Walking as a Gendered Practice: Travel and Transgressions in Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) and The Wings of the Dove (1902)

This essay investigates the gendered practice of taking a walk in two works of Henry James, his early success Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) and his later-phase masterpiece The Wings of the Dove (1902). We focus on James’s women protagonists, the titular Daisy Miller and Wings’ Milly Theale and, specifically, their desire to walk unhindered through the European cities they are visiting, Rome and London, respectively. The simple activity of going for a walk in an unknown city, this essay argues, points beyond the scope of the streets traversed; it becomes a practice of self-assertion. Both narratives draw on the deep-seated connotations of transgression and deviance with which travelling women have long been associated. We begin by addressing travel as transgression and look at the cultural-historical context of women travellers in which James places his heroines. Our major objective is to map the ways in which James’s treatment of the woman pedestrian has changed over the decades between the two works. To this end, we explore the gender-determined restrictions to mobility in the two case studies and bring out the pleasure that both protagonists derive from bypassing those restraints, the pleasure of travelling and walking freely, in their own distinct ways.