Daisy Miller. P.S. There's a movie! (That's super old).

The author who wrote “Editor’s Easy Chair” talks about how Daisy Miller “represents a young American woman…and describes the unconscious manner in which she devastates the accepted usages of society, doing, with perfect innocence and pure maidenhood, what in Europe is done only by women who are not innocent. She is one of the young women who amaze European society and give a strange reputation to American girls” (Harper 780).

Winterbourne is the stereotypical European and when he notices that Daisy Miller is attractive he says "American girls are the best girls”. All he can think about is how pretty she is. He is blind to anything else except for her beauty.
He is not familiar with how American act and so he is confused by her yet charmed at the same time. James writes that “Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed”. He couldn’t decide if she was just a pretty girl from the states “Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person”.

Through Winterbourne James paints the picture of Europeans having no instinct or reason to be able to help them decipher whether American women. Winterbourne decides that “Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent” but some people had told him that they weren’t. He finally decides that Daisy Miller is “a pretty American flirt”.
Although Winterbourne is unfamiliar with Americans he compares Daisy to the relationships that he has had with European women whom were “coquettes” and were dangerous and terrible women. He says that Daisy is unsophisticated and a flirt and see where this takes him.

Daisy on the other hand doesn’t seem to notice that she is acting any different than the other girls. When Winterbourne suggest that someone stays with her younger brother so that they both can go see the monuments she naively says that Winterbourne himself can stay with him. The fact that Daisy Miller is not a coquette like some other European women astonishes and amazes Winterbourne, the classic European man. He doesn’t quite know what to do with her and he can’t figure her out.

Jewett's A White Heron

During my fact sheet I talked about how “A White Heron” could be looked at through a “coming of age” lens. At the end of my fact sheet I gave part of the text that I felt showed this, so I wanted to talk about it more here.

“There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and hopeful Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it”

I think that the huge tree symbolizes life in general and Sylvia’s braveness to mount to the top of it shows her growing up and facing what life has to throw at her.

“with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird's claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself.”

This line describes the sexuality that this young girl is feeling at this age.
“First she must mount the white oak tree that grew alongside, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker.”

Getting lost among the branches shows how hard life is and how difficult it is to grow up. Sometimes it’s not easy to find our way. We don’t know exactly what we’re doing or which way is the right way to go and sometimes we will get lost. This paints the perfect picture to describe this.

“Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak's upper branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close together.”

This shows that coming into adulthood doesn’t have to always be hard. It can come easily in some areas and in some instances. For Sylvia, she had often climbed this area, so this particular road in her life wasn’t going to be too rough.

“There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the great enterprise would really begin.”

The change from familiar to unfamiliar is the toughest part. Once could say that this might be the leaving the nest part. Sylvia realizes the dangers of change and how much of an adventure life really would be from now on once she passed from one tree to the next.

Photographs

In Natalie Houston’s text "Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War", she talks about how photographs of this time look staged because they would have to pause for a few moments to take the picture. People had never seen war photographs before, and so they thought these pictures were amazing and awes-inspiring.

However, in reality, real and stage pictures of this group often times portray relaxation. She talks about how these photographs downplay the labor of war because it presents the times in which people were relaxing and not the busy stressful side of things.

Houston says that “By focusing on the officers and portraying them in this stylized manner, the real hardships faced by the troops are minimized”. This is true because instead of showing the action of what’s truly going on the viewer is painted a different picture. The picture that is painted here is one that’s saying everything is effortless and undemanding.




In this photograph that I found we are shown these things. There is a man hanging out on the back of a wagon. Nothing is really happening in the photograph besides this. We don’t get a war scene in the background or any other action, making it seem like nothing important is going on. Of course, war is more than nothing important, but these pictures don’t show this.

Levi's and Whitman

When I watched the Levi ad’s I would have never guessed that it was Walt Whitman’s voice. It’s interesting to me that there are people who would recognize a dead man’s voice. The ad’s are kind of entertaining. I can see how they relate with what Walt Whitman is saying in his poetry, but again I would never have noticed that unless someone pointed it out to me.

McCracken says that advertising has taken the job of what Whitman thought was the poets, he says, “Whitman redefines the poet’s relationship to the reader in much the same way that early advertisers invented a relation between consumers and products. . . . What gave advertising such a strong position in antebellum culture is that it began to define its audience as subjects who occupied a unique position in regard to it. People were no longer pedestrians or readers; they were spectators, consumers, witnesses, and bodies in need of healing.”

If you think of it in the way that McCracken describes it then I would say that Levi’s campaign is celebrating Walt Whitman’s project. What they’re advertising is the self and America and being an individual and respecting and appreciating nature, which is what is portrayed in Whitman’s text as well as the Levi’s ads.

Levi’s wants their country to absorb them just like Whitman says that the poet should be absorbed by his country. Through this campaign they are able to do this.
Whitman’s texts and Levi’s jeans’ promises both guarantee “self-fulfillment, independence, and the kind of charismatic individuality that will make us the center of every crowd”. Although I think that this is a stretch and a matter of personal opinion on both parts I think that it works. They are celebrating Whitman because they are using his ideas to enhance not only their business and their profits but individualism and having pride in being an American as well.

I think that McCracken’s idea of advertisers playing the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras is interesting to think about. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that statement completely, but they do play a huge role on influencing people and persuading them to make a decision one way or the other.