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Tl-IE LADY AS CRIMINAL: ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S
ADAPTATION OF THE VICTORIAN SENSATION FORM

presented by

Nancy Beth Deal

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THE LADY AS CRIMINAL: ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S
ADAPTATION OF THE VICTORIAN SENSATION NOVEL

BY

Nancy Beth Deal

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1988

ABSTRACT

THE LADY AS CRIMINAL: ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S ADAPTATION
OF THE VICTORIAN SENSATION NOVEL

BY
Nancy Beth Deal

This dissertation examines Anthony Trollope's
adaptation of the Victorian sensation novel in plots
involving lady criminals as protagonists. The anti-heroines
of these novels displace the conventional, sentimental
heroine to provide the main interest of the story. Trollope
continually juxtaposes the conventional heroine to a
criminal anti-heroine and thereby subverts popular
Victorian expectations for the novel. By making anti-
heroines the centers of interest, Trollope implies that both
fictional and social conventions are inadequate for women.

The Mid-Victorian sensation novel cast women as both
victims and victimizers. The sensation heroine rebels
against social conventions by openly embracing crime: she
most often commits crimes against the family and the
patriarchy. Although partly following the pattern of the
sensation novel, Trollope domesticates the form by allowing
his women criminals to participate in society. Rather than
attack the patriarchal structure, these women attempt to
infiltrate the patriarchy to gain for themselves the
patriarchal advantages of wealth and power. Trollope uses

marriage, particularly the mercenary marriage, as a means

for the criminal women characters to test their values
against those of the general society.

The novels are discussed in chronological order to
demonstrate that, throughout his career, Trollope included
subversive characters and values as part of his thematic
canon. The chronology also shows a progression in the
complexity of the anti-heroines' crimes, a movement from
obvious legal crimes to amorphous moral crimes. The
progression suggests Trollope's growing understanding of the
complexity of women's issues and represents a maturing
criticism of Victorian social values, particularly the

retrictions and double standards placed on women.

Copyright

BY

Nancy Beth Deal

1988

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Victorian Sensation Form and the Trollopian
TraditionOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIOOOIOOOO0.00...OOOOPO 1

Dispossessing the Patriarchy: Lady Mason, Theft,
and WOOD...OOOOOOOOOOOCOOOO0.0...IOOOOIOOOOOPO 17

Claiming the Patriarchal Inheritance: "Lady Ongar's
Revenge" in Ibe_§1aygz1ng§...........................p. 43

Expanding the Form: ”Wild-Cat” Anti-Heroines in The Way We
Live I!ow....OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPO 68

Politicizing the Tradition: Lady Eustace and Dissimulation

in Ihe EUStacg Digmgllgg.OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPO 94

The Immoral Hunt: Arabella Trefoil and the Mercenary
marriageOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIO0.0.000...OOOOOOOOOOPO 123

The mdy as criminal...OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPO 155

The Victorian Sensation Form

and the Trollopian Tradition

Few Victorian novelists continue to stir critical
debate in the same manner as Anthony Trollope.
Immortalized for his "complete appreciation of the
usual,"1 Trollope's critical reputation might likely
seem similar to the position of other minor literary
figures, such as Disraeli or Mrs. Oliphant. Instead,
Trollope elicits continual critical revision. James
Kincaid traces the change in the critical perception of
Trollope to the current assessment of the fiction as
"strikingly modern, tougher, more ironic and complex"
than previously has been granted in the tradition of
Trollope scholarship.2

Indeed, Henry James' designation of Trollope's art
as a mere appreciation of the usual is responsible for
much of the critical heritage. But as Kincaid points
out, James' assessment of Trollope is not so much
criticism as myth-making.3 The myth remains a powerful
symbol, however, so that the critical tradition started
by James continues to influence contemporary readings
of Trollope's fiction. As Raymond Williams discusses
Trollope's pastoral idyll, for instance, he considers
Trollope's depiction of society as both "ludicrous"
and "perfect": "there is no moral problem of any

consequence to disturb the smooth and recommending

2

construction [of society]."4

The power of the tradition places critics who
admire Trollope in the awkward position of apologizing
for his art. Perhaps the most striking example of
admiring apologia comes from Trollope's foremost
biographer, Michael Sadlier. Sadlier's biography
differs greatly from James' epitaph in tone and
intention. Ironically, though, the critical language
is notably similar. Sadlier claims that Trollope never
wrote a novel "of sudden incident or of striking
misadventure."5 James likewise asserts that Trollope's
novels "deal very little in the surprising, the
exceptional, the complicated."6 Nevertheless, Sadlier
believes that these novels without incident sustain
"almost breathless interest": James considers them
"dull, impersonal rumble[s] of the mill-wheel."7

The Trollope admirer, therefore, is in the
uncomfortable position of admitting a breathless
interest in the ordinary and dull. Yet many critics,
including James, note Trollope's realism, particularly
his realistic portrayal of character, as one of his
great strengths as a novelist. James concludes that
Trollope's ability to convey the reality in his
fictional world proves that ”Trollope did not write for
posterity: he wrote for the day, the moment."8 James'

subterfuge disguises the role fiction plays to

3

illuminate, for the future, the values of a society in
a particular day or moment in time. As Robert
Polhemus currently argues, the lasting impact of
Trollope's art is centered in his fine-tuned creations
of society:

Look hard at reality, his fiction seems to say,

and you find that the lives of so-called

"ordinary" people are in fact extraordinarily

interesting and important. The particular

quality which makes Trollope a major writer is his

outstanding ability to make us aware both of the

special predicament of individual Victorians and

of the univeral human condition....9

Polhemus, of course, is right. ”Real life" is,
usually, interesting to most of us who live it. One of
Trollope's strengths as a novelist is his ability to
extend the fictional reality to reflect general social
as well as individual concerns. As J. Hillis Miller
observes, realism in Victorian fiction functions as a
"mirror image" that does not reflect reality so much as
it images "the imaginary quality of reality."10 In
this respect, Trollope is characteristically Victorian.
Victorian novelists generally worked to redefine the
nature of fiction. In Victorian fiction, ordinary
human lives become as compelling as the heroic or the

romantic, perhaps even more so because they seem more

"real."

Trollope continually rejects the heroic and
questions romance throughout his fiction. Rather, he
focusses on human foibles to create sympathy for his
characters and structure our considerations of human
nature.11 In his Autobiography, Trollope categorizes
his work simply: "I am realistic."12 But in Trollope's
theory of fiction, realism, sensationalism, tragedy are
all subordinate to sympathy: ”...stories charm us not
simply because they are tragic, but because we feel
that men and women with flesh and blood, creatures with
whom we can sympathise, are struggling amidst their
woes. No novel is anything...unless the reader can
sympathise with the characters...."13

Trollope's most sympathetic characters are always
the least heroic. In fiction, Trollope says, "Truth
let there be."14 Truth in his fiction is most often
found through gross error rather than through great
heroism. Trollope's narrator periodically reminds us
to read fiction as a means to judge reality, which may
require us to give up the fictional conventions to
reach a deeper level of human understanding. Fiction
can act as a means to understand life, but only if we
relinquish its conventions and extend to characters the
sympathy we should have for our neighbors: "The persons

whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are

5
so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in
your life, because they are so good.... We cannot have
heroes to dine with us. There are none."15

In one of his many treatises on the novel,
Trollope complains, "Perhaps no terms have been so
injurious to the profession of the novelist as those
two words, hero and heroine."16 The displacement of
the heroic in literature is highly modern. Why, then,
is Trollope still so often considered the most
conventional of Victorian novelists? Kincaid notes
that Trollope's "obvious modernity is combined with a
resolute and equally obvious old-fashionedness": the
"mixed form" of his fiction counters but does not
subvert traditional values.17 Trollope uses fictional
conventions to question rather than reject.

Unlike James, Trollope does not try to redefine
fiction through a theoretical construct of the nature
of fiction. Trollope is not a radical, but he is
subversive. He works within the conventions of the
Victorian novel and Victorian society to present
characters who work against both fictional and social
conventions. For example, in her recent consideration
of Trollope, Deborah Denenholz Horse points out how the
author uses the conventional marriage plot to subvert
ideals for women's choices. As Morse argues, the.

novels indicate "Trollope's ambivalent relation toward

6

the often contradictory ideals for Victorian
womanhood."18 Horse's revisionist approach helps
provide a necessary antidote to the traditional view of
Trollope's treatment of women characters. Trollope's
women are not merely, as one critic claims, "genus
girls," "born to be submissive, as women must be in
Christian marriages."19 Horse demonstrates that
Trollope's women characters use marriage as a
legitimate means to achieve their own social influence,
as in the case of Lady Glencora Palliser, or to achieve
sexual fulfillment, as in the case of Marie Goesler.

The five Palliser novels discussed by Horse all
involve upper-class and aristocratic women who are
integral parts of Victorian society. In other novels,
Trollope often creates women characters who exist
outside the social core. As anti-heroines, they not
only subvert ideals for Victorian womanhood but
manipulate the patriarchal social structure as well.
Trollope may include a conventional Victorian heroine
in most of his novels, but the real interest lies, not
in her, but in the most unnatural English girls.2°
Polhemus believes that Trollope's fiction reflects the
shifts and changes in Victorian society, marked by
threats to the idyllic community or the comfortable
class system.21 Trollope's anti-heroines test their

accepted places within the community and resist gender—

 

7
related class distinctions.

Critics from James to Sadlier to Kincaid note a
movement in Trollope's vision and tone, a progression
from early bright comic novels to later dark satiric
ones. Certainly one could argue for a late "dark
Trollope" as persuasively as some argue for a late
"dark Dickens." Yet even in the early novels, Trollope
creates women who live essentially as social outlaws,
although they often remain within the boundaries of
society. By making these women the centers of interest
in the novels and by insisting on a sympathetic
response to their misadventures, Trollope implies that
fictional and social conventions are inadequate for
remarkable women. His anti-heroines are criminals:
Lady Mason is a forger, Lizzie Eustace is a thief. To
achieve lives that go beyond social convention, they
commit extraordinary acts which challenge the very
framework of society. As Trollope develops his
portrayal of women, the anti-heroines grow in
complexity, both as criminals and as characters.

The plots involving anti-heroines move from
definable legal crimes to amorphous moral crimes. The
shift marks the development of Trollope's world-view
and the place of women in the world. In Q;lgy_£azm
(1862), Trollope shows how Lady Mason violates society

by forging her husband's will, an obvious legal crime.

8
In Ihg_Ame;igan_§gnatgr (1877), he shows how Arabella
Trefoil's quest to contract a mercenary marriage
becomes a moral crime conditioned for her by a corrupt
society. Lady Mason takes extreme measures to secure
property: Arabella goes any length to secure a husband.
Their crimes are actually motivated by the sanctioned
principles of their society--to achieve wealth and
position. But because they are women, to act for
themselves is to act against the social structure.
They become criminals by their attempts to participate
actively in the patriarchal values under which they
live.

Trollope's lady criminals are much like his
fiction. They cannot easily be categorized as
villainesses, femmes fatales, or heroines, just as
Trollope's art is not simply comic, realistic, or
sensationalistic. Trollope manages to place women
criminals at the center of various novels and yet avoid
sensationalism or censure. If judged by his own
formula, Trollope's focus on the women's characters
defuses the sensationalistic elements of their
stories. By first comparing the conventional notions
of heroines in Victorian novels with the rise of the
lady criminal in Victorian sensation fiction, we can
better appreciate Trollope's portrayal of anti-heroines

in novels which deal with women who live as social

 

outlaws.

What is a conventional Victorian heroine? As
Merryn Williams describes her, she is a girl under
twenty, without a job, without sexuality, without a
mother or strong woman to influence her life
positively:

But the later, Victorian heroine is too often a

shrunken human being who takes no part in events

and exists only to uplift and inspire...The mid-

Victorian heroine is a very passive

creature...with the feeling that she could and

should love only one man.22
Trollope usually includes a conventional heroine in
most of his novels, but she is most often the heroine
of the subplot, not the major interest of the main
story. In contrast to the heroine's fidelity and
purity, Trollope's anti-heroines not only love more
than one man, but they frequently marry one man and
love another. Or, even more often, the anti-heroines
marry without love at all. The mercenary marriage is a
recurring issue in Trollope's novels. Although
generally condemning marriages based solely on
financial considerations, Trollope suggests that
economic aspects are part of women's primary concerns
when deciding to marry. Unlike the image of the Angel

of the House who selflessly inspires love in those

 

10
around her, Trollope's women are motivated by the self-
interested but very real need to find maintenance.

As Patricia Stubbs notes, ”the seductive concept
of romantic love...became a key part of Victorian
mythology."23 Although Patricia Branca's social
history of women's role in the home dispels many of the
myths about Victorian middle-class women, the fictions
about women created by male writers influenced and
continue to influence the popular image of genteel
Victorian womanhood.24 The Victorian myth of romantic
love granted a woman the power of weakness. She proved
herself a worthy object of love by admitting
inferiority to her husband. Domestic manuals for
women, such as Eemalo Improvements, advised the woman
reader concerning her duty as a wife: to ‘raise
herself, by every means, in the esteem of her
husband...and thus, far more than by insisting upon her
way, or urging her own claims, she will secure a voice
in her husband's counsels, and a place in his tenderest
consideration.‘25

The popular conception of love and marriage helped
reinforce the image of the passive heroine in fiction.
By contrast, Trollope's portrayal of women revises the
Victorian conceptualization of romantic love,
particularly as it relates to marriage. Love is

important in Trollope's novels: romance is not.

11
Trollope always rejects the tenets of romantic love:
that women die of broken hearts, that marriage is the
natural and inevitable extension of love, that women
consider the worthy man a prize to cherish, that pure
and untouched hearts are prerequisites to love for
women.

Trollope's anti-heroines challenge the
requirements for romance. They are not young, pure, or
inexperienced. Most are widows, sometimes in middle-
age. Their widowhood does not suggest the death of
sexuality but rather implies sexual experience. The
anti-heroines consciously use their sexual powers to
achieve their ends. Lady Mason, Julia Brabazon, Lizzie
Eustace, Mrs. Hurtle all use their widows' weeds as
aids to seduction. Their clothes cover their social
ambitions. As they outwardly participate in Victorian
mourning rituals, they actually pursue new schemes for
new lives with new men. The anti-heroines in effect
reject romance, initially in the mercenary marriages
they contract, and finally in their pursuit of less-
than-heroic but attractive lovers.

Trollope's anti-heroines are all women with pasts.
The fallen woman in Victorian fiction, as Nina Auerbach
suggests, is allowed to grow only through her sin.26
Trollope apparently follows this tenet but subverts it

as well. He uses his anti-heroines' "sins" as the

 

12
agents for ”repentence" rather than redemption.
Although death is the usual end for fallen women in
nineteenth century fiction, Trollope reverses this
expectation by allowing his anti-heroines to
reintegrate into the community, or at least to seek out
new territories beyond the boundaries accepted by
"good" society. Many fictional Victorian fallen
women are peculiarly asexual, possibly because they are
motivated by ambition, not passion.27 The real sin,
then, is not in exploring sexuality but in seeking
power. Tess Durbeyfield can be redeemed by death
because she seeks self-immolation rather than self-
actualization. Grant Allen's Herminia Barton can
become a New Woman heroine only because she reclaims
herself through self-sacrifice and death. In pointed
contrast, Trollope's anti-heroines actively use their
sexual power to escape the normal punishments for their
crimes, creating a paradox: the patriarchal system
which disbars women from enjoying legal privileges also
absolves them from legal responsibility.

Mary Hartman's exploration of Victorian women
criminals affirms the implications within Trollope's
fiction. Hartman examines the cases of thirteen
accused murderesses to conclude that women were often
exonerated from heinous crimes simply because the legal

system could not comprehend genteel women acting out

13
their hostility through violence. (Significantly,
Hartman finds that lower-class women met with less
generosity from the courts and, subsequently, were more
often punished for their crimes than were middle- and
upper-class women).28 Trollope's lady criminals
experience the paradoxical public reception of the
women criminals Hartman examines. "The world" may
exonerate the lady criminal in the courtroom, but it
also thrives on the sensational spectacle of a woman on
trial.

In this respect, Trollope diverges from the usual
pattern of Victorian sensation fiction. In contrast,
sensation writers like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon
surprise readers with plot twists and apparently
innocent female characters eventually revealed to be
demons in Pre-Raphaelite clothing. However, the fate
of the sensation heroine actually follows conventional
endings for the fallen woman--she is eventually
punished harshly for her crimes. The fiction
titillates the reader but ultimately reaffirms social
values and the conventions of mainstream Victorian
fiction. Trollope domesticates the sensation form. He
keeps no secrets from the reader and never attempts to
create mystery. All mystery is created by society
itself. The world invents more crimes and misdeeds for

the anti-heroines than they actually commit: the world

 

14
sensationalizes their stories. Trollope's technique
disguises a more radical subversion. He does not
censure individual crimes as much as he criticizes the
social values and social system which permit them.

