"She Did What She Liked!": Ethics of Freedom and Desire in Henry James's "Daisy Miller"

Revising J. Hillis Miller's account of ethics from the perspectives of Kant's philosophy of freedom and Lacan's theory of desire, this essay offers an alternative ethical criticism of Daisy Miller. The critical tendency to regard Daisy as a cultural type representing American innocence misses Daisy's singularity and reduces the novella's ethical dimension to Winterbourne's reading of her. Measured according to fidelity to one's desire, the core of Lacanian ethics, Daisy exemplifies the ethical act of risking one's socio-symbolic identity in defiance of cultural mandates and confronting fatal consequences, thereby embodying innocence without the guilt of ceding desire.