Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [107]
We opened the book to the crucial scene at the Colosseum. Daisy, defying all caution and decorum, has gone to watch the moonlight with Mr. Giovanelli, an unscrupulous Italian who follows her everywhere, to the chagrin of her correct countrymen and -women. Winterbourne discovers them, and his response says more about his character than hers: “Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror; and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy’s behavior and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect.”
Daisy’s night at the Colosseum is fatal to her in more ways than one: she catches the Roman fever that night from which she will die. But her death is almost predetermined by Winterbourne’s reaction. He has just declared his indifference, and when she returns to the carriage to leave, he recommends that she take her pills against Roman fever. “ ‘I don’t care,’ said Daisy, in a strange little tone, ‘whether I have Roman fever or not.’ ” We all agreed in class that, symbolically, the young man’s attitude towards Daisy determines her fate. He is the only one whose good opinion she desires. She is constantly asking him what he thinks about her actions. Without ever telling him, she poignantly and defiantly desires that he prove his devotion to her not by preaching, but by approving of her as she is, without any preconditions. It is ironic that ultimately Daisy is the one who really cares, and proves her devotion by dying.
Winterbourne was not the only one to feel relief on discovering the answer to Daisy’s riddle. Many of my students shared his relief. Miss Ruhi asked why the novel did not end with Daisy’s death. Did that not seem the best place to stop? Daisy’s death seemed like a nice ending for all parties concerned. Mr. Ghomi could gloat over the fact that she had paid for her sins with her life, and most others in the class could now sympathize with her without any feeling of guilt.
But this is not the end. The novel ends just as it started, not with Daisy but with Winterbourne. At the beginning of the story, his aunt warned him that he was in danger of making a grave mistake about Daisy. She had meant that he could be duped by her. Now, after Daisy’s death, Winterbourne ironically reminds his aunt, “ ‘You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.’ ” He had underestimated Daisy.
At the beginning of the novel, the narrator tells us of a rumor that Winterbourne is attached to a foreign woman. The novel ends, bringing us around full circle, with this same statement: “Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is ‘studying’ hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady.”
The reader, who has identified with the hero until that moment, is left out in the cold. We are left to believe that Daisy, like the flower she is named after, is a beautiful and brief interruption. But this conclusion also is not wholly true. The narrator’s tone at the end leads us to doubt if Winterbourne could ever see life the way he saw it before. Nothing will really be the same again, either for Winterbourne or for the unsuspecting reader—as I had occasion to find out much later, when my former students went back to their “mistakes” about Daisy in their writings and conversations.
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In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce “art as a human complication and social stumbling block,” my friend Mina reminded me. This is what made James so difficult. Mina was a scholar of James and I had told her about my students’ difficulties with Daisy Miller. Mina added, a little anxiously, I hope you