As Elaine Showalter points out, Victorian
sensation fiction was in fact based on perverted
domesticity and portrayed ”an unhappy marriage as a
cage rather than a spiritual opportunity."29 Heroines
of sensation fiction activate plots against the family,
particularly the husband, whereas in other novels,
violent plots usually work against women.30 As
experienced in Victorian sensation fiction, marriage
leads to crime and, in a broad sense, becomes a crime,
as it leads sensation heroines to commit forgery,
bigamy, adultery, even murder. However, the sensation
heroine eventually is punished within the fiction by
death or insanity, exonerating the institution which
compels her to crime.

Sensation novelists superimposed extraordinary
events on to ordinary life.31 Trollope takes ordinary
life and turns it into an extraordinary event.
Sensation heroines are punished largely because they
resist suffering. Trollope's anti-heroines escape
punishment but suffer from the repercussions of their
crimes. For example, Lady Mason never truly repents

forging her husband's will, but she is sorry that the

 

THE LADY AS CRIMINAL: ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S
ADAPTATION OF THE VICTORIAN SENSATION NOVEL

BY
Nancy Beth Deal

AN ABSTRACT OF
A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1988

15

revelation jeopardizes her son's social position. In
other words, the remorse concerns the consequences
rather than the crime. Trollope, moreover, encourages
such moral ambivalence. By distancing Lady Mason from
the original crime, and by expanding on the
circumstances which compel her to crime, Trollope
denies the reader an easy moral judgment on Lady
Mason's character. He focusses attention away from the
crime itself to consider its effect on the woman.
Winfred Hughes draws an accurate parallel between
Victorian sensation fiction and traditional melodrama:
both require sensational endings.32 Instead,
Trollope chooses prosaic endings for his anti-heroines.
Although they are not always assured happy futures,
they at least have another chance at life.

Mid-Victorian literature juxtaposes the sensation
heroine of crime novels to the unsensational heroine of
sentimental literature.33 As a mid- and late-Victorian
novelist, Trollope juxtaposes elements of sensation and
sentimental literature through the women characters in
his novels. He tries to enliven the sentimental
heroine of the sub-plots while he humanizes the
sensational anti-heroines of the main story lines.
Heroines such as Lucy Morris in Iho_Eo§tooo_niamono§
and Florence Burton in Ino_gloyo;ioo§ eschew the

”missishness," as they say, of the demure fiancee.

 

16
Polhemus's semi-Freudian approach to love issues in
Trollope addresses the complex sexuality present in all
Trollope's women characters.34 The anti-heroines do
more than reject docility. They espouse sexual power--
and use it. That Trollope focusses his interest, and
ours, on the anti-heroines suggests that he wishes us
to extend our sympathy to unconventional women as he
diverges from the accepted conventions of Victorian

fiction.

Dispossessing the Patriarchy:

Lady Mason, Theft, and onloy_£oxm

QI1§!_£QIE (1862) starts in the thick of a "case."
Trollope identifies the story as an unresolved legal
question and outlines the problem for the reader,
replete with suspects, victims, and lawyers. Twenty
years before this case, Orley Farm was the subject of a
celebrated legal dispute between Sir Joseph Mason's
eldest son George and Sir Joseph's young widow Lady
Mason. Sir Joseph had been understood to intend to
leave all property to George Mason, with adequate
provision for his second wife and infant son Lucius.
However, at Sir Joseph's death, a surprise codicil is
discovered attached to the will, leaving Orley Farm to
the youngest son. George Mason at that time disputes
the will, accusing Lady Mason of forgery. The family
lawyer dies before the the first trial begins, so the
discrepency in testimony from unreliable witnesses goes
unchallenged. Lady Mason wins the case and retains
control of Orley Farm until Lucius reaches his
majority.

orley Farm examines the effects of the original
case. Lucius Mason, now twenty-one, is master of Orley

Farm. One of his first acts as landlord is to remove a

17

18
land lease from the hands of Samuel Dockwrath, an
unscrupulous and avaricious attorney. Dockwrath
retaliates by looking into the questionable aspects of
the first Orley Farm trial. Trollope introduces the
reader to Lady Mason within the context of an
undiscovered crime, both a suspect and a victim in the
original trial. Her entrance identifies her as the
figure of interest in the story, but also denies her a
heroine's role:
I trust that it is already perceived by all
persistent novel readers that very much of the
interest of this tale will be centred in the
person of Lady Mason. Such educated persons,
however, will probably be aware that she is not
intended to be the heroine. The heroine, so
called, must by a certain fixed law be young and
marriageable...with as much of the heroic about
her as may be convenient: but for the present let
it be understood that the person and character of
Lady Mason is as important to us as can be those
of any young lady, let her be ever so gracious or
ever so beautiful.1
Trollope eventually provides a conventional heroine but
only after he has established Lady Mason as the central
focus of the novel. By the time the young and

marriageable Madeline Staveley enters the story, Lady

19

Mason has secured the devotion of a famous London

barrister, has elicited a proposal from a venerable

country squire, and has taken control of the story.
Lady Mason possesses none of the qualities of the

conventional heroine. Trollope divests her of heroine-

like qualities to develop her characterization based on

the force of personality rather than on appearance or

manners:
She was now forty-seven years of age, and had a
son who had reached man's estate: and yet perhaps
she had more of woman's beauty at this present
time than when she stood at the altar with Sir
Joseph Mason. The quietness and repose of her
manner suited her years and her position: age had
given fulness to her tall form: and the habitual
sadness of her countenance was in fair accordance
with her condition and character. And yet she was
not really sad,--at least so said those who knew
her. The melancholy was in her face rather than
in her character, which was full of energy,--if
energy may be quiet as well as assured and
constant (I, p. 15).

Lady Mason is middle—aged rather than young,

energetic rather than passive, mysterious rather than

ingenuous. Like the anti-heroines of Victorian

sensation fiction, Lady Mason appears the perfect lady,

20
although she is not the perfect heroine.

The tensions in Lady Mason's character help
suggest Trollope's subversion of Victorian fictional
conventions. In her essay on ogloy_£ozm, Laura Hapke
argues that Trollope uses Victorian notions of "proper
feminine behavior" as the basis for Lady Mason's
success as a criminal.2 At the age of twenty, Lady
Mason forges the codicil to Sir Joseph's will, securing
the estate for her own son and preventing the eldest
son's inheritance. Hapke sees Lady Mason's act, and
even her subsequent acquittals in two trials, as
triumphs for the patriarchy because "crime in a woman
is a brief irrationality caused by the pressure of
extraordinary circumstances, not by anything in her
character more dangerous than simple frailty."3
Trollope certainly points out the extenuating
circumstances surrounding Lady Mason's crime, but he
concomitantly emphasizes her twenty years of stoic
silence in disguising the crime as well as her
remarkable resolve in perpetrating the forgery in the
first place.

As a woman, Lady Mason has no acknowledged power
within the Victorian legal system. Without sanctioned
power, she nevertheless manages to commit a crime
against the patriarchy, a crime which interferes with

primogenitor and dispossesses an eldest son. Further,

21
Lady Mason maintains her position as a single woman for
twenty years, a calculated pose of long-standing. She
enjoys the position of mistress of Orley Farm until
Lucius is an adult. Lady Mason's success as a criminal
is not the result of feminine delicacy but of
remarkable resolve: ”Lady Mason had earned the respect
of all those around her by the way in which she bore
herself in the painful days of the trial, and also in
those of her success,--especially also by the manner
in which she gave her evidence” (I, p. 13).

Trollope's careful emphasis of Lady Mason's
demeanor at her trial both magnifies and solves the
mystery. Trollope leads the reader to suspect complex,
if not criminal, peculiarities to Lady Mason's
character. She bears her trouble with courage and her
success with calm, as a perfect lady should. At the
same time, she gives her evidence in an unusually
clever manner, unusual enough to warrant remark from
her neighbors and the narrator. Although her well-bred
neighbor, Sir Peregrine Orme, learns to excuse her
"want of gentle blood and early breeding," the other
townsfolk suspect her social reticence without specific
cause: "It may therefore be asserted that Lady Mason's
widowed life was successful. That it was prudent and
well conducted no one could doubt. Her neighbours did

say of her that she would not drink tea with Mrs.

22
Arkwright of Mount Pleasant villa...but such little
scandal as this was a matter of course” (p. 14).

Like the authors of sensation fiction, Trollope
draws "attention to the artifice of the facade" of the
‘inverted qualities which distinguish the normal
woman, namely reserve, docility, and sexual apathy.‘4
Lady Mason appears reserved and docile, but the very
fact that she can effectively defend herself from
criminal charges leads us to suspect that something in
her history is amiss. Trollope underscores the mystery
of Lady Mason's character through the mystery of the
legal question. Although Trollope denies his interest
in plots, he uses the storyline of Qzloy_fiozm to
develop his characterization of Lady Mason. Comparing
his own work to that of Wilkie Collins, Trollope
complains that overt plotting distracts from the
interest in character and theme: "One is constrained by
mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,
however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the
difficulties overcome at the end of the third volume."5

In erey Eazm. Trollope sustains interest through
Lady Mason rather than through a suspenseful mystery
plot or the promise of a surprise ending which the
narrator suspects will surprise no one:

I venture to think, I may almost say to hope, that

Lady Mason's confession at the end of the last

23

chapter will not have taken anybody by surprise.

If such surprise be felt I must have told my tale

badly. I do not like such revulsions of feeling

with regard to my characters as surprises of the

nature must generate (II, p. 33).
The narrator calls attention to Lady Mason's guilt and
in fact chides readers who might not accept her
criminality as important to her character and to the
story. Trollope does not absolve Lady Mason but rather
enumerates her vagaries to reinforce her criminality:
"...she was a forger, and a perjurer, and a thief:--a
thief who for long years had lived on the proceeds of
her dexterous theft" (II, p. 123). Trollope
nevertheless avoids turning Lady Mason into one of the
"bizarre and inartistic inventions" of the sensation
novelists: unlike Lady Audley, Lady Mason is not
perfidious.6 Just as she wins both her trials, Lady
Mason manages to win and retain the regard of
respectable people. The narrator provokingly asks,
”What was there about the woman that had made all of
those fond of her that came near her?" (I, p. 204).

One obvious quality is her sense of herself as a
woman. Lady Mason's femininity and sexuality attracts
both women and men. Lady Mason must rely on men to
manage her courtroom battles and elicit public support

from women for her cause. She manipulates the male-

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24
constructed legal system by asserting her most powerful
influence on men, what Trollope coyly calls her "female
charms":

Lady Mason was rich with female charms, and she

used them partly with the innocence of the dove,

but partly also with the wisdom of a serpent. But
in such use as she did make of these only weapons
which Providence had given her I do not think that

she can be regarded as very culpable (I, p. 272).
The narrator absolves Lady Mason of duplicity for
using her best resource. He implies that an active use
of sexuality is natural for a woman who possesses it.
She dresses simply but stunningly to solicit Mr.
Furnival's legal advice: "Had she given way to
dowdiness, or suffered herself to be, as it were,
washed out, Mr. Furnival, we may say, would not have
been there to meet her:--of which fact Lady Mason was
perhaps aware" (p. 92). To secure Mr. Furnival's
influence, Lady Mason exerts her own, using Mr.
Furnival's weakness for pretty women to gain power for
her cause.

Lady Mason's femininity is the source of her
strength, not her weakness. The force of her
femininity both attracts and intimidates men.

Victorian ideals of womanhood disallow the complex

femininity that Lady Mason uses to advantage. Her male

25
defenders reflect the Victorian dichotomy. They see
Lady Mason either as a victim or a criminal. When they
consider her a victim, they become her champions. When
they realize her guilt, they become emasculated. Lady
Mason's deceit not only calls into question chivalric
concepts of womanhood but also undermines the accepted
superiority of male judgment. Sir Peregrine Orme is
particularly devastated by her duplicity, but even Mr.
Furnival cannot accept the complexity in Lady Mason's
nature which allows her to be a lady and criminal at
the same time. Hardly a scrupulous lawyer, Mr.
Furnival never directly acknowledges Lady Mason's
guilt, even to himself, because he doubts his ability
to defend her in court if he makes such an admission:
"...he had almost brought himself again to believe Lady
Mason to be that victim of persecution as which he did
not hesitate to represent her to the jury" (II, p.
2552). Mr. Furnival reconstructs his own knowledge of
the truth rather than admit that Lady Mason has
herself victimized the court and his own credulity.

Sir Peregrine, however, is most affected by his
awareness of Lady Mason's guilt. He proposes to Lady
Mason to protect her from the supposed slander of
George Mason's and Dockwrath's vindictive allegations.
As an old man intending to marry a much younger woman,

Sir Peregrine's proposal reflects the conditions which

26
precipitated Lady Mason's first marriage. Sir Joseph
Mason's marriage provides an escape for his young wife
from her family's commercial failure. The marriage
represents a financial bargain. Sir Peregrine's
engagement is meant to rescue Lady Mason from ignominy
and thus represents a chivalric act. Margaret King
perceptively notes the tension between chivalry and
commercialism in orloy_£ozm.7 Both chivalry and
commercialism are male constructs to control women's
social and economic place. Because chivalry is based
on a false concept of womanhood, Sir Peregrine's
intended rescue ultimatly fails. Like Mr. Furnival,
Sir Peregrine believes he can "save" Lady Mason when he
believes her a victim.

Curiously, though, Sir Peregrine's love for Lady
Mason grows more desperately passionate after she
privately confesses her guilt to him. When he believes
in her innocence, he believes he only wishes to shield
her reputation. When he knows of her guilt, he admits
his own desire: ‘She was a woman for a man to love to
madness.... I love her--with all my heart! It is
foolish for an old man so to say: but I did love her:
nay, I love her still' (II, p. 288). His exercise of
chivalry is an act of control: his expression of love
is an admission of weakness. The discovery of Lady

Mason's guilt reveals the actual powerlessness of

27
patriarchal protection. Sir Peregrine's shield can do
nothing for Lady Mason that she has not already done
for herself. He expects their marriage to win for Lady
Mason public approbation: her refusal actually protects
Sir Pergrine from the disapprobation which would result
from a foolish marriage.

The reversal of roles so diminishes Sir Peregrine
that he can no longer function in society. After
learning the truth, he cedes control of his estate to
his grandson and becomes increasingly dependent on his
widowed daughter-in-law to make family decisions. Mrs.
Orme is the perfect Victorian angel of the house, the
counter image to Lady Mason. Ironically, Mrs. Orme
accepts Lady Mason's guilt more complacently than any
of the male characters. She is able to provide the
most serviceable friendship to Lady Mason because she
can accept Lady Mason, not as an image, but as she is.
Trollope implies that women and men have discrete
notions of honor, loyalty, and truth. Lady Mason's
trials prove that men can pervert their own abstract
concepts of justice for personal motives without
admitting a personal interest. Sir Peregrine cannot
reconcile the generous honesty of Lady Mason and the
charitable forgiveness of Mrs. Orme with male

perceptions of female virtues:

28

It seemed to him that he might touch pitch and
not be defiled:--he or any man belonging to him.

But he could not reconcile it to himself that the

widow of his son should run such risk. In his

estimation there was something almost more than
human about the purity of the only woman that
blessed his hearth. It seemed to him as though

she were a sacred thing, to be guarded by a

shrine,--to be protected from all contact with the

pollutions of the outer world. And now it was
proposed to him that she should take a felon to

her bosom as a friend! (II, pp. 46-47).

Mrs. Orme is the only character who can touch Lady
IMason's pitch and not be defiled. She challenges Sir
iPeregrine's perceptions of womanhood when she defends
lady Mason after the confession: ‘Dear father, is she
:not as worthy and as fit as she was yesterday? If we
saw clearly into each other's bosoms, whom should we
think worthy?‘ (II, p. 47). Mrs. Orme's friendship to
JLady Mason is perhaps an example of what Ruth apRoberts
deems Trollope's "Situation Ethics."8 Certainly we

question whether one can abet crime and remain morally
Pure. Trollope suggests that we must accept and cope
W1 th the dirty parts of the world and the human

character. Women are not exempt from this either.

