of fifty more pounds, Boodle is pressed into service for a third
attempt. When Sophie asks him if Boodle is an English name, he
replies, "Altogether English, I believe. Our Boodles come out of
Warwickshire; small property near Leamington--doosed small, I'm
sorry to say." When he utterly fails in his embassy, he feels "quite
entitled to twit her with the payment she had taken," and asks about
his friend's seventy pounds that she has taken. More ridicule. Boodle
is routed. Madame Gordeloupe finds that longer speeches in a tongue
not her own are more effective:
"Suppose you go to your friend and tell him from me that he have
chose a very bad Mercury in his affairs of love--the worst Mercury
I ever see. Perhaps the Warwickshire Mercuries are not very good.
Can you tell me, Captain Booddle, how they make love down in
Warwickshire?"
The women are strong. Julia Ongar plays her hand well. After
terminating her love affair with young Harry Clavering because
neither of them has any money, she goes in search of bigger game.
"Julia had now lived past her one short spell of poetry, had written
her one sonnet, and was prepared for the business of the world." She
goes on to win the prize of her widow's bountiful settlement, but
she then finds that she is accepted neither by the gentry nor by the
servants at Ongar Park when she goes to occupy her new residence.
And on learning that she has a losing hand to play against Florence
Burton, she plays it with reasonable dignity. She is not, however,
above a bit of revenge at the last, taunting Harry that Florence must
be very beautiful. Not so beautiful, he says, but very clever.
"Ah--I understand. She reads a great deal, and that sort of thing.
Yes; that is very nice. But I shouldn't have thought that that
would have taken you. You used not to care much for talent and
learning--not in women I mean."
Florence, for her part, is steadfast in her love and prepares to give
it up when she senses that she has lost; but the leading lady often
has the most stereotyped part to play. Florence's sister-in-law,
Cecilia Burton, plays her supporting role well, taking the initiative
in confronting Harry when he wavers, and doing it without informing
her husband, who might forbid her to do so. The title of Chapter
XXVII emphasizes her initiative: "What Cecilia Burton did for her
Sister-in-law." And what she did is explained a bit after her effort:
"Even Cecilia, with all her partiality for Harry, felt that he was
not worth the struggle; but it was for her now to estimate him at the
price that Florence might put upon him--not at her own price."
Harry Clavering's reflections on his situation bear the markings of
authenticity. Trollope had met his new American friend, Kate Field,
about three years earlier, and it is tempting to attribute these
comments about how a man can love two women at the same time to his
not-entirely-paternal interest in Kate.
Sir Hugh Clavering's death at sea permits the fairy tale ending.
Fairy tale, yes; and soap opera plot, yes; but the nuances of
Victorian society are exposed with such wit that _The Claverings_
is lifted well above the soap opera mark. It stands as one of my
favorites of Trollope's novels, one that could readily be recommended
to the reader who is not quite familiar with the author's name.
SEVERAL DEGREES OF STUBBORN
LINDA TRESSEL
Be advised and read no further, any to whom it is important that the
ending of the book not be known before it is read. _Linda Tressel_
(1867) is one of Trollope's dark books--_Sir Harry Hotspur_ is
another--in which the heroine does not fare well after being thwarted
in trying to have a life on her own terms.
That a young woman should insist on such conditions in the nineteenth
century would mark this as a work that could be used as a feminist
text today; and perhaps it would be so used if it were a little less
melodramatic--and if anyone knew anything about it.
Linda is a young woman who shows spunk and determination, but
she falls victim to the stubborn steadfastness of purpose of her
Aunt Charlotte, shown to be a religious zealot of the evangelical
Protestant variety, and Aunt Charlotte's lodger, Peter Steinmarc, a
Nuremberger of the slow-witted stubborn sort. Both are so extreme in
their positions that they might be taken for caricatures were they
not shown in such convincing detail.
