Mr Winterbourne Quotes

One of the quotations I found most striking in Daisy Miller was Daisy’s announcement: “I’m a fearful, frightful flirt!” While the other characters in the novel try to define their entire selves by their position and actions in society, Daisy definitively identifies herself as a “flirt.” She places herself outside of the upper class society norms that she enters into whilst in Europe. In a novel that otherwise avoids concretely labeling its characters, Daisy declares her identity with a level of self-awareness far more developed than any other character. In contrast to Daisy stands Mr. Winterbourne. Although Daisy is ready and able to identify herself as a “flirt,” Mr. Winterbourne can only state his emotional reaction: “I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt.” He cannot tell her she is a flirt, only that he fears …show more content…
In studying the quotation, she demonstrates that she understands not only herself very well, but also the two societies she and Mr. Winterbourne come from. After disarming Mr. Winterbourne by her frankness regarding her character, she addresses the difference in what both she and Mr. Winterbourne consider a “nice girl.” For Daisy, being a “nice girl” in New York can also include spending copious amounts of time with gentlemen, such as attending “seventeen dinners [...] three of them were by gentlemen” (11). She is free to be a flirt in her usual habitat, and to be a flirt to the extent of being “fearful” and “frightful,” it is still possible that society considers her a nice girl. However, she also realizes that Mr. Winterbourne does not see her as a very nice girl. For Mr. Winterbourne, a nice girl includes someone who does spend so much alone time with a single man. David Lodge writes that the “unspoken reason for this rule was to guarantee the woman’s virginity when she married” (xviii). In Mr. Winterbourne’s upper class society, women are expected to live sheltered and