29

Mrs. Orme displays a complex understanding of
morality which Trollope identifies as "A Woman's Idea
of Friendship" (II, chapter VI). Her decision to
support Lady Mason is a conscious act which calls into
question conventional notions of women's purity. Mrs.
Orme's equivocal moral decision does not dethrone her
as the angel of her house but rather elevates her as a
compassionate woman. She is able to uphold the
Victorian image even as she violates its tenets. In
contrast, Trollope's heroine of ogloy_£o:m, Madeline
Staveley, never achieves the complexity of Mrs. Orme or
becomes more than a conventional character. Madeline
and her rival, Mary Snow, are instead parodies of
female purity.

The dull subplot of Madeline's courtship satirizes
male images of the genus girl. Madeline's suitor,
Felix Graham, falls in love with Madeline while he is
engaged to Mary Snow, a young girl he has adopted to
mold as a suitable wife. Trollope mocks the fictional
convention that requires a marriage plot in a popular
novel as well as the social expectation for marriage
itself. Trollope sardonically undermines Madeline's
role in the novel. He introduces her late in the first
volume with an effusive prayer that she please the
popular reader:

... as I intend that Madeline Staveley shall, to

30
many of my readers, be the most interesting
personage in the story, I must pause to say
something of her. I must say something of her:
and, as with all women, the outward and visible
signs of grace and beauty are those which are
thought of the most, or at any rate spoken of the
oftenest, I will begin with her exterior
attributes. And that the muses may assist me in
my endeavor, teaching my rough hands to draw with
some accuracy the delicate lines of female
beauty, I now make to them my humble, my earnest
prayer (I, p. 144).
The overly-ornate language and the repetition of "I
must say something of her" reveal Trollope's bow to
conventional tastes and suggest that he regards
Madeline's presence almost as an intrusion into the
important storyline. Madeline is described only by her
appearance--in fact, her appearance is the only
interesting thing about her. Lady Mason's character,
on the other hand, is developed in terms of her
history. As a pure and marriageable young girl,
Madeline has no history.
Madeline's story is intended to please the popular
audience. By juxtaposing Madeline's conventional
romance plot to Mary Snow's contrived marriage plot,

frrollope exposes the limited understanding of marriage

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within the patriarchal construct. Felix Graham
believes he can mold Mary into a wife and that she
will naturally appreciate his effort. By rescuing Mary
from an alcholic father, Felix intends to elevate her
position by his chivalric act. Mary's own inclinations
prove the artificiality of chivalry. Instead of
cultivating devout gratitude to Felix, she falls in
love with the neighborhood druggist.

To Mary's working-class suitor, she is "The Angel
of Light" (I, p. 257). To Felix Graham, Madeline is
”The Gem of Four Families" (II, p. 48). The
melodramatic titles further parody the sentimental
hero's perception of the heroine. Mary Snow, for
instance, is no angel: she conducts a sidewalk
flirtation and defies her duenna. Trollope uses the
romance subplots to undermine patriarchal tenets and
make ironic comment on idealized conceptualizations of
women. Felix sheepishly arranges Mary's marriage to
her true lover. He assumes a false fatherly role,
examining the young man and providing a dowry. In his
own marriage to Madeline, he must accede to Judge
Staveley's demands to become more successful
professionally. The Staveley family actually elevate
Felix to a higher social position. Although Felix
considers himself more ethical than all the other

lawyers, his eagerness to rid himself of Mary

32
compromises his own idealism: "This idea of a model
wife had already become a very expensive idea, and in
winding it up to its natural conclusion poor Graham was
willing to spend almost every shilling that he could
call his own" (II, p. 133).

Felix's chivalry deteriorates into commericalism
as he buys off Mary Snow and cedes his personal
professional code to buy into the Staveley family.
Trollope does not so much condemn Felix's arrogance as
deride its pretense: "But then modest-minded young men
are fools" (II, p. 200). As he participates in Lady
Mason's defense during her second trial, Felix learns
that he cannot remain professionally pure and remain
loyal to his client at the same time. Through his
personal and professional errors, Felix discovers that
women are not the simple creatures of popular image.
His attempts to defend and protect female purity are
just as ineffectual as those of Sir Peregrine Orme.

Indeed, ozloy_£o:m reveals Trollope's
understanding of the systemized corruption in his
world. Lady Mason's case is only a case in point. The
legal system devised to protect the innocent and punish
the guilty instead protects the guilty and punishes
.the innocent. Trollope does not so much address the
situational ethics of moral decision-making, but rather

presents the difficulties involved in defining morality

33
at all. Lady Mason violates both legal and social
codes by perpetrating a crime against the patriarchy.
But who is most criminal? What is the real crime? Sir
Peregrine Orme's idealism is ineffectual when applied
to a moral issue. Mrs. Orme's merciful act of
friendship compromises morality. The Mason men are all
a line of bad masters. George Mason has the law on his
side, but his harsh applicatibn of justice seems more
criminal than Lady Mason's original forgery and
subsequent perjury.

The lawyers, particularly, reveal the corruption
of the system they represent. Dockwrath ferrets out
truth, but he is motivated by revenge and lacks all
sense of mercy. Moreover, as he pretends to champion
the larger cause of right, he violates the very
procedures intended to ensure a system of justice. He
bribes witnesses and uses legal technicalities for
personal gain. Similarly, Mr. Chaffanbrass discredits
honest witnesses as his strategy for defending Lady
Mason, using legal maneuverings to prevent the
discovery of truth. Mr. Chaffanbrass' professional
code is based on loyalty to his client. His success
as a barrister comes from his ability to champion the
cause of criminals without regard to guilt or
innocence.

Mr. Furnival's relationship to Lady Mason most

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34
exemplifies the moral dilemma. He knows that Lady
Mason is guilty but defends her because he decides her
forgery is less criminal than George Mason's "malicious
justice" (I, p. 207). The notoriety of Lady Mason's
original trial helps make Mr. Furnival a successful
barrister. His success, however, diminishes him as a
man. As he becomes a celebrated lawyer, he neglects
his home life, choosing wealth and professional
recognition over his wife's happiness. Lady Mason's
second trial acts as a catalyst for the Furnivals'
marital problems. Mrs. Furnival suspects her husband
of infidelity because of his devotion to Lady Mason's
cause. Although Mr. Furnival is not unfaithful in act,
he develops a flirtatious relationship with Lady Mason
which he disguises as both professionalism and
chivalry: "It would be sweet to feel that she was in
his hands, and that he would treat her with mercy and
kindness" (I, p. 198).

Mr. Furnival's interest in Lady Mason's case
operates as covert sexual control. He dispenses
advice and mercy while he "stray[s] after strange
goddesses in these his blue-nose days" (I, p. 91).
Trollope exposes the dual hypocrisy behind Mr.
Furnival's chivalric defense of Lady Mason. First, as
a lawyer, Mr. Furnival's defense is necessarily a

business arrangement. Second, he intentionally creates

35
an image of Lady Mason as a wronged woman to facilitate
a successful defense: "It would be a great thing if he
could spread abroad a conviction that she was an
injured woman.... The jurymen of Alston would be mortal
men: and it might be possible that they should be
imbued with a favourable bias on the subject before
they assembled in their box for its consideration" (I,
p. 198).

Lady Mason is indeed a strange goddess, and Mr.
Furnival is well-aware of the mortality of men when
considering the effect of her charms. Mr. Furnival's
championship of Lady Mason centers on popular images of
womanhood. Publicly and privately, he invents an image
of her as a frail and helpless woman. Mr. Chaffanbrass
agrees to help with Lady Mason's defense with a
strikingly different perception of his client: ‘I
remember thinking that Lady Mason was a very clever
woman.... A pretty woman like that should have
everything smooth: shouldn't she? Well, we'll do the
best we can. You'll see that I'm properly instructed'
(I, p. 269). Mr. Chaffanbrass is Trollope's Mr.
Jaggers, intensified. He is a dirty lawyer who never
bothers to wash his hands. Yet he is essentially more
honest than Mr. Furnival since he acknowledges that his
task is to'manipulate a fraudulent justice.

Lady Mason's lawyers realize the importance of

36

manipulating public opinion as an integral part of her
defense. Lady Mason's notoriety as a lady criminal
actually helps her gain public support:

As the trial progressed the interest in it

increased, and as people began to believe that

Lady Mason had in truth forged a will, so did they

the more regard her in the light of a heroine.

Had she murdered her husband after forging his

will, men would have paid half a crown apiece to

have touched her garments, or a guinea for the

privilege of shaking hands with her (II, p. 240).
The narrator reevaluates what constitutes a real
heroine in the public mind. Forgery and murder are not
the provinces only of sensation fiction. Hartman's
reconstruction of the trials of respectable middle-
class women accused of capital crimes confirms
Trollope's fictional assertion. Women's trials
elicited great public interest--the more lurid the
better.9

In some ways, Trollope follows the practice of
sensation writers with his "assault on the heroine":
like the sensation heroine, Lady Mason represents "a
moral ambivalence rather than a moral certainty."1°
Still, Trollope denies Lady Mason's function as a
fictional heroine just as he denies his similarity to

sensation writers. Trollope uses Lady Mason's case to

37
comment on society's values, particularly represented
by popular attitudes toward women's function in
society. Lady Mason is much more engrossing than a
conventional heroine and much less evil than a
sensation heroine. Her beauty and apparent docility
seem to support the Victorian cultural myth of the
ornamental middle-class woman. Her crime demolishes
the basis of the myth, that women passively accept the
constraints of the system under which they live.

Lady Mason not only threatens but deposes the
patriarchal legal system. She is more clever than all
the lawyers and other "commercial gentlemen." She
disregards the abstract bases of the male-dominated
system, but exercises her own set of scruples
regarding personal matters. She refuses Sir
Peregrine's offer rather than jeopardize his
reputation: much of her concern over the second trial
involves the effect it will have on her son. She
resists both confession and repentance. Lady Mason's
sense of shame concerns public opinion more than
private remorse:

The world, her world, that world for which she had

cared, in which she had lived, had treated her

with honour and respect, and had looked upon her
as an ill-used innocent woman. But now all that

would be over. Every one must know what she was.

38

And then, as she lay there, that thought came to

her. Must every one know it? Was there no longer

any hope for her? (II, p. 34).

Even in the aftermath of her confession to Sir
Peregrine, Lady Mason considers new schemes to
preserve the conditions of her life in society. She
realizes that her outward image will be compromised by
the revelation of guilt: thus, she decides to proceed
with the second trial, doubling her act of perjury.
Nineteenth century fiction assumes that self-sacrifice
is the natural bent of femininity. Trollope counters
the convention with Lady Mason's successful effort to
elude public scorn and legal punishment. He suspects
that, even for women, self-protection is a more natural
human motivation than self-sacrifice.

Lady Mason wins her trial but agrees to cede Orley
Farm to George Mason in a private arrangement. The-
private act refutes the public verdict. The legal
system actually rewards fraud and perpetuates injustice
by allowing Lady Mason the right to retain the estate
and continue to live a lie. When she activates
justice by returning the property, she is exiled from
her community. She and Lucius begin new lives in
Germany. Again Trollope reverses the Victorian
fictional convention which requires fallen women to die

as payment for their crimes against society. Lady

39
Mason is given the opportunity for a new life in a new
sphere:
Of her future life I will not venture to say
anything. But no lesson is truer than that which
teaches us to believe that God does temper the
wind to the shorn lamb.... For Lady Mason, let us
hope that the day will come in which she also may
trick her beams in some modest, unassuming way,
and that for her the morning may even yet be sweet
with a glad warmth (II, p. 312).
The trick of ozloy_£ozm's ending is not just the
unlikely conventional hope for an unusual protagonist.
Trollope tricks the reader out of a conventional love
story and a conventional heroine as well as a
conventional ending. He encourages the reader to
expect additional vagaries from Lady Mason. Nothing we
know about her indicates that she will ever assume
modest ambitions for her life, whatever her demeanor.
What we know about Lady Mason comes mostly from
the perception of others. Secrecy is part of her
fascination and a key part of her success as a
criminal. Trollope asks us to consider how a woman can
be both a lady and a criminal. Lady Mason tells Sir
Peregrine, ‘I am guilty... Guilty of all this with
which they charge me' (II, p. 32). Sir Peregrine is

astounded by the discrepency between Lady Mason's outer

40
and inner life:

Could it be that she had forged that will: that

with base, premeditated contrivance she had stolen

that property: stolen it and kept it from that day
to this:--through all these long years? And then
he thought of her pure life, of her womanly,
dignified repose, of her devotion to her son,--
such devotion indeed!--of her sweet pale face and
soft voice.... He thought of it all, and he could

not believe that she was guilty (II, p. 34).

Lady Mason is sweet, soft, and womanly, but she is
undeniably guilty. Her crime does not prevent her

from leading a pure life for twenty years or from
manifesting conventionally accepted qualities of
femininity. Trollope stresses her innocence and guilt
equally, prodding the reader to bestow greater humanity
on his character than the conventional images of women
permit. Lady Mason manifests the complexities, not
simply of woman's nature, but of human nature--for both
good and bad.

The final juxtaposition of heroine and anti-
heroine is a striking subversion to convention.
Trollope ends QI1£!_E§IE with a two-line reference to
Madeline Staveley's marriage. The narrator makes
negligible comment on Madeline's future--"as yet I have

not heard of any banishment”--whereas he affirms hope

41
for Lady Mason's life--'For her, on the whole, the
change was for the better" (II, p. 320). Lady Mason's
exit from the novel brings the significant story to a
close: ”And now we will say farewell to her, and as we
do so the chief interest of our tale will end" (II, p.
312). Trollope's adieu to Lady Mason echoes our first
introduction to her and reinforces her importance as
the novel's anti-heroine.

Using many of the forms of Victorian sensation
fiction, Trollope reconstructs the elements to provide
an equivocal conclusion to ozloy_£ozmo He does not
allow a sense of resolution with the restoration of
patriarchal possession. He does not assert the
supremacy of Madeline's marital happiness over Lady
Mason's widowed contentment. Lady Mason dupes a
corrupt system and wins the world's admiration for her
audacity. Trollope's ambivalent ending is his final
comment on the moral equivocy of the world of 9:12!
Form. Lady Mason's crime against social institutions
only reveals a larger social corruption. Even in this
early novel, Trollope displays a complex understanding
of the nature of women's place in his society as he
prefigures the darker social criticism of the later
novels. QIIQY_E§IE gives tepid support to convention
and rejuvenation. For Lady Mason, perhaps for all

unconventional women, exile may be the only chance for

42
a better life. With the restoration of Orley Farm to
its rightful owner, the patriarchy banishes Lady
Mason, but the escape from patriarchal control is a

change for the good.

Claiming the Patriarchal Inheritance:
”Lady Ongar's Revenge" in Meanings

In QI1§Y_E§ID. Trollope's examination of a corrupt
legal system exposes the inadequacies of patriarchal
institutions and women's subversive means to combat
their oppression. In Ino_gloyorino§ (1866), he
dissects the intimate workings of the patriarchy within
the family. In this novel, the Clavering family 15
society. The male members each represent conventional
roles for gentlemen by their social positions: Sir Hugh
Clavering is a baronet, his brother Archie is a
military officer, Harry Clavering is an Oxford scholar,
Harry's father is a clergyman after the worldly model
of Archdeacon Grantly. Despite their aristocratic
heritage, the Clavering men are not noble. Harry's
peccadilloes with two women form the substance of the
storyline, revealing the emotional and social abuse
'women receive within the construct of a highly
patriarchal family.

Tho glavezingo begins with the end of a romance.
crulia Brabazon rejects Harry Clavering to marry the
Wealthy debauchee, Lord Ongar. Harry subsequently

pledges himself to a life of misery and celibacy

because of Julia's defection, but he becomes engaged to

43

44
Florence Burton within a year. When Lord Ongar dies of
delirium tremens a year after Julia's marriage, Harry
is torn between the return of his old lover and the
commitment to his new sweetheart. Harry's infidelity
and final return to Florence forms the simple plot of
Tho_gloyogino§, but Julia's attempt to infiltrate into
a closed society to achieve a position of power
provides the real interest of the novel.

Julia's marriage to Lord Ongar is motivated by
mercenary considerations, always a major issue in
Trollope's novels. Julia commits the "crime" of
forsaking romance for money. She distinguishes
between romance, love, and marriage with sardonic
detachment, perceiving Harry's attachment as immature
ardor based on falsely romantic notions of love: ‘It
must be manifest to you during these two years that all
that was a romance.'1

The opening scene between Julia and Harry
establishes the conflict between romantic love and
married life as the basis for the novel. Julia's
apparently mistaken and cynical attitude seems to
establish her as the heartbreaking femme fatale.
However, the imagery of the scene reflects Julia's
perception of Harry's love as a fruitless proposition.
Trollope fills the garden scene with dark images which

suggest that Harry's protestations of love actually

45
reveal a dearth of real affection: "It was now the end
of August, and the parterres, beds, and bits of lawn
were dry, disfigured, and almost ugly, from the effects
of a long drought...everything was yellow, adust,
harsh, and dry” (p. 1).

