Daisy Miller at Chillon Castle
‘Have you been to that old castle?’ asked the young girl, pointing with her parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the Château de Chillon.
Henry James’s 1878 novella ‘Daisy Miller’ is one of the few classic works of fiction with a plot that revolves around sightseeing.
In company with her ‘gentleman friends’, the heroine, American girl Daisy Miller, visits two of the great monuments of Europe: the Château de Chillon, on the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and the Colosseum in Rome. These two sightseeing excursions are the key to the story’s exploration of human motives and emotions. One leads to love, and the other brings death.
In 2015 I had the chance to recreate Daisy’s crossing by steamer from the little lakeside town of Vevey to the rocky fortress of Chillon. I don’t know when I’ve ever been so excited about a forthcoming journey, even though it was only going to last about twenty minutes!
That’s because I’ve spent so much time thinking about James’s story. I used to teach ‘Daisy Miller’ to undergraduate students and I wrote a critical essay about its theme of tourism. I’ve also seen and admired the 1974 Peter Bogdanovich film adaptation with Cybill Shepherd in the title role.
It was always intriguing to me how easily my young female students identified with the character of Daisy and empathized with her experience of being judged and misunderstood. I also loved the atmosphere of romance Henry James wove around the castle and how, with few words, he was able to convey the immense importance for Daisy of her visit there.
When the day came for my own visit to Chillon I was almost beside myself with excitement. The experience turned out to be every bit as inspiring as I’d anticipated. As with Dravuni Island, this was a perfect fit between reading and travelling. The sail across the water surrounded by magnificent Alpine scenery was breathtakingly beautiful. On arrival, the castle presented exactly the mixture of grace and sternness that James describes.
And I liked the feeling of being in a literary echo chamber. For late nineteenth-century tourists like Daisy Miller, part of Chillon’s appeal was that the famous Lord Byron had previously visited and written a poem about it (‘The Prisoner of Chillon’). Now the castle gift shop promotes both its Byron and its Henry James associations.
It’s funny how things turn out. Having dreamt about visiting Chillon for ages, and after finally organizing my own trip in 2015, I was given the opportunity to return last year, this time in an excursion from the adjacent town of Montreux. As a guest of Switzerland Tourism, I marvelled once again at the sight of the country’s most visited historic monument in all its fairytale loveliness. And on this second visit there were bonuses – a castle-building workshop showcasing Chillon’s educational program (gothic arches are hard!) and a very atmospheric tasting of wine from the château’s own vineyard, accompanied by Swiss cheeses, in the stone dungeon.
Chillon is one of my absolute favourite European travel experiences and although I’ve now been there twice, I’d return in a heartbeat if the opportunity came around again. I was thrilled to be able to include the château in my story about Montreux, Switzerland, which has just been published in issue #2 of the Australian magazine Audrey Daybook. The magazine is available in supermarkets and newsagents this week and will be on sale for the next two months. Please take a look at my article if you’re interested not just in Chillon but also in all the other wonderful things you can see and do in and around Montreux, with its spectacular setting on the shore of Lake Geneva. There’s also a condensed version of the story online.
‘Daisy Miller’ shows that sight-seeing need not be a superficial activity, and that even though we tend to place the highest value on getting ‘off the beaten track’, well-worn tourist trails can also lead to profoundly interesting places. No one would ever call Daisy a traveller – she’s a tourist through and through. And that’s OK. How many of us can say that we’ve had our lives transformed by an afternoon of sightseeing? James’s story suggests that it’s possible. All you need is a little imagination.
