WOMEN in SOCIETY and DAISY MILLER
Over the years men and women have developed different roles in society and culture is very effective on characteristics of these roles. Unfortunately this especially affects women. Even in today's modern and progressive society, women continue to be judged more harshly than men for their behavior, particularly when it comes to sexual impropriety. The interesting point in here, we often see also other women acting as a woman’s harshest critics in society and this is very common in many societies, including Turkish society, around the world. So this topic has been the subject of many literary works. An example of these works is Daisy Miller written by Henry James, who is an American writer. This novella was published in 1878 but its topic is still fresh for our time and in here “women are painted as the ultimate judge of morality; but the women, not men, seem to be the only ones judged and held accountable to society for their actions.” (Murphy, 2007)
Daisy is an American girl with no worries about how others perceive her in a vastly different cultural environment. She feels herself free to behave as she wants, because of this she becomes the object of gossip among the American circles in Geneva and Rome which pride themselves on conforming to European standards of behavior. Winterbourne is also an American, but he has been raised in Europe. He is acquainted with the culture but has been in Europe so long that it has caused him to become a European of his own. When they meet, he thinks she is very attractive and beautiful but he confuses because of her behaviors and immediately he tries to categorize her whether she is a “good” girl or not. He doesn’t try to understand her or her feelings he mainly focuses on “solve” her. He doesn’t understand a girl can have more than one personality traits.
As stated in an article written by Diane Murphy “Society typically categorizes women into "good girls" or "bad girls", "ladies" or...