Trollope juxtaposes the stories of the
conventional heroine and the anti-heroine to reveal the
decay of the traditional romance/marriage plot.
Trollope's discussion of Tho_gloyoriog§ focusses
attention on Julia's character and history as the
interest of the novel. He points out the reversal of
expectations for male-female roles as central to the
story:

The chief character is that of a young woman who

has married manifestly for money and rank.... When

she is free, the man whom she had loved and who
had loved her, is engaged to another woman. He
vacillates and is weak,--in which weakness is the
fault of the book, as he plays the part of the
hero. But she is strong-~strong in her purpose,
strong in her desires.2

Trollope's disingenuous assessment of the novel
accounts for a popular reading as it explains the
subversion of the text. Harry is weak, Julia is
strong. Harry becomes engaged to a model Victorian

girl, yet Florence is the "other woman.” Harry casts

46
himself into the role of romantic hero with both women.
He snobbishly believes he is elevating Florence to a
higher position by marrying her, and he sentimentally
defends Julia as a wronged woman. Trollope undermines
Harry's motivations by questioning the whole romantic
concept of heroes and heroines as a mere fictional
creation that damages our ability to respond to the
complexities of life honestly or naturally: "In spite
of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in
putting his own interpretation upon these words [hero
and heroine], something heroic is still expected:
whereas, if he attempt to paint from Nature, how little
that is heroic should he describe!" (p. 239).

Harry Clavering particularly manifests romantic
illusions about love. More than being genuinely in
love with either Florence or Julia, he is in love with
an image of himself as the hero of romance. By
engaging himself to a girl of a lower social class, he
believes he sacrifices better marriage opportunities
for love. By becoming Julia's champion during her
widowhood, he creates a view of himself as a lost man
sacrificing himself for Julia's sake: "What would he
care what the world might say?... There had been a
tragic seriousness in what had occurred to him...which
seemed to cover him with care, and make him feel that

his youth was gone from him" (pp. 214-15).

47

Trollope continually undermines Harry's self-
perceptions. The narrator points out that what Harry
considers tragedy is merely folly. Harry's lack of
heroism is caused by his faulty sense of honor: "In all
his love for Florence,--so he now told himself, but so
told himself falsely,--he had ever remembered that
Julia Brabazon had been his first love, the love whom
he had loved with all his heart" (p. 174). Harry
privately scorns the Burtons because he is, by rank, a
gentleman. The idea of the gentleman is always
important in Trollope, but the narrator reminds us that
rank alone does not insure good character: "High rank
and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart"
(p. 217).

Julia's marriage to Lord Ongar proves that high
rank cannot insure against a cruel heart. Julia feels
she must marry for money because, as a high-ranking but
dowerless girl, she has amassed debts to maintain her
social position. Lord Ongar agrees to assume her debts
during their engagement, but his subsidy becomes her
blood money later. Lord Ongar compromises Julia's
reputation to prevent her from inheriting after his
death, even though she has lived up to her part of
their marriage bargain: to be a social ornament to him
and to nurse him through the last stages of alcoholism.

On his deathbed, Lord Ongar starts divorce proceedings

48

against Julia, having induced his friend Count
Pateroff to try to become Julia's lover. Julia denies
any involvement with the Count, but because of the
rumors started by her husband, her brother-in-law Hugh
Clavering refuses to acknowledge her. Accepting Hugh's
condemnation, society bans her as well.

The world decides Julia is guilty of adultery
because the head of her family ostracizes her.
Trollope complicates the moral indictment. First, he
is unsparing in his treatment of Sir Hugh as an abusive
patriarch. Second, he leaves open the question of
Julia's guilt. Harry believes in her innocence, but
Harry is no judge of character. Enchanted by her
position, wealth, and beauty, he is conscious of his
own chance to achieve position and wealth through a
marriage to her. Julia defends herself more on the
grounds of her husband's ill-treatment than on the
basis of her innocence. She hesitates to snub Count
Pateroff because of his intimate knowledge of her
married life, and she feels compelled to support the
Count's sister, Sophie Gourdeloupe, because of Sophie's
mysterious aid during the time of Julia's troubles.

Count Pateroff purports to hold compromising
documents about his relationship to Julia. Sophie is
able to blackmail Julia because she knows so much about

Julia's past:

49

There are services for which one is ready to give

almost any amount of money payment,--if only one

can be sure that that money payment will be taken

as sufficient recompence for the service in

question. Sophie Gourdeloupe had been useful....

She had done things which nobody else could have

done, and she had done her work well (p. 393).
Sophie's own past and reputation are murky at best.
Her association with Julia reinforces both suspicion
and sympathy for the anti-heroine. The gullible Archie
Clavering believes that Sophie is a Russian spy. Her
long-absent husband was once associated with the St.
Petersburg embassy, but we never know in what capacity,
nor do we learn what becomes of him. We know that
Sophie herself is both a blackmailer and an anonymous
letter-writer. Sophie is on the fringes of society,
but her own social position is still stronger than
Julia's. When Julia tries to break their association,
Sophie taunts Julia with her relative freedom: ‘I can
choose my friends anywhere. The world is open to me to
go where I please into society. I am not at a loss'
(p. 246).

In marked contrast to Julia's banishment from the
family by her brother-in-law, Sophie's is allowed
social freedom because of the support of her brother.

Sophie works hard to facilitate a marriage between

50
Julia and the Count. Count Pateroff is a smooth man of
the world who assumes the quiet mannerisms of a well-
bred Englishman. He is a well-known figure in
aristocratic circles despite his suspect lineage. He
knows the inner-workings of Harry's club better than
Harry himself. Julia is without active male support.
She lives in virtual isolation. The financial power
Julia gains from Lord Ongar's money is severely
tempered by the social ostracism that accompanies it.
Lord Ongar's money provides her with the means to buy
Harry as a husband but also makes her the target of
unfastidious fortune-hunters. Her tarnished reputation
is a handicap only if she remains a single woman
without male protection. In an ironic parallel to
Julia's arrangement with Lord Ongar, Sir Hugh is
willing to accept her into the family only if agrees to
marry Archie and take over his debts.

Julia's isolation from family life corresponds to
the disaffection with middle-class domesticity
addressed in Victorian sensation fiction.3 Normally,
Trollope's narrator provides information and commentary
to correct false impressions or mistaken perceptions of
his characters. With Sophie and Julia, he remains
unusually reticent about clearing the mysteries that
surround their characters. As Elaine Showalter points

out, secrecy was both a prime element of sensation

51
fiction and "was basic in the lives of all respectable
[Victorian] women.”4

Trollope adds several layers to Showalter's
premise. Julia and Sophie are not typical, or
respectable, middle-class Victorian women. The secrecy
enveloping Julia's married life becomes sensationalized
because of the nature of the public accusations. As in
Q:1oy_£ozm, society openly discusses the supposedly
unspeakable crimes of the anti-heroine.

After Julia's failed attempt to reenter her
family, she tries to establish a domestic sphere of
her own. Following her return to England, Julia
travels to Ongar Park, the estate left to her in Lord
Ongar's will. As mistress of Ongar Park, she believes
she can find happiness independent of family life:
”Everything in and about the place was her own, and she
might live there happily, even in the face of the
world's frowns, if she could teach herself to find
happiness in rural luxuries" (p. 96).

Julia, at Ongar Park, defies the world's frowns,
but she cannot feel that the place is really her own.
As she tries to assert ownership, she continually
reminds herself of the moral cost of possession: "It
was all her own. It was the price of what she had
done: and the price was even now being paid into her

hand,--paid with current coin and of full weight" (p.

52
98). Julia creeps around the neighborhood veiled and
rarely strays far from the house. The Rector's wife
refuses to visit her. Even the housekeeper shuns her.
Julia's attempt at an independent life only humiliates
her further. The "joys of possession" become her
burden: "She had the price in her hands, but she felt
herself tempted to do as Judas did,--to go out and hang
herself” (pp. 101-102).

Yet Julia believes she can redeem her act of
"mercenary perfidy" by marrying Harry Clavering and
showering her wealth on him. In a sense, she still
believes in the possibilities of a mercenary marriage,
but with Harry, she would be the buyer rather than the
goods. She even speculates on the possibility of Harry
assuming the Ongar title. In effect, she attempts to
give him a name. Julia's defiance of the patriarchy
extends to an effort to establish her own seat of power
through her economic advantages.

Unlike most "economically impotent” Victorian
women, Julia has powerful financial resources. Even
so, she still falls "outside the paternalistic family
system."5 Although she is a suspected adulteress, her
real crime is her refusal to accept Hugh's terms for
reintegrating into the family. Trollope is unsparing
in his treatment of Hugh Clavering. Hugh is an abusive

husband. Julia's sister Hermione is isolated at

53
Clavering Park, shunned and despised as a wife. Hugh
refuses Hermione consolation after their child dies,
effecting a virtual separation when Hermione no longer
fulfills her role as the mother of the heir. Hugh does
not allow Hermione to visit Julia or to leave
Clavering Park, confining her to an empty house,
devoid of occupation and bereft of any human affection.
Hugh sees marriage in purely utilitarian terms.
He sees no reason to stay with Hermione once she has
served her limited purpose, and love is not a factor in
any of his considerations about marriage:
What had his wife done for him, that he should put
himself out of his way to do much for her? She
had brought him no money. She had added nothing
either by her wit, beauty, or rank to his position
in the world. She had given him no heir. What
had he received from her that he should endure her
commonplace conversation, and washed-out, dowdy
prettinesses? (p. 30).
Hugh is, admittedly, a monster patriarchal figure, but
his view of his marriage resembles Harry's
considerations toward his engagement to Florence
Burton--that is, what worldly advantage does she offer?
Hugh's attitudes pervade the entire Clavering clan.
lhost significantly, Hugh's assessment of Hermione

reflects commonplace Victorian assumptions that confine

54
women to ”social, decorative and childbearing
role[s]."6

Florence is the heroine of Tho_gloyo;1ng§, but she
is not much of a character: she is mostly a device in
the love triangle. She is the wronged woman, but she
is wronged by Harry, not Julia. Trollope implies that
the woman is the sufferer in love and marriage,
particularly because she has little power or recourse
beyond endurance. Julia's attempts to win back Harry
fail despite her many resources. Florence herself does
nothing to hold Harry to their engagement. According
to the domestic manuals, Florence should gain power
over Harry from her passivity and weakness. Instead,
Florence's sister-in-law and Harry's mother have to
shame him into keeping his promise to her.

Cecilia Burton and Mrs. Clavering are influential
matriarchs, but their main roles are to cover the
errors of the family men. Mr. Clavering is an idle,
hedonistic clergyman who sets an arrogant, worldly
example before Harry. Rather than insist on Harry
honoring his commitment to Florence, Mr. Clavering
speculates on the advantages Lady Ongar's wealth could
give the family: "...a rich marriage would be an easy
way out of all the difficulties" (p. 344). Mr.
(llavering's moral indignation at Julia's suspected

adultery diminishes at the prospect of gaining the

55
wealth secured by her marriage. In other words, a
mercenary marriage which benefits Harry is acceptable
since Julia's money will again be placed within
patriarchal constructs.

Mrs. Clavering takes over all the private duties
of the parish and acts as the conscience of the family.
The Rector accepts her energies on his behalf,
preferring her contempt over his own exertions:

And his wife had given him up. She had given him

up, not with disdainful rejection, nor with

contempt in her eye, or censure in her voice, not
with diminution of love or of outward respect.

She had given him up as a man abandons his

attempts to make his favourite dog take the water.

He would fain that the dog he loves should dash

into the stream as other dogs will do. It is, to

his thinking, a noble instinct in a dog. But his
dog dreads the water. As, however, he has learned
to love the beast, he puts up with this mischance,
and never dreams of banishing poor Ponto from his
hearth because of this failure. And so it was
with Mrs. Clavering and her husband at the
rectory. He understood it all. He knew that he
was so far rejected: and he acknowledged to

himself the necessity for such rejection (pp. 12-

13).

56
Hermione remarks to Mrs. Clavering about the love that
pervades the family at the rectory, but Trollope's
description of Mrs. Clavering's marriage distinguishes
between love and romance. Mrs. Clavering learns to
love her husband and to do the hard work in the
marriage without romance.

Cecilia Burton, too, "in all affairs of tact, of
social intercourse, and of conduct between man and man,
or man and woman...actually fought the battles" (p.
266). Cecilia acts as the mediator between the
Clavering and Burton interests when Harry reneges on
the engagement. She receives Harry's confession and
plans her own attack to secure Florence's happiness.
Without consulting her husband, Cecilia boldly visits
Julia to plead Florence's case.

The marriages within Julia's experience confirm
her cynicism about romantic love. She perceptively
notes the absence of romance in the Clavering
marriages. Hugh's abuse and Mr. Clavering's neglect
provide the models for husbands. Harry's vacillations
and infidelity provide the model for lovers, lapses
Harry himself considers "so common with men" (p. 262).
Julia's marriage is a grotesque extension of these
.relationships. Lord Ongar is abusive even though she
:fulfills her married roles as nurse and social

Ornament. Accusations of infidelity also color her

57
married relationship. Like Harry, Julia fails to
perceive that love often exists without romance.
Trollope's narrator articulates a revised
conception of committed love that conflicts with
notions of romantic love: ”A man, though he may love
many, should be devoted only to one.... There is much
of this which is quite independent of love,--much of it
that may be done without love. This is devotion..."
(pp. 239-40). Harry's romantic disposition actually
works against love. Because Florence is not invested
with princess-like endowments, she does not seem as
worthy of his love as Julia:
Poor Florence Burton was short of stature, was
brown, meagre, and poor-looking. So said Harry
Clavering to himself. Her small hand, though
soft, lacked that wondrous charm of touch which
Julia's possessed. Her face was short, and her
forehead, though it was broad and open, had none
of that feminine command which Julia's look
conveyed (p. 19).
On the other hand, Harry creates a romantic image of
Julia as the femme fatale: ”She had robbed-him of his
high character, of his unclouded brow, of the self—
pride which had so often told him that he was living a
Ilife without reproach among men. She had brought him

to a state in which misery must be his bedfellow..."

58
(p. 216). Harry excuses his own treatment of women by
blaming what he perceives as the women's failings.

Trollope's resolution of the Julia-Florence
rivalry is involved and peculiar. He invokes many
conventional devices as possible solutions, but all
distort the traditional comic marriage plot. Cecilia
Burton appeals to Julia's sense of feminine solidarity
to cede her hold on Harry to Florence's claim. In the
spirit of Trollope's anti-heroines, Julia remains
unrepentent and self-interested. She rejects self-
sacrifice in the spirit of self—assertion: ‘You cannot
expect that I should love another woman better than
myself' (p. 318).

Florence's response to betrayal is strikingly
different and appropriately conventional. With the
proper spirit of a heroine, Florence chooses self-
denial rather than insist on fair treatment. She
readily excuses Harry for his own interests in a
remarkable act of self-deprecation:

For herself,--had she not known that she had only

come second? As she thought of him with his

noble bride and that bride's great fortune, and of

her own insignificance, her low birth, her
doubtful prettiness,--prettiness that had ever
been doubtful to herself, of her few advantages,

she told herself that she had no right to stand

59

upon her claims (p. 269).

Again, the mercenary marriage is sanctioned when
contracted for Harry's advantage. Florence condemns
Julia's marriage as an act of prostitution, considering
her rival "a bold, bad woman who could forget her sex,
and sell her beauty and her womanhood for money" (p.
267). Yet she is willing to see Harry's defection as a
justifiable act of romance, ”the strength of an old
love which he could not quell" (p. 269). Florence
accepts, indeed supports, the double standard which
permits Harry to repudiate romance for money but which
condemns Julia to criminal status. As a prince of
romance, Florence would insist, Harry deserves Julia's
wealth to complete the romantic image.

When Mrs. Clavering coerces Harry into keeping his
promise to Florence, Trollope seems to confirm the
supremacy of the heroine. Ironically, though, Florence
is the real loser. The Rectory family never considers
Florence suitable material for the Clavering line.
Harry comes into succession of the baronetcy only
through warped means. Hugh and Archie both drown in a
.boating accident: thus, Harry achieves his title only
through premature and violent death. Harry's response
‘to Florence's role as Lady Clavering echoes Hugh's
attitude toward Hermione, ”that her destiny might

Probably call upon her to be the mother of a future

6O
baronet" (p. 377).

