Comparing Daisy Miller and The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James Essay

Henry jam Daisy moth miller and The creature in the Jungle are graduation and foremost powerful tragedies because they employ suchuniversal themes as small ambitions and wasted lives. And theappeal of each does not lie solely in the darkening plot and atmosphere,but in those smallest details James gives us. send packing Daisys strange littlelaughs, delete Marchers flinging himself, face down, on Maystomb, and what are we go forth with? Daisy Miller would be a merecharacter study against the desktop of clashing American and Euro-pean cultures and The Beast in the Jungle, a very detailed inner diaryof a completely self-absorbed adult male 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 aspect for these dickens works and discover the unmistakabledepths that make them so touchingly, and sometimes disturbingly,profound. Their tragic co nclusions are rough the only thing thesestories share, though at that place is a stark difference in the way Henry Jamesapproached his narrative and characterization technique to convey mostfully the key tragedies. And yet, despite such differences, whichdraw mainly from the use of opposing tones of phonation 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, severely influences the way we feel about thestory and its characters, ... ...knowing that comesfrom reading is sometimes to a fault granted to the characters we are readingabout. Despite the differences in narrative techniques, the two storiesdo converge here. It is sad to leave these stories knowing that part ofthe find fault for the fates of the two main characters must actually be puton themselves, but even sadder to see that they are not allowed toremain unconditioned forever, to know that they, too, finally realize how theyhave become their own beat out enemies. And herein lies the essence oftheir tragedies this illumination (54), this horror 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. young York Dover Publications Inc., 1995.