The story is that of a motherless child who is taken under the wing
of her Aunt Charlotte, a devout woman who "goes far beyond the
ordinary amenities of Lutheran teaching." When Linda attains the age
of twenty, she learns that Peter Steinmarc has offered to make her
his wife. The reader is told that he has previously proposed many
times to Charlotte Staubach, who declined the honor and reminded
Peter that he would become owner of the house now in Linda's name,
if he should become Linda's husband. On being told of his marital
intentions by her Aunt Charlotte, Linda immediately refuses, but she
becomes "very wretched." A few details tell why:
She told herself that sooner or later her aunt would conquer her,
that sooner or later that mean-faced old man, with his snuffy
fingers, and his few straggling hairs brushed over his bald pate,
with his big shoes spreading here and there because of his corns,
and his ugly, loose, square, snuffy coat, and his old hat which he
had worn so long that she never liked to touch it, would become
her husband, and that it would be her duty to look after his wine,
and his old shoes, and his old hat, and to have her own little
possessions doled out to her by his penuriousness.
This then is the story, and it plays out with the added complication
of Linda's being in love with the young man who lives across the
little river behind her house. He is in and out of jail because
of his political radicalism, but Linda knows little of this. They
attempt an elopement, but it fails when young Ludovic is apprehended
by the police at the Augsburg station when their train arrives. Linda
had the pluck to run away with Ludovic, and in the end she has the
pluck to run away on her own, but though she confronts her aunt
several times, she never can bring herself to face her and refute
her. When Aunt Charlotte plays the prayer card, Linda never refuses
to kneel and listen to the degrading and humiliating prayers offered
on her behalf.
The feminist agenda was one that the conservative Trollope never
subscribed to, but his stories were too true to life to conceal
women's problems. Perhaps his stories got away from him, and the
women's stories told themselves. In this one, poor Linda finds
herself totally powerless under the domination of her aunt, as no
man would be. The world appears to be conspiring to keep her from
breaking out of her aunt's smothering sphere. When she leaves the
house to go consult an old friend of her late father's, Herr Molk
tells her that she should submit herself to her elders and her
betters.
Trollope made little secret of his religious tastes--traditional
Anglicanism, of the high church sort, but not papist. And he had no
patience with any evidence of fanaticism in religion. "But there are
women of the class to which Madame Staubach belonged who think that
the acerbities of religion are intended altogether for their own sex.
That men ought to be grateful to them who will deny?" Poor Linda's
final escape is too late to save her; she makes her way to her
uncle's house in Cologne, where her Aunt Grüner, a Catholic, tells
her that her Aunt Charlotte's mistreatment of her comes of her
religion.
"We think differently, my dear. Thank God, we have got somebody to
tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do." Linda
was not strong enough to argue the question, or to remind her aunt
that this somebody, too, might possibly be wrong.
Linda's progressive downhill and melodramatic course makes for a
rather grim story. Mercifully, it is a short one. The descriptions of
Aunt Charlotte and of Peter Steinmarc leave little room for subtlety.
However, Aunt Charlotte's breastplate of righteousness was not
entirely without a few little chinks, as we see in her last encounter
with Linda's wild lover. Trollope's description, I fear, will bring
few feminists to his side:
He could get in and out of the roofs of houses, and could carry
away with him a young maiden. These are deeds which always excite
a certain degree of admiration in the female heart, and Madame
Staubach, though she was a Baptist, was still a female. When,
therefore, she found herself in the presence of Ludovic, she could
not treat him with the indignant scorn with which she would have
received him had he intruded upon her premises before her fears of
him had been excited.
Like _Nina Balatka_, _Linda Tressel_ was published as an anonymous
work; only later did Trollope declare himself as the author. It has
been stated that he wanted to prove that he could write a different
kind of novel, set in Europe. _Linda Tressel_ was clearly an effort
to take his writing in a different direction. Though it was not a
commercial success, it can hardly be dismissed. The story moves
inexorably to a tragic ending for the heroine; the author stays on
task with the progression of the story, but it is seasoned with bits
of irony. The reader begins to suspect that there is heavy weather
ahead as the storm clouds gather over the picturesque little red
house in Nuremberg; perhaps it is the impact of the inevitable deluge
that is so depressing.