Following the conventions of the comic marriage
plot, Florence is elevated to the position of a titled
lady, but her happiness does not seem assured. Even
after Harry "returns to the fold“ (p.343), his mother
and sisters continue to doubt his constancy. Mrs.
Clavering urges Florence to an immediate marriage to
"reward" Harry's return: "‘Believe me it will be best
that it should not be delayed.‘ Whether or no Mrs.
Clavering had present in her imagination the
possibility of any further danger that might result
from Lady Ongar, I will not say..." (p. 398).

Florence's security within the Clavering
patriarchy remains precarious. Harry's assumption of
the title is juxtaposed to the end of Hugh's reign as
patriarch. The narrator provides a harsh eulogy for
Hugh and Archie that offers only tempered hope for
renewal within the family: "Was it not well that two
such men should be consigned to the fishes, and that
the world,--especially the Clavering world...should be
well quit of them?" (p. 377). The narrator openly
accuses the brothers of unbridled greed: "Both of the
brothers had lived on the unexpressed theory of
(consuming, for the benefit of their own backs and their
Own bellies, the greatest possible amount of those good

things which fortune might put in their way" (p. 377) .

61
After their deaths, the narrator describes Harry and
his father in similar terms, as they assess the
property left to them as a result of the family
tragedy: "...the rector and Harry took themselves off,
somewhere about the grounds of the great house,--
counting up their treasures of proprietorship..." (p.
406). In contrast to Hugh, Harry is weak rather than
harsh, but the essential family values remain constant
and promise continuance under Harry's control.

As the heroine, Florence will be subject to the
greed and snobbishness that marked Hermione's marriage
to the Clavering baronet. As the anti-heroine, Julia
escapes control through exile. After Hugh's death and
Harry's return to Florence, Julia decides to establish
her own residence, with her sister, in Europe. Julia
maintains her independence and sets the conditions for
her life while she reconciles with the patriarchal
system on her own terms. Julia cedes her claim to
Ongar Park, returning the estate to Lord Ongar's
family. Like Lady Mason, she redeems herself with the
system by restoring its most valued component,
property. Julia's "repentence" results from the
personal misery caused by her mercenary marriage.
Having previously resisted threats from Lord Ongar's
:family to yield the property, she structures her

atonement to suit herself. Curiously, the restoration

62
only produces incredulity. Both the Ongar and
Clavering clans believe she is mad when she acts on her
own accord.

Julia does not act out of a sense of abstract
justice. She acts out of her own sense of integrity
for her own contentment: ‘I will not have his
money.... It is a curse to me, and has been from the
first' (p. 385). Julia's lawyer and the Clavering men
try to dissuade her from surrendering wealth, but she
rejects the authority of the male view of her
situation: ‘Who is there that can advise me? Of
course the lawyer tells me that I ought to keep it all.
It is his business to give such advice as that. But
what does he know of how I feel? How can he understand
me?‘ (p. 384).

Julia's dilemma about property raises perplexing
questions about women's economic and social place in
the world of The Clovoriogs. Julia must choose social
condemnation or economic powerlessness. By retaining
wealth, she retains power yet concomitantly loses her
social position through accusations of immoral conduct.
By yielding wealth, she loses power and is then
considered mad--but good--in the bargain. In Laoy
Aooloy;§_§ooxot, Mary Bradden excuses Lady Audley's
attack on the patriarchy by assigning her to an insane

asylum, suggesting that insanity is the reason behind a

63
woman's anger and exercise of power. Trollope
structures our sympathy for Julia by treating the
world's easy explanation as the real insanity. Julia
never acts so much for herself as when she cedes the
property. In essence, she trades both social place and
economic power for independence. She no longer fights
the system but withdraws from it.

Julia finally condemns herself for marrying
without love, but she is never sorry for her attempt to
achieve love with Harry Clavering. She never considers
herself the other woman or apologizes for her active
expression of sexuality: ”What cared she now for the
common ways of women and the usual coynesses of
feminine coquetry?" (p. 145). Julia continues to use
her advantages even after she loses Harry to Florence.
Julia forces a confrontation with Harry and corners
Florence to offer cautionary advice about love and
marriage.

Trollope significantly titles the confrontation
scene, "Lady Ongar's Revenge" (pp. 361-69). Unlike
Florence, Julia does not excuse Harry's lack of honor
by searching for a personal lack in herself: ”...there
could be no reason why Harry Clavering should not be
made to know all that he had lost" (p. 364). Julia
carefully controls their conversation to make Harry as

uncomfortable as possible and prevent him from

64
dominating the meeting: ”She had especially determined
to be at ease during this meeting, and was conscious
that any falling off in that respect on her part would
put into his hands the power which she was desirous of
exercising" (p. 366).

Julia understands that love issues can remain her
one sphere of domination, even though she loses her
lover:

The excitement of having a passion which she might

indulge was over with her,--at any rate for the

present. She had played her game and had lost
woefully: but before she retired altogether from
the gaming-table she could not keep herself from

longing for a last throw of the dice (p. 365).
Unfortunately, Julia's power still comes from a
condition of loss. Through the contrasting responses of
Julia and Florence to rejection, Trollope seems to
affirm the conventional wisdom which recommends
feminine delicacy in love. However, we are left to
wonder which woman is the real winner. Florence gets
her man, but the narrator reminds us that Harry is a
sheep (p. 351). The narrator also adds one sly
qualification to Julia's single position: her passion
is only conditionally over for the present. Harry may
nurse romantic wounds of unrequited love at Julia's

marriage, but the narrator leaves us to suppose that

65
Julia will recover from Harry's marriage to another
woman.

Julia also assumes the ironic role of Lady
Bountiful toward Florence. With marvelous audacity,
Julia guides Florence through Clavering Park,
Florence's own future home. Particularly, Julia leads
Florence through the garden, the site of Julia's
original rupture with Harry: ‘Not that there is much
to show you,' said Lady Ongar: ‘indeed nothing: but the
place must be of more interest to you than to any one
else.... It's a gloomy place enough: is it not?' (p.
403). Julia's final speech to Florence expresses both
hope and doubt for the woman's happiness in the
patriarchal seat. Julia's comments suggest that
Florence, as a conventional woman, may be able to find
satisfaction under a patriarchal dominion even as they
express regret for her own ability, as an
unconventional woman, to achieve the promises of love:

‘A spirit of prophecy comes on one sometimes, I

suppose.... I have shown you all the wonders of

the garden, and told you all the wonders connected
with it of which I know aught. No doubt there
would be other wonders, more wonderful, if one
could ransack the private history of all the

Claverings for the last hundred years. I hope,

Miss Burton, that any marvels which may attend

66

your career here may be happy marvels' (p. 405).
Julia's wish for Florence's happiness seems an ominous
warning about her place in the Clavering family and
Harry's affection. The withered garden is a bleak
emblem of Julia's private history with the Claverings
and, possibly, an omen of Florence's future.

By using one family to represent society, Trollope
offers a microcosmic criticism of patriarchal
oppression in Tho_§1ayaz1og§. As the anti-heroine of
this novel, Julia Brabazon tries both to enter and
influence the family construct. Julia possesses both
the traditional weapons of male power, money and
property, and the traditional weapons of female
manipulation, beauty and charm. For attempting to
usurp the male sphere of economic control, she is
accused of contracting a mercenary marriage,
essentially an act of prostitution. For attempting to
fulfill feminine roles, she is accused of adultery.
Trollope fails to assure us that the accusations are
false, yet he structures the interest of the novel to
manipulate our sympathy toward Julia's quest for self-
assertion under conditions which disallow a woman's
full realization of self.

The.§laxerings also works as a microcosm for
Trollope's panoramic criticism of society in Tho Way We
.Lfiye Now. In that novel, Trollope extends the plight

67
of two women involved with one family to examine
women's place in a larger social arena. Tho
Clayorihoa may fairly be seen as a precursor to the
later, sprawling novel, a contained exposition of the
complex Victorian social attitudes. Nearly every
female character in Tho flay Wo Liyo Noy is both a
criminal and a victim. Within this society, women are
punished both in their attempts to achieve or reject
the social values assigned to them. As Julia Brabazon
says of herself, ‘I am a chamelion, and take the

colour of those with whom I live' (p. 403).

Expanding the Form: "Wild-Cat"
Anti-Heroines in Tho Way Wo Livo hog

Tho Way Wo Liyo No! (1872) is perhaps Trollope's

most ambitious novel. A sprawling satire of late
Victorian society, Tho Way To Livo Noy exposes vice in
nearly every social institution. Trollope dissects the
financial, political, and literary worlds to reveal
social corruption everywhere. He particularly uses the
mercenary marriage as a device to expose the greed and
self-interest which penetrate even the most intimate
human relationship, creating a world without positive
values and bereft of love.

The mercenary marriage is itself an institution in
the high society of the novel. In W iv ow,
marriage for financial gain alone is the objective of
both male and female characters. Not surprisingly, the
women are mostly adversely affected by its
consequences. Domestic life barely exists in this
society, as marriage becomes a public exchange of goods
to display before the larger world. The decentralized
plot allows Trollope to employ the ”new kind of family
pattern" characteristic of Victorian sensation fiction
and thereby to uncover corrupt family life in the homes
of squires, aristocrats, and laborers alike.1

Trollope expands his use of the anti-heroine in

68

69

Tho_flay_flo_L1yo_Noy, creating several subversive women
characters to address the issues of love, marriage, and
maintenance. He first introduces Lady Carbury, a
beautiful middle-aged widow and herself a writer of
sensational historical fiction. Lady Carbury's book,
Criminal_Queens. reveals Lady Carbury's own attitude
toward women's conditions as formed out of her
experience in society. In a letter to her editor, Mr.
Broune, Lady Carbury articulates the operating
principle for ambitious women, disclosing her personal
creed for success:

‘After all how few women there are who can raise

themselves above the quagmire of what we call

love, and make themselves anything but playthings

for men. Of almost all these royal and luxurious

sinners it was the chief sin that in some phase

of their lives they consented to be playthings

without being wives. I have striven so hard to be

proper: but when girls read everything, why should

not an old women write anything?’2

Lady Carbury's experience as a proper wife
certainly invalidates conventional expectations for
love in marriage. Lady Carbury's history resembles
that of the Victorian sensation heroine and exemplifies
”the sexual frustrations of young women married to old

‘men [which] counter the Victorian idealization of

70
these December-May marriages."3 At eighteen, Lady
Carbury marries a retired military officer who
"occasionally spoilt his darling and occasionally ill-
used her" (I, p. 12). When she tried to escape Sir
Patrick's physical abuse, he spread the scandal that
she ran away with another man. Like Julia Brabazon,
Lady Carbury performs her wifely duty by returning home
to nurse her husband through the last stages of
alcholism and senility. Although she reconciles with
Sir Patrick, her one brief act of self-preservation
pursues her throughout the rest of her career: "...her
name would for the remainder of her life be unjustly
tarnished" (I, p. 14).

The death of the husband operates as a welcome
release.4 For Lady Carbury, widowhood represents an
Opportunity for unprecedented freedom, "a period of
relaxation--her reward, her freedom, her chance of
happiness" (I, p. 14). She establishes herself and her
children in London, beginning a literary career to
supplement her income from Sir Patrick's meagre estate.
She aspires toward recognition rather than
respectability, and she rejects love altogether: "The
time for love had gone by, and she would have nothing
to do with it" (I, p. 14).

Ironically, Lady Carbury's "tarnished reputation"

offers her peculiar advantages, one of which is that

71
she can lead an unconventional life. The literary
world despises Lady Carbury as an authoress, but her
notoriety makes her a colorful social addition. Lady
Carbury exploits her sensational history as
appropriate background for her book on criminal women.
Mr. Broune is willing to publish her bad books in
exchange for flirtation. They both understand the
tacit agreement of their business association. Lady
Carbury only wants her books to sell and to receive
good publicity: Mr. Broune is susceptible to pretty
women. Their quasi-professional partnership is based
on mutual deceit: "...she smiled and whispered, and
made confidences, and looked out of her own eyes into
men's eyes as though there might be some mysterious
bond between her and them--if only mysterious
circumstances would permit it" (I, p. 3).

In many respects, Lady Carbury is a social
outcast: she is a literary fraud, a compromised woman,
a brazen opportunist. Rather than use her femininity
to uphold Victorian ideals and morals, she trades on
her sexuality to gain financial and social benefits.
If Lady Carbury's life violates the idealization of
the Victorian woman, her values are nonetheless
supported by the actual workings of her society.

The plot of The Way We Livo No3 involves the
machinations of highly-placed men to marry the daughter

72
of the American robber baron, Augustus Melmotte. Like
Lady Carbury, Melmotte is a fraud and an opportunist,
but society accords him a prominent social place in
exchange for the financial benefits he offers
impoverished aristocrats through marriage to his
daughter.

As an heiress, Marie Melmotte is the greatest
potential source of financial gain for the dissolute
young men-about-town, just as she is Melmotte's
strongest vehicle to gain social acceptance, if not
respectability. Melmotte's wealth allows him to
bargain with Marie's future, setting conditions for a
marriage settlement with all the aristocratic families
in the running for Marie's hand. Lord Nidderdale is
Melmotte's chosen connection, but Marie inopportunely
falls in love with Lady Carbury's degenerate son Felix.

Lady Carbury's family provides a loose anchor for
the panoramic plot of Tho Way We Liyo hog. Sir Felix
is the prime contestant for the Marie Melmotte
sweepstakes, Trollope's openly satirical designation of
the mercenary marriage contract. Felix's sister Hetta
is the conventional heroine of the novel, torn between
her mother's ambition for an advantageous match and her
own love for an unheroic suitor. Lady Carbury
encourages Felix to pursue Marie and nearly insists

that Hetta marry her country squire cousin Roger.

73
Hetta is in love with Paul Montague, a distant relative
of Roger Carbury. During a business trip to America,
however, Paul becomes engaged to Mrs. Hurtle, a
notorious American widow. Roger persuades Paul to end
his precipitous engagement, but then becomes Paul's
rival for Hetta. The rivalry allows Trollope to
explore the effects of the mercenary marriage in
relation to male responses to two women, one who is
properly feminine and one who is beyond the strictures
of propriety.

Hetta's marriage problems are complicated by both
financial and romantic considerations. Her mother
wants her to marry to secure maintenance. Lady Carbury
is distressed by Hetta's "unrealistic, romantic view of
life" and advises her daughter to consider the ways of
the world: ‘The world at large has to eat dry bread,
and cannot get cakes and sweetmeats. A girl, when she
thinks of giving herself to a husband, has to remember
this. If she has a fortune of her own she can pick and
choose, but if she have none she must allow herself to
be chosen' (II, pp. 384-85).

Lady Carbury's advice both belies and underscores
her own experience and the general practice of marriage
which she sees in the world around her. Marie
Melmotte, for instance, has her own fortune, but she is

forced by violence to accede to her father's wishes for

74
her marriage. When she asserts her right of choice,
he beats her. Lady Carbury herself, as a girl without
a fortune, suffers abuse in a marriage contracted under
the dry bread principle. The men Hetta and Marie
choose are themselves far cries from cakes and
sweetmeats. Felix is an unenthusiastic lover, who
scorns the romantic twaddle he mouths to please Marie.
Paul Montague is another Harry Clavering.

In letters to Mary Holmes, Trollope comments on
the failings of the novel's hero and heroine: "The
character [of Paul Montague] is badly done throughout,
and fails in interest. Hetta also is bad.... Hetta 8c
were uninteresting."5 Characteristically, Trollope
excuses Paul on the basis of the reader's erroneous
expectations for fictional heroism: ”He is not a hero.
But men are seldom heroes. He is as good as our
brothers and sons and friends."6 Judged according to
the novel itself, Trollope's comments on Tho Way Wo
Live New seem particularly guileful. Being as good as
the brothers and sons in this novel is ironic
condemnation, not exculpation. Hetta's lover and
brother belong to the same dissolute club and live
according to the amoral philosophy of the Beargarden,
"the express view of combining parsimony with
profligacy" (I, p. 24).

Hetta fulfills her role as the heroine of the

75
novel by being uninteresting. Yet to say that her
character is badly done does not recognize her affinity
with the other women characters in the novel. Despite
her mother's angry insistence, Hetta continually
rejects Roger Carbury as a suitor, refusing to
sacrifice herself for mercenary or family interests:
"But yet she was disposed to do battle with her mother
and her cousin in the matter-~if only with the object
of showing that she would not submit her own feelings
to their control. She was savage to the point of
rebellion against all authority" (II, p. 377). Even as
the novel's genus girl, Hetta rebels against
interference in the most intimate aspect of her life.
She fails as an interesting character because, choosing
endurance over action, she makes little effort to
secure her future. In this respect, she differs from
the anti-heroines. Nevertheless, Trollope juxtaposes
Hetta and Mrs. Hurtle to create a parallel between the
heroine and her rival.

