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weren’t any supernatural forces at work here. But you don’t need fangs and a cape to be a vampire. The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman. Okay, let’s see now. Winter bourne and Daisy carry associations of winter—death, cold—and spring—life, flowers, renewal—that ultimately come into conflict (we’ll talk about seasonal implications in a later chapter), with winter’s frost destroying the delicate young flower. He is considerably older than she, closely associated with the stifling Euro-Anglo-American society. She is fresh and innocent—and here is James’s brilliance—so innocent as to appear to be a wanton. He and his aunt and her circle watch Daisy and disapprove, but because of a hunger to disapprove of someone, they never cut her loose entirely. They play with her yearning to become one of them, taxing her energies until she begins to wane. Winterbourne mixes voyeurism, vicarious thrills, and stiff-necked disapproval, all of which culminate when he finds her with a (male) friend at the Colosseum and chooses to ignore her. Daisy says of his behavior, “He cuts me dead!” That should be clear enough for anyone. His, and his clique’s, consuming of Daisy is complete; having used up everything that is fresh and vital in her, he leaves her to waste away. Even then she asks after him. But having destroyed and consumed her, he moveson, not sufficiently touched, it seems to me, by the pathetic spectacle he has caused.
    So how does all this tie in with vampires? Is James a believer in ghosts and spooks? Does “Daisy Miller” mean he thinks we’re all vampires? Probably not. I believe what happens here and in other stories and novels ( The Sacred Fount [1901] comes to mind) is that he deems the figure of the consuming spirit or vampiric personality a useful narrative vehicle. We find this figure appearing in different guises, even under nearly opposite circumstances, from one story to another. On the one hand, in The Turn of the Screw, he uses the literal vampire or the possessing spook to examine a certain sort of psychosocial imbalance. These days we’d give it a label, a dysfunctional something or other, but James probably only saw it as a problem in our approach to child rearing or a psychic neediness in young women whom society disregards and discards. On the other hand, in “Daisy Miller,” he employs the figure of the vampire as an emblem of the way society—polite, ostensibly normal society—battens on and consumes its victims.
    Nor is James the only one. The nineteenth century was filled with writers showing the thin line between the ordinary and the monstrous. Edgar Allan Poe. J.S. Le Fanu, whose ghost stories made him the Stephen King of his day. Thomas Hardy, whose poor heroine in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) provides table fare for the disparate hungers of the men in her life. Or virtually any novel of the naturalistic movement of the late nineteenth century, where the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest reign. Of course, the twentieth century also provided plenty of instances of social vampirism and cannibalism. Franz Kafka, a latter-day Poe, uses the dynamic in stories like “The Metamorphosis” (1915) and “A Hunger Artist” (1924), where, in a nifty reversal of the traditional vampire narrative, crowds of onlookers watch as the artist’s fasting consumes him. Gabriel García Márquez’s heroine Innocent Eréndira, in the tale bearing her name (1972), is exploited and put out to prostitution by her heartless grandmother. D. H. Lawrence gave us any number of short stories where characters devour and destroy one another in life-and-death contests of will, novellas like “The Fox” (1923) and even novels like Women