Daisy Miller and “The Hotel Child”: A Jamesian Influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald

Abstract

DAISY MILLER AND “THE HOTEL CHILD”: A JAMESIAN INFLUENCE ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Hilton Anderson University of Southern Mississippi The influences of the work of Henry James on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction have been discussed by James E. Miller, Jr., Sergio Perosa, Joseph N. Riddel, and numerous others.1 Henry Dan Piper has discussed the similarities between Daisy Miller and The Great Gatsby, even while admitting that “there is no evidence that Fitzgerald knew Daisy Millerwhen he wrote The Great Gatsby”2 Although Fitzgerald made four trips to Europe in the 1920s, spending a total of four and a half years there, and although he wrote some excellent stories with European settings, he remained purely American and never revealed a knowledge of the subtleties of European life and manners equal to James. Two of Fitzgerald’s stories with European settings are superior: “Babylon Revisited” has elicited more critical commentary than any other of his short stories and is considered by many to be his best, while “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” is “generally acknowledged to be one of his finest short pieces.”3 Neither story, however, deals with European-American relationships in the manner of James. Despite all that has been said of James’ influence on Fitzgerald, this realm of influence has not been extended to the international theme, the one with which James is most readily associated; but there is at least one Fitzgerald story that quite evidently reveals this Jamesian thematic influence. Piper states that while Fitzgerald had perhaps not read the story when he wrote The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller “eventually became one ofhis favorite novels.”4 And it is apparent that he had read Daisy Miller by November 1930, when he wrote “The Hotel Child.”5 “The Hotel Child” begins rather obviously as a parody of Daisy Miller but ends as something of a farce with a detective-story conclusion in which the Europeanized American young lady defeats the “ladies” of the inter­ national set whom Fitzgerald refers to as the “Furies.”6 It becomes apparent very soon that while Fitzgerald did not admire the expatriate Americans and Europeans he was writing about, he had no intention of treating the matter too seriously. To James the name “Daisy Miller” probably sounded commonplace and unaristocratic, but Fitzgerald goes even further in naming his young headstrong, defiant flapper “Fifi Schwartz.” Fifi is Jewish for no apparent reason other than to allow her to have a domineering mother, who, it might be added, is not very successful in controlling either of her children. The main targets of ridicule in the story are European nobility and the group ofAmericans who have lived abroad so long that they have become expatriates of the type found in Daisy Miller: “They were Europeanized Americans, in fact, they had reached a position where they could hardly be said to belong to any nation at all; certainly not to any great power, but perhaps to a sort of Balkanlike state composed of people like themselves” (p. 276). Both of these groups Fitzgerald had recently attacked in “One Trip Abroad.” “The Hotel Child” opens in a Swiss hotel at “the radiantly beautiful” Fifi Schwartz’s eighteenth birthday party (p. 275). Although pursued by dozens of young men, the naive and unsophisticated Fifi is more or less engaged to the young Hungarian Count Stanislas Borowki, who has been pressuring Fifi to marry him. When Fifi’s mother dispatches her to a downtown cafe to rescue her nineteen-year-old brother, John, from the clutches of a penniless Russian countess, the Marquis Kinkallow (called Bopes), who detests Americans, agrees to accompany Fifi since her fiance is at the moment occupied with Miss Howard, an American young lady of the international set. But Bopes makes advances toward Fifi and ends up alone with a dawed-up face. When Fifi returns withJohn, Mrs. Schwartz announces that they are all returning to America. Upon hearing this news, Count Borowki immediately proposes that he and Fifi elope that very night, suggesting that Mrs. Schwartz will be greatly impressed with “the little gilt coronets” (p. 287) painted on Fifi’s luggage. Not wanting to go back to America, Fifi agrees. That same...