Hetta visits Mrs. Hurtle to confront her about the
real state of Paul's affections. Mrs. Hurtle, more
direct still, writes furious letters to Paul and
confronts him with his double-dealing. Trollope's
correspondance reveals that his contemporary readers
reacted negatively to Mrs. Hurtle's assertiveness. To

a modern reader, Mrs. Hurtle is the most remarkable

76

character of the novel. Trollope diplomatically
responds to criticisms by insisting on Mrs. Hurtle's
importance to the novel: ”... you are quite right in
saying that Mrs. Hurtle, (who is well done) is kept too
long on the stage. But she was wanted to give an
interest to the last chapters....”7 Mrs. Hurtle is a
source of conflict throughout the novel, the subject of
controversy between Paul and his cousin and lover
before she even appears. Mrs. Hurtle is more than an
anti-heroine, more than a mere social rebel: she is
genuinely an outlaw.

Even though Mrs. Hurtle's past in the American
West includes a duel, a divorce, and possibly adultery,
she is still, like Lady Carbury and Marie Melmotte,
threatened with physical abuse.8 Rather than run away
or submit stoically to beatings, Mrs. Hurtle defends
herself against her husband with a gun. Rather than
rely on maintenance, she retains control of her money
after her divorce. She kills a man in self-defense in
Oregon. She pursues Paul to England and threatens to
horsewhip him when he jilts her. She lives up to her
nickname, "the wildcat." Her own assessment of her
creed for living seems remarkably understated: ‘I have
little respect for the proprieties of life' (II, p.
446).

Mrs. Hurtle represents an important extension of

77
the anti-heroines of the earlier novels. Lady Mason
and Julia Brabazon, for instance, maintain many of the
proprieties of Victorian feminine gentility. Mrs.
Hurtle's explosiveness is not consonant with any
version of the angel of the house. By making her an
American, Trollope allows himself latitude with an
unorthodox woman character struggling against the
hypocrisy of Victorian society. Trollope allows Mrs.
Hurtle unprecedented behavior for a woman and yet
complicates her masculine aggressiveness by stressing
her essential femininity. She is both vitriolic and
generous, full of both anger and kindliness. Despite
her own disappointment in love, she facilitates the
marriage of the housemaid in her lodgings and pours
attention on the children of her landlady.

Much of Mrs. Hurtle's anger results from the dual
expectations for women in society. She has charm and
beauty to attract men, but Paul wishes her to moderate
the force of her personality, including even her
feminine demonstrations of affection: "He did not want
to see her raging like a tigress, as he had once
thought might be his fate: but he would have preferred
the continuance of moderate resentment to this flood of
tenderness" (II, p. 446). Paul in effect expects her
to sacrifice her sense of self for the sake of social

propriety. Mrs. Hurtle realizes that self-assertion is

78
central to her survival as an independent woman:

To give up not only her love, but her wrath

also:--that was too much for her! The idea of

being tame was terrible to her. Her life had not
been very prosperous, but she was what she was
because she had dared to protect herself by her
own spirit. Now, at last, should she succumb and
be trodden on like a worm? Should she be weaker
even than an English girl?... Had not her whole
life been opposed to the theory of such passive

endurance? (II, pp. 3-4).

Mrs. Hurtle astutely observes that the cult of
feminine passivity is a male construct which benefits
men. Paul cannot believe that any woman, under any
circumstance, should threaten to retaliate against male
abuse. Mrs. Hurtle is not chastened by accusations of
unfeminine behavior but focuses on the motivation
behind feminine docility: ‘It is certainly more
comfortable for gentlemen,--who amuse themselves,--that
women should have that opinion' (II, p. 8). She
questions the validity of gender distinctions
altogether as she points out the oppression of
chivalry for most women:

‘As long as there are men to fight for women, it

may be well to leave the fighting to the men.

But when a woman has no one to help her, is she to

79

bear everything without turning upon those who

ill-use her? Shall a woman be flayed alive

because it is unfeminine in her to fight for her
own skin? What is the good of being--feminine, as

you call it?...That men may be attracted, I

should say. But if a woman finds that men only

take advantage of her assumed weakness, shall

she not throw it off? If she be treated as prey,

shall she not fight as a beast of prey? (II, p.

a) .

Mrs. Hurtle possesses the rhetorical skills to leave
Paul with an unanswerable question. Why should
perceptions of femininity include victimization?

With varying degrees of vigor and success, Mrs.
Hurtle, Lady Carbury, Marie Melmotte, and even Hetta
resist victimization, rejecting the Victorian
assumption that such ill-treatment is an inevitable
part of women's lives. The various machinations to
contract marriages for money most reveal society's
primary means to victimize women, calling into question
the morality of Victorian marriage rituals. Marie
Melmotte, particularly, is victim to society's
adulterated conception of marriage, but she also
becomes the most stridently independent character as a
result of her social education. After two blatantly

mercenary proposals by Lord Nidderdale, an aborted

80
elepement with Sir Felix, and the brutal persuasion of
her father, Marie learns to suspect romance, reject
love, and control her money as her most effective means
to achieve autonomy.

In Tho flay Wo Liyo hog, the stories of the women
characters continually parallel. The male responses to
the women disclose the hollowness of the cult of the
genus girl. For example, Hetta realizes that Mrs.
Hurtle surpasses her in all the feminine graces and yet
understands that, accordingly, "[Mrs. Hurtle] would be
an unfit wife for Paul Montague..." (II, p. 390). Lord
Nidderdale, on the other hand, becomes more attracted
to Marie Melmotte only after she displays self-
assertion in setting her own conditions for their
marriage arrangements:

As far as the girl herself was concerned, she had,

in these latter days, become much more attractive

to him than when he had first known her. She
certainly was not a fool. And, though, he could

not tell himself that she was altogether like a

lady, still she had a manner of her own which

made him think that she would be able to live with

ladies (II, p. 222).

Lord Nidderdale's revised perception of Marie as
an interesting woman, and Marie's own choice for her

life, confound the premise of conventional love stories

81
which relegate women to only passive roles. Unlike
Paul Montague, Lord Nidderdale does not find a lack of
conventional femininity to indicate a woman's
unsuitability as a wife. He is able to perceive,
albeit dimly, that being lady-like may entail complex
definition. Further, Marie agrees to marry Nidderdale
only on terms of honesty and equality: ‘... it's just
as well for both of us to look on it as business.... I
think you are a very good fellow: only you don't care
for me.... I won't say that I love you. But if ever I
do say it, you may be sure it will be true' (II, pp.
221-22).

As a result of her exploitation on the marriage
market, Marie learns to insist on treatment which
recognizes her real worth as a person. Melmotte's
suicide after his social and financial ruin releases
Marie from the Nidderdale engagement and allows her to
make her own choices for her life. Actually, she is a
greater heiress after her father's death because she
then has unfettered control of her own money. She
recognizes her position of strength. Her choices
reflect a desire to maintain power and avoid future
humiliation:

In these days of her grandeur, in which she had

danced with princes, and seen an emperor in her

father's house, and been affianced to lords, she

82

had encountered degradation which had been

abominable to her.... But go where she might, she

would now be her own mistress. That was the one

resolution she succeeded in forming...(II, p.

310).
While hobnobbing with the aristocrats, Marie found her
treatment as a marriageable woman anything but noble.
Consequently, independence, rather than marriage to
some lord, is her preferred state.

Marie eventually accepts the suit of Mr. Hamilton
K. Fisker, her father's American business partner. As
with Lord Nidderdale, she sets the terms for their
engagement, based on honesty and sound business rather
than love and romance: ”She had contrived to learn
that, in the United States, a married woman has greater
power over her own money than in England, and this
information acted strongly in Fisker's favour" (II, p.
453). Both Marie and Mrs. Hurtle leave England for
California on the same ship: "the ladies were
determined that they never would revisit a country of
which their remininscences certainly were not happy"
(II, pp. 456-57). Trollope allows both women to seek
new territories with brazen independence. Marie, who
is originally the most victimized woman, finally keeps
company with the woman who most strongly rejects

victimization throughout the novel. Both women can

83
exercise their roughly hewn independence and
individualism on the American frontier.

With the histories of Marie Melmotte and Mrs.
Hurtle, Trollope reverses expectations for appropriate
endings for sensational heroines. Unlike Lady Audley,
they are not punished by madness for their "unfeminine
assertiveness" but are rewarded by new possibilities.
Unlike Mrs. Henry Wood's Lady Isabel Carlyle, they
reject suffering to control new prospects. In Wood's
has; Lynho, Lady Isabel encounters grisly retribution
after runnning away with a lover. When her
illegitimate child dies, she returns home, in disguise
as a governess, to nurse her son on his deathbed,
losing not only her family but her whole identity.
Marie and Mrs. Hurtle demand recognition of their
independent selves. They cannot achieve the
conventional fate of the heroine by doing so, but
neither must they suffer the doomed lot of the
sensation heroine.

As anti-heroines, Marie Melmotte and Mrs. Hurtle
escape the social repressions of Victorian society by
irejecting their prescribed role for women--that is to
be a wife. But Trollope does not end his attack on
the marriage market with the departure of the anti-
heroines from England. He also examines several

courtships which culminate in marriage but which fail

84
to promise the happy ending of the conventional
marriage plot.

The marriages of Lady Carbury, Georgiana
Longestaffe, and Hetta are each filled with tension and
entail the forms of abasement that Marie repudiates and
that Mrs. Hurtle combats. Lady Carbury marries Mr.
Broune after he rescues her from the financial disaster
and social disgrace caused by her son's role in the
Melmotte affair. She is forced to admit the failure of
her schemes for herself and her children, essentially
conceding her own worthlessness. Mr. Broune seems
heroic in the midst of the Melmotte ruin, but he
becomes more tyrannical as he gains power over her
circumstances: "Though he was hard to her now,--he who
used to be so soft,--he was very good. It did not
occur to her to rebel against him.... The more she
thought of him, the more omnipotent he seemed to be.
The more she thought of herself, the more absolutely
prostrate she seemed to have fallen...” (II, p. 461).

Lady Carbury does not experience a sense of
rejuvenation from her moral epiphany or from Mr.
Broune's proposal:

Her opinion of herself was so poor, she had

become so sick of her own vanities and

littlenesses and pretences, that she could not

understand that such a man as this should in truth

85

want to make her his wife. At this moment she

thought less of herself and more of Mr. Broune

than either perhaps deserved (II, p. 463).

This passage offers an extraordinary departure from
conventional expectations for love and marriage. Lady
Carbury becomes less of a person as a result of her
gratitude for Mr. Broune. Trollope's comment on her
self-abasement shrewdly points out the fallacy behind
women's indebtedness toward the men who rescue them by
marriage. Lady Carbury's renunciation of selfishness
may be good, but it is precipitated for the wrong
reasons--or, perhaps more accurately, with harmful
effect. Mr. Broune is not truly deserving of her
adoration. In fact, his second proposal is almost an
insult: "Of course he had renewed his offer of
marriage, but he had done so in a tone which almost
made her feel that the proposition could not be an
earnest one” (II, p. 463).

Lady Carbury's abjection in her marriage to Mr.
Broune reproduces the self-abasement she experienced in
her first marriage. In both cases, she is reduced to a
suppliant. She believes she deserves mortification as
punishment for her social ambitions. Accepting
humiliation allows her to "redeem" herself for
attempting to pursue independently the values of

society.

86

The subplot involving Georgiana Longestaffe is
even more overtly satiric than Lady Carbury's story.
Georgiana's marriage woes underscore the actual
selflessness behind her apparently selfish quest to
find maintenance. Like Lady Carbury, Georgiana's
attitude toward love and marriage is formed by the
values which operate around her. She conducts her
hapless manhunt according to those values.

The Longstaffe family is highly-placed but
impoverished. They maintain their position at the
expense of their own comfort. The squire's notions of
gentility include expenditure and exploitation as
natural elements of his life as a gentleman:

"There were no doubt gentlemen of different degrees,
but the English gentleman of gentlemen was he who had
land, and family title-deeds, and an old family place,
and family portraits, and family embarrassments, and a
family absence of any usual employment" (I, p. 116).
With its emphasis on the man's place, this idea of the
family seems to exclude women altogether. Whereas a
gentleman may be idle and wasteful, Georgiana, as a
gentleman's daughter, must find proper employment in
seeking a rich husband.

At thirty, Georgiana faces an up-hill battle on
the marriage market. Her snobbishness about family

position prevented her fromaccepting several marriage

87
offers in earlier days, but her eventual desperation to
find a husband leads her to contract reckless
alliances. She first compromises her reputation by
visiting the Melmottes and then loses caste completely
by engaging herself to Melmotte's business partner, a
Jewish financier.

In actuality, Georgiana's requirements for
marriage are few and shallow. She wants a house in
town and money enough to visit London for the season
every year. Since social position no longer indicates
adequate wealth among her circle, she must look for
economic advantages in new spheres. Georgiana's
selfishness is really self-abasement. She never asks
for a husband she can love, or even like. She does not
seek marriage to please herself, but only seeks the
money and position adequate to meet the demands of her
social circle. Like Lady Carbury, Georgiana looks
about her and spurns personal fulfillment in marriage:
‘Who thinks about love nowadays? I don't know any one
who loves any one else' (II, p. 425).

Through Georgiana's harsh comment on her society,
Trollope extends his recurring criticism of romantic
love as a false construct. In Georgiana's world, no
form of love exists. Her father and brother fight each
other for control of property: she and her sisters

fight over suitors. With all the world pursuing the

88

Melmotte millions, Georgiana merely joins the general
hunt for wealth. Society's reaction to her engagement
to Mr. Brehgert epitomizes the double standard for men
and women concerning the mercenary marriage. Although
lords may pursue an alliance with Melmotte, of unknown
origin, Georgiana cannot remain a respectable girl if
she marries Brehgert, an honest businessman.

Georgiana's marriage choices reflect Trollope's
larger social criticism. Torn between choosing a
wealthy husband or a husband who belongs to ”the right
set" (II, p. 138), Georgiana is unable to fulfill
society's demand to achieve wealth and position through
marriage. Trollope suggests that the values of the
right set are as corrupt as the charlatanism of the
Melmotte crowd. The Longestaffe's anti-Semitism
couples Mr. Brehgert unfairly with the underworld of
Melmotte's organization. Mr. Brehgert is himself kind
and considerate of Georgiana's position. Their
correspondance reveals Mr. Brehgert's unromantic but
sensitive perspective on marriage as well as
Georgiana's prejudices and mercenary motivations.

Mr. Brehgert's letter to Georgiana is not a love
letter but a thoughtful explanation of his position.
He addresses her with honesty and maturity and pays her
the undeserved tribute of assuming she will respond in

kind. He argues that society has changed enough to

89
allow a Jew to claim social equality in all circles.
He takes her into his confidence concerning his
financial retrenchments. He allows her the privilege
of free choice that should be accorded to an adult
woman. Most important, he offers the mutual honesty
that Marie Melmotte, for instance, fights to achieve in
her relationships with men:

‘As to my own feelings they remain exactly as they

were when I endeavoured to explain them to you.

Though I do not find myself to be too old to

marry, I do think myself too old to write love

letters. I have no doubt you believe me when I

say that I entertain a most sincere affection for

you: and I beseech you to believe me in saying
further that should you become my wife it shall be

the study of my life to make you happy (II, p.

272).

Georgiana's response to Mr. Brehgert's letter is
characteristically limited and bigoted. Despising
love, she is nevertheless offended by Mr. Brehgert's
lack of romance. Most of all, she offended by his
financial revelations. When she taxes him about losing
his townhouse, he realizes her mercenary motives and
breaks off the engagement. Georgiana is first
humiliated by her engagement to Mr. Brehgert, then by
his jilting her. She finally elopes with a curate,

90
completing her social disgrace. Although Georgiana's
greed is reprehensible, her plight is pathetic. She is
torn between conflicting expectations for her proper
social role. As concerned as she is about society's
expectations, she inevitably fails to meet them because
they involve irreconcilable components. Marriage as
practiced in society cannot accommodate the disparate
elements of status and wealth or love and romance.9

Compared to Mrs. Hurtle's escape to the frontier,
Georgiana's story is thoroughly disheartening.
Georgiana and Lady Carbury both marry and remain within
the boundaries of society, yet their futures seem
dismal. Hetta Carbury, as the heroine, achieves union
with the man she loves, but her marriage, too, is
complicated by subjecting her to her cousin's
patriarchal control.