THE DOWNSIDE OF CHIVALRY
HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT
Novels rarely have subtitles; Anthony Trollope certainly didn't
bother with them. But _He Knew He Was Right_ is a sitting duck for
a frivolous little subtitle. How about _But He Was Wrong_? Or maybe
_But She Knew He Was Wrong_? Or perhaps, _But She Wouldn't Pretend
That He Was Right_? But of course any subtitle would have been
redundant. The five-word title tells it all. Of course he wasn't
right. But he was stubborn. And she was stubborn. And in this case,
it was a case of terminal stubbornness.
The problem with _He Knew He Was Right_ is that the man who knows
he is right, Louis Trevelyan, fails to overcome his terminal
stubbornness. Or perhaps we should refer to it as a paranoid
personality disorder--or maybe as the prevailing diagnosis of the
time: madness. Whatever we call it, it isn't pretty, and the story of
his progressive delusion is not a pleasant one. Interesting, yes. So
is _Crime and Punishment_. But both stories tell how someone happened
to think and do the wrong thing, and these are unpleasant subjects.
Both books dilute the dose with little subplots that add humor and
diversion. But the main story line is still the main story line.
Louis Trevelyan, a young husband, is annoyed by the daily visits
to his wife by her godfather, Colonel Osborne, a bachelor with a
reputation for pursuing beautiful young married women. He objects,
she resents the objection, and both husband and wife shoot past the
point of negotiation with their first discussion of the subject. Both
are stubborn, things go downhill from there, and in the end Louis
Trevelyan goes mad and suffers the consequences.
Trevelyan was set up by circumstances, and to understand some of
these circumstances, we must take note of the laws of England at that
time. English common law stated that in marriage, two became one,
and that one was the husband in the eyes of the law. The husband was
indeed the lord and master. In regard to children, John Stuart Mill
wrote of the wife's subordination in marriage, "They are by law his
children . . . . No one act can she do towards or in relation to
them, except by delegation from him."
This was part of the system of coverture, in which a married woman
surrendered her legal existence, which was suspended during her
marriage, "or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of
her husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs
everything." [1] The efforts of Victorian feminists, who considered
this to be "marital slavery," led to the Married Woman's Property
Act of 1882, twenty years after this book was written; but even this
was only a partial solution. It was not until 1923 that grounds for
divorce were made the same for both sexes, and divorce remained
expensive until Legal Aid became available in 1949.
[Footnote 1: Sir William Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of
England_, 1765-1769]
With this as the law of the land, one can begin to see that a young
husband, new to the demands of marriage, might feel that his very
manhood required that he exercise his authority. (There is a downside
to chivalry.)
And on the other side of the equation, we are told that Emily has
been brought up away from England, in the Mandarin Islands, where she
has developed an independent spirit. Friends of both parties urged
them to soften their positions, but both felt that their honor was
insulted, and that they could not retreat or compromise.
Today's reader observes pretty quickly in this disaster that such an
impasse is less likely to occur these days because women have more
rights. And though Trollope never officially endorsed the rights
of women, he allowed Emily, and other women in other novels, to be
compelling in their arguments. Emily voices these early in our story:
"It is a very poor thing to be a woman," she said to her sister.
"It is perhaps better than being a dog," said Nora; "but, of
course, we can't compare ourselves to men."
"It would be better to be a dog. One wouldn't be made to suffer
so much. When a puppy is taken away from its mother, she is bad
enough for a few days, but she gets over it in a week . . . . It
is very hard for a woman to know what to do," continued Emily,
"but if she is to marry, I think she had better marry a fool.
After all, a fool generally knows that he is a fool, and will
trust someone, though he may not trust his wife."
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," and we are mercifully
diverted by the subplots, which occupy approximately fifty-four of
the ninety-nine chapters of the 823-page book (one of Trollope's
longest).
