligraphy, renderings of sugar cubes, Alpine landscapes, and depictions of minor characters adorn the volume and manifest McVickar's attention to design and decorum but leave uninformed observers, who pick up the volume at random, without a clue as to the tale's conflict, Winterbourne's

The Femme Fatale in Vogue: Femininity Ideologies in Fin-de-siècle America

“…The femme fatale imagery here was created by the versatile and then prominent artist, and the initial art director of Vogue , Harry Whitney McVickar, who had also provided illustrations for Daisy Miller —a novella by Henry James ((2012) [1878])—in its first illustrated edition in 1892. As such, there are similarities in illuminating the characters of the heroine Daisy Miller in the frontispiece and the femme fatale here: a discreet manner in portraying indecorous American girlhood without visually documenting the transgressions and indiscretions (Sonstegard 2008). She also foreshadows McVickar’s (1896) book, The Evolution of Women , a cautionary tale in which he illustrated the social Darwinism that could be applied to gender politics with the progression in women’s fashion: from skirts to bloomers and breeches.…”