Roger Carbury finally withdraws his self-
interested objections to Hetta's marriage to Paul, but
he manipulates her future through his position as head
of the family. Although it has been argued that Roger
is the novel's moral center, Trollope repeatedly shows
that Roger's notions of gentility are intolerant and
inadequate when put to moral test.10 Roger's notion of
what constitutes high principle prevents him from
responding compassionately or generously to anyone who

does not live up to his standards.

91

Roger is no more free of the values of his age
than those he most stringently criticizes. Although he
professes to believe "that a man's standing in the
world should not depend at all upon his wealth” (I, p.
49), he forbids Paul to marry Hetta because of
financial considerations: ‘You have neither of you a
shilling in the world...and now you know what my
feelings are you must abandon [your suit]' (I, p. 54).

Like the rest of his society, Roger supports the
mercenary marriage, especially if it gives him an
advantage over his rival. Possessing greater wealth
and a higher social position than Paul, Roger invokes
the supremacy of patriarchal authority to structure
Hetta's marriage opportunities. Hetta offers him
sisterly affection in an effort to resist the false
fatherly role he tries to assume with her. Roger
rejects the woman's terms of friendship. He begins to
call Hetta his daughter and to provide her maintenance:
'You shall be all that I have in the world. I will
hurry to grow old that I may feel for you as the old
feel for the young. And if you have a child, Hetta, he
must be my child' (II, p. 407).

Before he will make Hetta's son his heir, Roger
requires that the child take his name in order to
inherit Carbury Manor. Such a condition actually

usurps Paul's paternity. To reconcile the family,

92
Hetta and Paul agree to move to Carbury Manor. Under
Roger's surveillance, Hetta is placed in a paradoxical
situation, living as a bride in the home of the man she
rejected as a husband. Hetta faces a married life
similar to that of Emma Woodhouse: she has two men to
answer to as a married woman.

R.D. McMaster describes Tho_flay_flo_Liyo_Noy as a
novel concerned with the search for authentic selfhood
and sees the women characters as providing the most
intricate elaboration of the theme.11 Certainly the
diversity of women characters permits them several
possible endings. The extended storyline and array of
characters also allows Trollope full scope to survey
Victorian values, particularly the values surrounding
marriage.

The anti-heroines manage to elude the duplicities
of Victorian marriage. Marie Melmotte marries an
American and on her own terms, too. Admittedly, Fisker
is no ideal husband: he is a wheeler-dealer who wears
loud suits. Still, he proves himself more honest in
money matters than Marie's Beargarden suitors, and he
agrees to her terms for marriage. Most important,
Marie pleases her personal tastes by marrying him: "As
to Fisker himself,--she certainly liked him" (II, p.
453). Mrs. Hurtle proves too dynamic altogether for

the men she encounters and is too much of an

93
adventuress to accept the institutionalized images of
women in Victorian England. A duellist and a divorcee,
Mrs. Hurtle commits both social and legal crimes in the
spirit of survival and self-defense. Unlike either
Lady Mason or Julia Brabazon, she does not attempt to
integrate her life as a woman with the values of
society. Instead, she rejects the tenets of a society
that tyrannizes over her selfhood as a woman.

Society, however, remains intact and unchanged at
the end of The flay We Liyo Noy. The Beargarden breaks
up, but its members continue their hedonistic creed of
live and let live. Lady Carbury is crushed by her
failures: Georgiana Longestaffe is disgraced by her
marriage: Hetta is neatly put away in the country,
answerable to society's most conservative spokesman.
The criminal women may outrage social propriety, but
their actions champion individual rights over
collective wrongs. e W W v thereby

extends the social criticism Trollope limits to the

family in W- We W w may
also be seen as a precursor to Tho_Eootaoo_Diamohdo.

Lizzie Eustace is part of Victorian society, not a
maverick American. She openly embraces the values she
sees covertly pursued--greed, self-interest, and sham--

as an integral part of the way they lived then.

Politicizing the Tradition:
Lady Eustace and Dissimulation in Ih§_EH§§§E£_DiAan§§

In The Way We Livo Noy, Trollope's anti-heroine

challenges Victorian notions of proper feminine
behavior to assert her self-hood as a woman. In Tho
Eoohaoo_niaoohoa, the anti-heroine manipulates
Victorian expectations for femininity to create

several images of herself to accommodate a wide variety
of misadventures as she participates in high society
intrigue. Lizzie Eustace is a thief, a liar, an
accomplished actress, the heroine of society gossip and
scandal. Unlike Mrs. Hurtle, Lizzie is an integral
part of society, in fact, a celebrated member. Her
peccadilloes, lies, and crimes are not particularly
reprehensible in a world in which everyone participates
in sham, opportunism, and human exploitation.

Trollope consolidates the sweeping social
criticism of WWLN to centralize the plot of Tho_Eoooaoo
Diamohoo within the political sphere of the Palliser
novels. Changes in allegiance, mercenary marriages,
lies and poses are all part of a personally and
socially factionalized world. To win support for her
social infractions, Lizzie operates as a good
politician, manipulating the system to her advantage.

She seduces men, who control the legal system, and she

94

95
charms Lady Glencora Palliser, who controls the social
system.

Lizzie's story combines legal, social, and moral
crimes to explore a complex interweaving of criminality
and morality as practiced and perceived by society.
Lizzie lives in a shadow world of blurred social
distinctions. Her father, Admiral Greystock, ”liked
whist, wine--and wickedness in general": her uncle, the
Dean of Bobsborough, is a respectable clergyman.1
Lizzie marries Sir Florian Eustace, a dying rake, who,
like her father, ”denied himself no pleasures” (p. 43).
Lizzie encounters both censure and acceptance through
her marriage. Although Sir Florian is "vicious... dull
of intellect, slow of discernment, blearéeyed in his
ways about town...," society considers Lizzie a
successful golddigger: "It was admitted by all her
friends, and also by her enemies--who were in truth the
more numerous and active body of the two--that Lizzie
Greystock had done very well with herself" (pp. 39,
44).

Doing well for herself is a key part of Lizzie's
character. The key to her success, however, is her
ability to manipulate male perceptions to coincide with
accepted images of conventional womanhood. Without
male support, Lizzie sifts her way through labyrinthine

social machinery. She acts the part of a proper and

96
virtuous lady as an essential strategy to gain wealth
and position through marriage. She convinces Sir
Florian that she is truth, beauty, and purity incarnate
despite her purely mercenary motives for marrying.
When Sir Florian realizes her essential falseness, he
is devastated by the discovery that her womanly
appearance is not an index of her character. Unlike
any of the anti-heroines we have so far examined,
Lizzie does not experience dissonance because of the
disparity between her inner self and the roles she
plays. As Juliet McMaster perceptively notes, Lizzie
in fact has "no centre of identity...no real self
inside."2 Lizzie necessarily assumes false poses as
part of her role as a woman in society.

Lizzie is a student of the woman's art. She is a
complex blend of the natural and unnatural, both the
epitome and the antithesis of the feminine ideal image.
Because the image itself is manufactured, Lizzie cannot
truly be a natural woman and still reflect the image.
She works hard to achieve expectations of proper
femininity without possessing the requisite inner
tenderness that is supposed to accompany outward
beauty. Much of her understanding, significantly,
comes from texts, the fictionalized versions of
womanhood available to her:

We have said that she was clever. We must add

97

that she had in truth studied too much. She spoke

French, understood Italian, and read German. She

played well on the harp, and moderately well on

the piano. She sang, at least in good taste and
in tune. Of things to be learned by reading she
knew much, having really taken diligent trouble
with herself. She had learned much poetry by
heart, and could apply it. She forgot nothing,
listened to everything, understood quickly, and
was desirous to shine not only as a beauty but as

a wit (p. 56).

Lizzie understands well what men admire in women
and cultivates those qualities to near perfection. She
fails in being truly perfect because she fails in being
true. Lizzie's falseness is conditioned for her by the
false expectations for women in society. To be
socially successful, she must be beautiful, well-
educated, tender, and virtuous--in other words, she
must be perfect. Lizzie 1o perfect in form, if not in
substance. The narrator stresses Lizzie's simulated
perfection: "... her form was perfectly symmetrical.
Her feet and hands might have been taken as models by a
sculptor....she were [her hair] bound tight round her
perfect forehead.... Her chin was perfect...” (pp. 54-
55). At the same time, the narrator comments that all

of these marks of feminine perfection fail to achieve

98
true "feminine tenderness" (p. 55).

Lizzie does everything right to become the image
of the perfect woman. The image, which is meant to
exhibit character, reveals only talent: the image
itself is static. The narrator suggests why Lizzie's
perfect figure fails to conform to the image: "If [her
figure] had a fault it was this--that it had in it too
much of movement.... for she was much given to action"
(p. 54). Lizzie's energy belies the tableau-like image
she tries to reproduce. Paradoxically, her activity is
what helps her to create a dazzling facsimile of a
passive woman.

Society actually encourages Lizzie's poses by
making her the star of the season's social gossip. As
a rich and beautiful young widow, Lizzie is equipped to
act as both huntress and prey in the marriage market.
She takes possession of Sir Florian's appropriately
named Scottish seat, Portray Castle, and she
appropriates the family jewels as part of her widow's
settlement. The diamonds are the catalyst for Lizzie's
legal embroilments and also the reason for her social
success. Stealing the family heirlooms provides her
with a glitter that elevates her to the center of
society's attention.

In contrast to the anti-heroines of the earlier

novels, Lizzie is embraced by society because of her

99
crime. Julia Brabazon, for instance, shares a similar
history, but she is shunned after Lord Ongar's death,
even by her own family. As a glamorous and notorious
widow, Lizzie is a welcome addition to high society.
She is not exiled to life abroad, in isolation, as a
result of her crime. Instead, Lizzie openly courts and
is courted by a host of suitors and freeloaders. She
gathers an entourage of social hangers-on to give
herself a semblance of respectability while she juggles
her prospective husbands. Lizzie's acceptance in high
society is also a striking contrast to Marie Melmotte's
exploitation in Tho Way Wo Live Now. The difference
lies in Lizzie's response to her social position.
Rather than become a victim, she uses the pose of
victimization to cover her misdeeds. The sophisticated
world of the Palliser novels is not threatened, only
titillated, by a thorough-going adventuress like Lizzie
Eustace. She is a useful social ornament and a
potential source of wealth to fortune-hunting social
politicians. She is therefore tolerated, even
indulged, in her melodramatic role.

Lizzie seduces her cousin, Frank Greystock, even
as she accepts Lord Fawn's marriage proposal. Frank
and Lord Fawn are political as well as romantic rivals.
Opposites in many ways, their motivations with Lizzie

are identical. Frank is charismatic whereas Lord Fawn

100
is dull. But both are poor and look on Lizzie as an
attractive source of income to finance their careers
and advance their social positions.

Just as Lizzie married Sir Florian for his money,
her suitors subsequently court her to profit from his
wealth. Mercenary motives are sanctioned for ambitious
men, however. Lord Fawn possesses none of Sir
Florian's mistaken romanticism about women, but still
assumes that Lizzie will meet his requirements as a
wife without considering that he should offer anything
in return:

Lord Fawn thought a great deal about money....

Such a man almost naturally looks to marriage as

an assistance in the dreary fight. It soon

becomes clear to him that he cannot marry without
money, and he learns to think that heiresses have
been invented exactly to suit his case.... As for
giving anything away, that is out of the question.

He has not been so placed as to be able to

give.... The lady had an income. That was the

first and most indispensable consideration (pp.

113-116).

Lizzie's character is unimportant as long as she
is attractive and wealthy enough to meet her suitor's
requirements. Lizzie may lack self-realization, but

her inner self is never valued and therefore never

101
cultivated. Lord Fawn views Lizzie only as a
convenience designed for his benefit: ”... he knew
nothing about her, and had not taken the slightest
trouble to make inquiry... yet Lord Fawn was quite
content to marry her, not having seen any reason why
she should not make a good wife" (p. 117).

As a lawyer, Frank defends Lizzie's theft. As a
cabinet under-secretary, Lord Fawn censures her for
retaining her hold on the Eustace family jewels. Frank
is willing to ignore Lizzie's guilt to act as her
public champion. Lord Fawn is more concerned about
public opinion than about Lizzie's criminality. He
vacillates between keeping and breaking their
engagement as public sympathy for Lizzie's position
shifts:

He, too, had found a change in general opinion

about the diamonds. When he had taken upon

himSelf with a high hand to dissolve his own
engagement, everybody had, as he thought,
acknowledged that Lizzie Eustace was keeping
property which did not belong to her. Now people
talked of her losses as though the diamonds had

been her own (p. 545). A
Although Lizzie undoubtedly keeps property that is not
her own, the legal question remains unsettled, mainly

because of public reluctance to prosecute a pretty and

102
seductive woman. The moral question is clear enough,
but instead of condemning Lizzie's crime the world
would rather enjoy the entertainment she provides on
the social scene.

In the arena of social scandal, Lizzie's
engagement to Lord Fawn is treated as a political
issue. Lord Fawn weighs the merits of marriage to
Lizzie in terms of his political career and social
approbation:

He would again offer his hand--acknowledging

himself bound to do so by his former offer--but

would give reasons why she should not accept it.

If anything should occur in the meantime which

would, in his opinion, justify him in again

repudiating her, he would, of course, take
advantage of such circumstance. If asked himself

what was his prevailing motive in all that he did

or intended to do, he would have declared that it

was above all things necessary that he should

‘put himself right in the eye of the British

public' (p. 644).

Lizzie, too, recognizes the importance of the public
eye regarding her marriage. Publicity is the only way
to ensure an engagement in a world of precarious honor.
At the first sign of Lord Fawn's impending defection,

Lizzie advertises the engagement to guarantee the

103

attachment. She writes a series of letters revealing
the engagement to her estranged aunt, Lady Linlithgow,
the Eustace family, Frank Greystock, and Lord Fawn's
mother, covering all the possible factions concerned
with her remarriage. More clever and energetic than
her betrothed, Lizzie counters Lord Fawn's caution by
mobilizing her offensive to attack his weakest point:
"Lord Fawn was, therefore, well aware that Lady Eustace
had published the engagement. It was known to
everybody, and could not be broken off without public
scandal" (p. 142).

Although Lizzie is intensely practical in keeping
Lord Fawn, she pretends to deep feelings of
romanticism. Lizzie is well-read in Romantic poetry
and, as a result of her reading, nurses a penchant for
Byronic Corsairs. Lizzie selects false models to dream
about and to emulate, but her familiarity with the ways
of her world helps her discriminate between men and
protect herself. She realizes that none of her suitors
are Corsair material, but she invests them with enough
of the romantic to suit her moods and requirements as
an independent woman. For instance, a liaison with her
cousin provides interest without complications: "Frank
was not the exact hero that her fancy had painted--but
he was sufficiently heroic" (pp. 106-107).

Lizzie is able to flaunt stolen diamonds and

104
create melodramatic scenes without social censure, but
she realizes that blatant sexual indiscretions
represent social death for women. As a single woman,
Lizzie recognizes the value of an engagement as a means
to increase her social position. While affianced, she
achieves a position of power without the constraint of
marriage: "She felt that a woman by herself in the
world can do nothing, and that an unmarried woman's
strength lies only in the expectation that she should
be married" (p. 758). This shows a fine distinction.
Lizzie is not interested in marriage for the sake of
romance but only as a means to gain social strength.
Because marriage may precipitate male dominance in her
life, she prefers only the expectation of marriage
without consummation. Her choices in men are often
astute in this respect. She marries Sir Florian,
knowing he is under a death sentence. She engages
herself to the respectable Lord Fawn, knowing his
reluctance to finalize the marriage. She proposes to
Frank Greystock, knowing he is already engaged to
another girl.

Indeed, love and marriage are separately
compartmentalized in Lizzie's understanding. Marriage,
or at least the expectation of marriage, ensures a
cover of respectability for her independent pursuits.

Love, or at least the illusion of love, provides an

105
avocation or at least an entertaining game. Whereas
Lizzie actively campaigns to contract marriage
arrangements, she daydreams about love more than she
actually seeks it:
Somebody, in speaking on Lady Eustace's behalf,
and making the best of her virtues, had declared
that she did not have lovers. Hitherto that had
been true of her--but her mind had not the less
dwelt on the delight of a lover. She still
thought of a possible Corsair who would be willing
to give up all but his vices for her love, and for
whose sake she would be willing to share even
them. It was but a dream, but nevertheless it
pervaded her fancy constantly. Lord Fawn--peer of
Parliament, and member of Her Majesty's
Government, as he was--could not have been such a
lover to her. Might it not be possible that there
should exist something of romance between her and
her cousin Frank? She was the last woman in the
world to run away with a man, or to endanger her
position by a serious indiscretion: but there
might, perhaps, be a something between her and
her cousin-~a liaison quite correct in its facts,
a secret understanding, if nothing more--a mutual
sympathy, which should be chiefly shown in the

abuse of all their friends--and in this she could

106

indulge her passion for romance and poetry (p.

