“Daisy Miller dies from having an Italian friend and going outside”

by Mallory Ortberg · November 6, 2014

Like, Daisy Miller ended up being a four-parter, which is really funny because I don’t think of Daisy Miller as being one of the biggest names in the canon. But something about that book really cracks me up. Everyone is such a dick to Daisy Miller! And she literally dies from having a friend who’s Italian. That’s what kills her, is she befriends an Italian man and goes outside. And she dies! That’s hilarious to me.

You can always find me talking about terminal cases of “being friends with Italian men” in literary history. Very silly, literary history.

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25 Comments

  1. redheadedwolf +49

    Daisy Miller is honest-to-God one of my favorite stories, though it is dumb she has to die from consumption at the end. But I’ll love it forever and give Henry James a pass for everything else, just for this line:

    “I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.”

    It still pisses men off today, I find.

  2. rkfire +54

    Ghost! Oh, Ghost, somehow I had forgotten and now I am a little sad as I remember that series of posts.

    *pours one out for Ghost, a very normal thing to do about a fictional character that lives in a cell phone*

    5. Peanutcheese +8

      Ghoooosssttt! That series made me cry, which was unexpected because I think the first time I found it I was reading through the ‘texts from’ archive, and crying did not really enter my mind as a possible reaction to that series (except laugh-crying, which is a given).

      I managed to just about keep it together through the Jack O’Lantern texts from piece though. http://the-toast.net/2013/10/30/text-messages-jac…

    6. zachariahary +5

      Ahhh I just read Ghost for the first time because of this. What the heck?! I was looking for some chuckles but instead found only a whole lotta FEELS.

  3. plspassthePinot +23

    Fan girl moment: I love how much all these journalist fall under Mallory’s charm immediately. Its like, YEAH, you get it, rt?

    Also: Clue mystery books were THE.SHIT.

  4. middlemarch +19

    Ooh! Ooh! Can we talk about Where Angels Fear to Tread? I’m the biggest Forster person in the world, but that is some CLASSIC being friends Italian dudes leads to death stuff.

  5. MRTK +8

    The Clue books! Yes! I collected every single one. I distinctly remember being ineffably upset at a family Thanksgiving because, in the narrative I’d just read, Mr. Boddy’s favorite blanket (“blankie”) had been stolen, and he was disconsolate. Poor Mr. Boddy! It was a heartbreaking symbol of my then-impending adolesence, I now realize! (In the next chapter he got murdered, but “blankie” upset me much more.)

    Also there were Clue Jr. books, for some reason, which gave me serious cognitive dissonance. I remember badgering a very confused local-bookstore employee because I wanted the Clue books “for grown-ups, not the little kids’ ones.” It wasn’t until years later that I realized they were ALL for children…

    1. summerestherson +8

      I loved those books too! But now I’m unsure which version I had? The kids’ version or the kiddie kids’ version?

      Does anyone remember one where they did a cola taste test? Nobody even got murdered, to the best of my recollection! They just tried various cola brands? Did I fever dream that?

      1. longlostlullaby +19

        That would probably be the regular kids version. There were a lot of stories where they just did things like bake cookies or drive cars or get pogo sticks and no one got murdered. Just mean-spirited people being jerks to each other and taking advantage of their millionaire friend, ie, my goal in life.

    2. longlostlullaby +6

      I loved those books so much! I was actually just looking at the wikipedia entry for the books the other day because I was watching Clue (some murder for my Halloween) and it made me think of the books. I was hoping maybe there had been some more published that I’d never read and I could go read some books made for 11 year olds. There were no new books. Not for like 17 years. It still made me sad.

  6. winterbymorning +18

    I’d like a Dirtbag Colette post, but literally everybody in every Colette book is a massive dirtbag. Claudine à l’école alone, oh my god.

    (Fun story: my high school librarian refused to let me borrow Claudine à l’école when I was in 8th grade because it wasn’t “age-appropriate.” My French teacher intervened on my behalf and said she was sure I was mature enough to read any book in the school library, but I don’t think she was told this specific book was about occasionally-abuse teenage lesbian love quadrangles.)

  8. thebellewitch +7

    Oh my gosh, my copy of Texts From Jane Eyre arrived and Daisy Miller is one of my favorites so far. I’m not phrasing it exactly, but the exchange “She went for a walk at night with an Italian/Yeah that would kill anybody” was just beautiful.

  9. thebellewitch +2

    WAIT I JUST READ THE INTERVIEW. Mallory, you’re reading “Salvation on Sand Mountain”!!! I love/have ambivalent feelings about/am fascinated by that book. Everyone needs to read that book so we can all talk about it endlessly.

    1. leslieellenjones +8

      Ready, willing, and able. Snake handlers are endlessly fascinating. They always get in the news when they die, but it’s astonishing how often they don’t (until, of course, they do). Also just so calls into question what, exactly, do we mean by the US being “Christian” if this counts as Christian. This is the end result of literacy, people. You let just anyone read the Bible, and there are some of them who are going to come up with snake handling. And why not.

    2. SarahDances +8

      Fun story! An old friend of my dad’s bred poisonous snakes, and had a booming business selling rattlesnakes to the snake handlers! I don’t know why I always found that so neat, but there you have it.

    3. Gingersnap +4

      I was the production editor for that book, many years ago. Did you know that it was nominated for the National Book Award? I was so proud of that! Fascinating material and wonderful writing.