Miss Jemima Stanbury occupies a position of similar prominence among
the subplots as she enjoyed in the city of Exeter. This is stated
in a single sentence (of some length): "It is to be hoped that
no readers of these pages will be so un-English as to be unable
to appreciate the difference between county society and town
society--the society, that is, of a provincial town, or so ignorant
as not to know also that there may be persons so privileged, that
although they live distinctly within a provincial town, there is
accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the merit of living
in the county." And Miss Stanbury was universally regarded as
"county" rather than "town." "There was not a tradesman in Exeter
who was not aware of it, and who did not touch his hat to her
accordingly."
Miss Stanbury was rich. She had been engaged to a young banker, Mr.
Brooke Burgess, who had jilted her, subsequently died, and left to
her "every shilling that he possessed." And she, in her own romantic
way, was determined that her inheritance should be hers only for life
and that at her death it should revert to the Burgess family and not
stay in her own family.
This is the formidable woman who paid for the education of Hugh
Stanbury, Louis Trevelyan's best friend, and then cut him off from
all support because he abandoned the study of law to write for the
"penny press." She then wrote to Hugh's mother asking her to send her
younger daughter Dorothy to live with her. "I shall expect her to be
regular at meals, to be constant in going to church, and not to read
modern novels."
The great problem for Miss Stanbury arose when her beloved niece
Dorothy fell in love with and agreed to marry young Brooke Burgess,
nephew of Miss Stanbury's late lover. But young Brooke was to inherit
the Burgess wealth that Miss Stanbury intended to return to the
Burgesses. And if he should marry her niece, it would diminish her
posthumous triumph in returning the wealth. So he must not marry her
niece. Her niece must marry Mr. Gibson, a young clergyman of Exeter.
Happy endings are permitted in the subplots, and the young people
have their way. That is, most of them do. Miss Stanbury comes
around with a late night change of heart and grants her blessing to
Dorothy's marrying Mr. Burgess. Mr. Gibson receives his just reward.
He is claimed by two sisters of the parish, one of whom so terrifies
him that he reneges on his engagement to her, escaping her long
kitchen knife when a kinsman is summoned to take it away from her,
and Mr. Gibson then takes the younger of the two lovely sisters.
There is yet another subplot involving the Rowleys and the Stanburys.
Hugh Stanbury, best friend of the unfortunate and stubborn Louis
Trevelyan and rejected beneficiary of his Aunt Stanbury, is in love
with Nora Rowley, beautiful sister of the also unfortunate and also
stubborn Emily Trevelyan. But Nora's parents have their hearts set
on her accepting the proposal of one Mr. Glascock, soon to be Lord
Peterborough on the death of his father. A handsome and pleasant
young man, his proposal comes only after the beautiful Nora has
lost her heart to radical young Hugh Stanbury, and Mr. Glascock is
refused. We then have the opportunity to follow Mr. Glascock on his
journey to Naples to see his dying father, in the course of which
he happens to travel with, by great coincidence, Louis Trevelyan
himself, and two young Spalding sisters from America. This gives the
young Trevelyan, separated from his wife, an opportunity to describe
another variety of wives, the American ones, who are "exigeant--and
then they are so hard. They want the weakness that a woman ought to
have."
We see a good bit more of the Spalding family in Florence, where Mr.
Glascock decides that the elder sister Caroline is his favorite, and
after a suitable diversion to other subplots, the reader learns that
they have become engaged, Caroline having demonstrated her wit with
her response to his question about American "institutions:"
"Everything is an institution. Having iced water to drink in every
room of the house is an institution. Having hospitals in every
town is an institution. Travelling altogether in one class of
railway cars is an institution. Saying "sir", is an institution.
Teaching all the children mathematics is an institution. Plenty of
food is an institution. Getting drunk is an institution in a great
many towns. Lecturing is an institution. There are plenty of them,
and some are very good--but you wouldn't like it."
Mr. Trollope must have had some unpleasant experiences with one or
more American women who served as his model for Caroline Spalding's
friend Wallachia Petrie, "the Republican Browning," a "poetess" and
a feminist and an outspoken opponent of "European" ways. Inveighing
against the "courtiers" of "Europe," Miss Petrie vows that "the
courtier shall be cut down together with the withered grasses and
thrown into the oven, and there shall be an end of them."
We may hope that the future Lord Peterborough will not be obliged to
listen to such speeches at Monkhams, his ancestral home.
But all is not diversion with subplots. The main business at hand is
the progressive madness of Louis Trevelyan, who has his young son
snatched by his private detective Bozzle (a well-meaning agent who
eventually allows his wife to convince him that his own suspicion
is correct, and that Trevelyan is mad) and carries him off to Italy.
There he becomes progressively weaker, failing to eat, and Emily
comes to rescue her son and provide hospice care for her husband. Was
he mad? The author answers that he was "neither mad nor sane--not
mad, so that all power over his own actions need be taken from him;
nor sane, so that he must be held to be accountable for his words and
thoughts."
The case of Louis Trevelyan is a tough one. The author, noted for his
realistic portrayal of the world, makes a convincing case. And one
must remember that Trollope was, after all, a story teller; and the
story of a man who went mad because his wife would not accept his
authority--because she would not recognize his position as master of
his house, where his word was law--was a story worth telling. The
subplots and the comedy and the realism are all background, but the
strange story is the event in the foreground. The story may have
taken its author further than he had intended to go. His own comment
on the novel in his autobiography has been often quoted and is worth
reviewing:
I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more
completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was
my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man who, while
endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led
constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment
to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate
enough, and the evil which he does is apparent. So far I did not
fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the
story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by
certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter.
But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot, in truth, be
redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters.
It may well be that Louis and Emily Trevelyan got away from their
creator, just as their quarrel took on a life of its own and got
out of the control of its two participants. Even with an author who
prided himself on discipline in his writing, the pen can sometimes
take off with a will of its own. Though the author professed to be
displeased with the result, most critics have viewed the result
with more favor, and I am inclined to agree with them. As to the
strangeness of the story, the more one sees of life, how can anyone
say that anything cannot happen? The storyteller's job is to take
strange stories and make entertaining stories out of them. When I was
in training, one of my chief residents had a comment that he used for
strange cases: "You see that sometimes."
He knew he was right, but he was wrong.
THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON
On the day that I finished reading Trollope's _The Vicar of
Bullhampton_, the following appeared in an email from a friend: An
Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return,
her father cussed her: "Where have you been all this time, you
ingrate!" The girl, crying, replied, "Dad . . . I became a
prostitute." "What! Out of here, you shameless harlot! . . ." "OK,
Dad--as you wish. I just came back to give Mom this fur coat and you
this new Mercedes Benz. . . ." "Now what was it you said you had
become?" "A prostitute, Dad" "Oh, you scared me half to death, girl.
I thought you said a Protestant."
This is one of the major plot lines of _The Vicar of Bullhampton_,
though not its conclusion. Plots are standard and repetitive. The
success of the work relies less on the plot than on its window
dressing. Trollope's Carry Brattle has been gone from home, and
everyone knows what she has become but delicacy forbids use of the
word "whore." Her father forbids her return. Will she come back? How
will she be received? This theme apparently was a daring innovation
in the mainstream Victorian novel; Mary Magdalene rarely appeared in
the printed pages of the nineteenth century.
Sensational as this story line was, the novel appears to move rather
slowly. All plot lines revolve around Mister Fenwick, the vicar. He
and his wife encourage their house guest, Mary Lowther, to accept the
suit of Mr. Fenwick's best friend, Harry Gilmore. She doesn't love
him; she refuses him and shortly after falls in love with her cousin
Walter Marrable. She accepts his proposal, but they jointly agree to
call it off when his prospects in life are ruined by his father's
reckless wasting of Walter's inheritance. Against her better judgment
she accepts Mr. Gilmore. Then Walter's prospects for an inheritance
improve. So she breaks her engagement to Mr. Gilmore and resumes that
with Captain Marrable. Like Alice Vavasor in _Can You Forgive Her?_
she becomes a double jilt, and she is roundly criticized by many for
such grievous behavior.