136).

This passage reveals important conflicting
motivations behind Lizzie's social machinations as well
as her understanding of social proprieties. Even as
she dreams about an anti-social, rebellious lover with
whom she can share the vices traditionally allowed only
to sexually assertive males, she also includes a
respectable husband in her fantasy life as necessary
for her social acceptance. She presupposes that
respectability precludes sexuality or romance. Yet
even Lizzie's sexual fantasies are peculiarly tame.

She wishes only for a correct affair of mutual
understanding that will allow her to communicate her
anger toward proper society. Lizzie's fantasy life
indicates her frustration with the respectable life she
imitates without passion.

Even Lizzie's most dramatic seduction scenes are
self-consciously enacted rather than passionately felt.
Much of Tho_£oohaoo_niahohoo is remarkably sexually
suggestive and as such hardly supports the common
perception of Trollope as a "proper" novelist
interested only in "pretty, pious, half-comical,
domestic love--love within the bounds of social law."3
Lizzie's use of sexuality resembles the passion of the

sensation heroine, an act of social rebellion

107
characterized by criminality and eroticism.4 By
playing the part of the seductress and heroine, Lizzie
is able to exercise power in the role of the sexual
aggressor.

The key hunt scene is central to an understanding
of Lizzie's quest for sexual and social potency. The
hunt reveals Lizzie's conflicting roles as both
huntress and prey: "Mounted on a bright-skinned, lively
steed, with her cousin on one side and Lord George de
Bruce Carruthers on the other, with all the hunting
world of her own county civil around her, and a fox
just found in Craighattan Gorse, what could the heart
of woman desire more? This was to live” (p. 387).

One does not need an especially Freudian turn of
mind to notice the sexual implications of the hunt
scene. Lizzie exults in her companionate ride with
Lord George, experiencing new sensations in the company
of her most Corsair-like suitor: "Over went Lord
George, and she followed him almost without losing the
stride of her horse. Surely in all the world there was
nothing equal to this.... She was so glad now that he
Ahad not spared for price in mounting her” (pp. 388-89).
Even more than indicating sexual gratification, the
experience points out Lizzie's desire to gain masculine
equality by becoming the pursuer during the hunt: "Oh,

if she could only pass them, and get up to those men

108
whom she saw before her!” (p. 389).

Lizzie's delight in the hunt is tempered by her
dim awareness of her dual role. Her financial
independence allows her the place of first lady of the
hunt, but also preempts any privilege to be treated
like a lady. She not only provides lodging for her
suitors but purchases their equipment for the hunt as
well. Lizzie literally pays for her sexuality by
financing her suitors' recreational pursuit of her:
"Young women generally pay for nothing: and it was very
hard that she, who was quite a young woman, should have
to pay for all. But she smiled, and accepted the
proposition" (p. 384). In exchange for freedom and
power, Lizzie must still feign the proper lady-like
attitude: smile and endure it. Lizzie covertly pursues
a deviant course while she overtly assumes the
conventional pose. No wonder that Lizzie is unable to
achieve self-realization, "unreal as she was to
herself" (p. 386).

Lizzie's failure to reach self-realization is the
result of her ability to perform social roles. That
Lizzie ultimately fails in society suggests that the
roles themselves are false. Lizzie's romantic
entanglements are grouped with those of her foils,
Lucinda Roanoke and Lucy Morris. Lucinda is the niece

of Mrs. Carbuncle, Lizzie's permanent house guest and

109
dubious duenna. Lucy Morris is the conventional
heroine of the novel, Frank Greystock's long-suffering
fiancee. Lucinda and Lucy play conventional social
and fictional roles and, like Lizzie, they fail to
achieve the promised success of those roles.

Lucinda is Lizzie's twin in many ways. Her family
background is ambiguous: society speculates that she is
the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Carbuncle and Lord
George de Bruce Carruthers. As a beauty without
fortune, Lucinda enters the marriage market with even
fewer resources than Lizzie. Marriage is her means to
achieve maintenance whereas a second marriage for
Lizzie is a means to infiltrate higher social circles.
Lucinda must market her one advantage carefully to make
herself the object of male desire, although the
narrator notes that she scorns the role:

It must be presumed that Lucinda Roanoke was in

want of a husband, and yet no girl seemed to take

less pains to get one. A girl ought not to be

always busying herself to bring down a man, but a

girl ought to give herself some charms... but

Lucinda Roanoke stood aloof and despised

everybody (p. 368).

Lucinda arouses a violent admiration in Sir
Griffin Tewett, a middle-aged roue, because of her

frigidity and antipathy for him. Lucinda's aloofness

110
makes her more desirable but also makes her subject to
greater displays of violence from her future husband.5
Sir Griffin gives Lucinda the strategic advantage of
the pursued with the understanding that he can make her
pay for her cool treatment after their marriage: "He
had no idea of giving up the chase, but he thought that
perhaps he would take it out of her when she became
Lady Tewett" (pp. 400-401).

Lucinda participates in the hunt, but her
experience counters Lizzie's. A momentary liberation
for Lizzie, for Lucinda, the hunt represents a
desperate escape from the drawing-room facade of her
daily social pose: "There was a savageness of
antipathy in her to the mode of life which her
circumstances had produced for her. It was that very
savageness which made her ride so hard, and which
forbade her to smile and be pleasant to people whom she
could not like" (p. 401). Lucinda is unable to muster
the plastic smile Lizzie manages in response to her
social exploitation. Trollope compares the fate of
both girls in the larger hunt: Lizzie leaps the fences
successfully: Lucinda falls off her horse into a mire.

Lucinda larger ”fall" begins when she accepts Sir
Griffin to please her aunt by making a financially
advantageous match. Although Sir Griffin is repellent

to her, he at first seems no worse than other suitors:

111
"...it seemed to her that all men who came near her
were men whom she could not fail to dislike.... Why
not Sir Griffin as well as any other fool?" (p. 401).
Lucinda does not invest her pursuers with false
romance, but neither does she discriminate between
potential husbands. Lizzie dupes her followers by
playing the false feminine roles which Lucinda scorns.
Yet Lucinda's clarity of perception fails to protect
her from a foolish choice for marriage: ”It may be
doubted whether she knew how obstinate, how hard, how
cruel to a woman a fool can be" (p. 401).

It may also be doubted whether Lucinda is any more
true to herself than Lizzie. She disdains her social
role. Scorning the part does not protect her from
playing it or experiencing its consequences. She still
agrees to marry a man she abhors. Lizzie tries to
invent a man who will please her as a lover: Lucinda
accepts a man who makes her recoil. For Lucinda, Sir
Griffin's kiss represents a psychological rape and
compels her to desperate measures to break the
engagement. She threatens murder or suicide or a
retreat into madness if she is forced to go through
with the marriage: ‘I shall never be married to him.
How I shall escape from him--by dying, or going mad--or
by destroying him, God only knows.... If he comes for

ever and ever and ever he shall never touch me again:--

112
not alive: he shall never touch me alive' (pp. 670,
677).

Lucinda pays a high price for seeking a mercenary
marriage or for accepting the whole construct of the
marriage market. Even though she refuses to don a
false identity, she continues to participate in the
accepted social tenets which dictate feminine roles.
Lucy Morris, by contrast, performs both her social and
fictional roles in an exemplary fashion. Lucy is, like
Jane Eyre, a poor, plain, and obscure governess, but
without the force of Jane's personality or the
complications of Jane's love life. Lucy's love
problems are, in fact, pedestrian, but no less
humiliating than Lucinda's. The difference is in her
response to Frank's neglect and infidelity.

Lucy fills the role of conventional heroine in Tho
Eustaco Diamonds. Lucy's introduction in the novel‘
displays the narrator's typical disinterest in the
conventional woman as a focus for the narrative.
Lizzie achieves prominence because she "did so many
things, made so many efforts, caused so much suffering
to others, and suffered so much herself" (p. 57).

Lucy does little but suffer while she stands by her
man. In the earlier novels, Trollope uses the

conventional heroine to fulfill popular expectations,

but the narrator of Tho_Eoooaoo_hiahohgo does not even

113
"dare to put forward Lucy Morris as a heroine" (p.
57) .

Like Lucinda Roanoke, Lucy is paired with Lizzie
to emphasize the divergent possibilities Lizzie creates
for herself. Lizzie and Lucy come from similar
backgrounds: "Lady Eustace and Lucy Morris had known
each other for many years--had indeed been children
together-~there having been some old family friendship
between the Greystocks and the Morrises" (p. 57).
Lizzie and Lucy are also rivals for Frank Greystock.
Lucy wins the contest through endurance rather than
through perseverance. Lizzie manages her marriage
possibilities by keeping several men on her string even
as she ties them to her through seduction or
publicity. Frank follows the same course in his
romantic affairs. He binds Lucy to him without making
a commitment to her: "He had not, in truth, asked her
to be his wife: but he had told her that he loved her,
and could never love any other woman. He had asked for
no answer to this assurance, and then he left her" (p.
150).

Frank leaves Lucy to pursue Lizzie. Frank's
attitude toward both women suggests an ambivalent
regard to proper femininity. Frank realizes that
Lizzie is a liar and a thief, but, in truth, he likes

her better than he likes Lucy. He considers Lucy

114
perfect, but perfection is not a likeable quality: "He
did not want women to be perfect.... But Lucy Morris,
in his eyes, was perfect” (p. 151). Frank, then, can
despise both girls--Lizzie for being bad, Lucy for
being good. Trollope plays with fictional expectations
as Frank self-consciously enacts his roles as lover and
hero. Frank understands the convention only too well.
He flirts with Lizzie and even considers marrying her
while he protects himself from her with the shield of
his engagement to Lucy.

Frank admires Lizzie because of her vitality:
"What a wonderful woman was his cousin Lizzie:--and so
unlike any other girl he had ever seen! How full she
was of energy, how courageous, and, then, how
beautiful!" (p. 255). Frank's admiration of the
criminal woman implies that feminine purity is not
really an attraction for men. At the same time,
Lizzie's past makes her fair game for flirtation:
"...women who have had one husband already, are not
like young girls in respect to their hearts. So at
least thought Frank Greystock" (p. 255). Frank's
cavalier treatment of Lucy emphasizes his hypocrisy.
He assigns her a martyr's role during his fling with
Lucy: "...but what did all that matter in comparison
with the love of Lucy Morris? A man is bound to be

true. And he would be true. Only, as a matter of

115
course, Lucy must wait" (p. 255).

In the spirit of the proper heroine, Lucy does
wait. In the process, she experiences a series of
humiliating rejections, not only from Frank but from
Lady Fawn, her patroness. When Lucy stands by Frank in
an argument with Lord Fawn, Lady Fawn supports her son
and ships Lucy out as companion to Lizzie's dragon
aunt, Lady Linlithgow. Frank eventually returns to
Lucy after sating himself on Lizzie's feminine wiles.
The narrator moves quickly through the reconciliation
and marriage to return to Lizzie's trial for theft:
"Having told the tale of Lucy Morris to the end, the
chronicler must now go back to the more important
persons of this history" (p. 747).

Trollope's hurried conclusion of Lucy's history
suggests that her story is predictable and unimportant
compared to Lizzie's adventures. Lizzie's trial,
rather than Lucy's marriage, is given center stage.
Like Lady Mason, Lizzie figures in two trials. She,
too, perjures herself in the original trial. In
contrast to Lady Mason, however, Lizzie convinces no
one of her honesty, but the legal representatives in
Lizzie's case understand that dishonesty is a natural
part of a self-interested world. Learned counsel Mr.
Dove merely recommends that the Eustace family count

their losses in their connection with Lizzie. He

116
suggests that her greed is simply a microcosm of the
larger society:

‘What can you get by harassing the poor, weak,

ignorant creature?... She has hankered after her

bauble, and has told falsehoods in her efforts to
keep it. Have you never heard of older persons,
and more learned persons, and persons nearer to

ourselves, who have done the same?' (p. 694).

Mr. Dove excuses Lizzie on the grounds of her
femininity, but the narrator makes an important
connection between her criminality and that which
operates in male-dominated institutions. Lizzie's
misappropriation of the diamonds is compared, for
example, to kick-backs in high government posts: "At
that moment there was presumed to be great rivalry, not
unaccompanied by intrigue, among certain leaders of the
learned profession with reference to various positions
of high honor and emolument, vacant or expected to be
vacant" (p. 694). Mr. Dove excuses Lizzie according to
the ways of the world. He exercises a problematic
mercy that excuses dishonesty and crime. The narrator
refuses to admit Mr. Dove as the spokesman of
conscience. Mr. Dove may believe that 'the very
existence of such property so to be disposed of, or so
not to be disposed of, is in itself an evil,' but the

narrator reminds us that Mr. Dove takes his fees, too,

117
"as to which...no human being was more indifferent” (p.
753).

Lady Mason's trial and criminality confound the
community and throw its most respected members into
moral crisis. In the world of the Palliser novels,
Lizzie's notoriety is not only part of every day life
but a social asset. Lizzie does not need to shelter
her life as Lady Mason does or to put herself through a
public trial to right herself in the public mind. Even
the supposedly high-minded politicians in the Palliser
set take bets on Lizzie's chances to escape
prosecution. Lady Glencora solidifies Lizzie's place
in the social scheme by visiting her to show public
support for the woman who, in society gossip, "was
almost becoming a heroine on the strength of the
necklace" (p. 582).

Lizzie escapes punishment in the simplest manner:
she simply fails to show up for her trial. The trial
is a public spectacle: "Lizzie's absence was a great
disappointment to the sight-seers of London, but
nevertheless the court was crowded" (p. 750). The
prosecuting attorney publicly censures Lizzie for her
actions, but nevertheless pronounces a kind of encomium
as part of his condemnation: ‘A most wonderful woman,
indeed, is the widow Eustace. It is she whom public

opinion will convict as the guilty one in this

118
marvellous mass of conspiracy and intrigue' (pp. 752-
53). Public opinion, on the contrary, favors Lizzie,
not as the victim of a legal conspiracy, but as the
heroine of her own self-created adventure.

Lizzie tests the limits of public opinion as she
tests the limits for feminine behavior in a world of
compromised values. Lizzie finally marries contrary to
her principle that an engagement is protection enough
for her independent life. After failed romances with
Frank, Lord Fawn, and Lord George, Lizzie marries the
slimey charlatan society preacher, Mr. Emilius. Mr.
Emilius seems a fitting companion for Lizzie, the
spokesman for social hypocrisy: "The man had a grasping
ambition about him, and a capacity, too, which,
combined, would enable him to preach himself into
notoriety" (p. 759).

Mr. Emilius spouts the romantic cant that Lizzie
craves. Perceptive enough to recognize his
insincerity, Lizzie still enjoys Mr. Emilius'
seduction. In the cynical style of Felix Carbury,
Lizzie's high society suitors disdain romantic twaddle
in their pursuit of Lizzie. She wants Frank and Lord
George, for instance, to express romantic sentiments,
even if insincerely. Mr. Emilius pleases her in this
respect, returning fraud for fraud:

She knew, or half knew, that the man was a

119

scheming hypocrite, craving her money, and

following her in the hour of her troubles, because

he might then have the best chance of success.

She had no belief whatever in his love. And yet

she liked it, and approved his proceeding. She

liked lies, thinking them to be more beautiful
than truth. To lie readily and cleverly,
recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to
the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in

woman, and an added grace in man (p. 762).

Lies, hypocrisy, and greed are the lessons that Lizzie
learns from her society. Lizzie's adventures prove
that reckless lies are successful in her world and, for
a woman, almost necessary.

Lizzie's marriage to Mr. Emilius marks an
important difference from the fates of the anti-
heroines in the earlier novels. In the earlier novels,
the anti-heroines retreat from relationships and live
as exiles in other worlds. Lizzie marries and seems to
achieve the union guaranteed to the conventional
heroine. Her marriage, however, represents a mock
comic ending. Lizzie marries partly out of an
awareness that she has challenged public opinion to the
breaking point. Mr. Emilius's social status is far
below any of Lizzie's other suitors, but being his

wife still provides greater social approbation than

120
living her life as an independent woman. She is no
longer able to maintain a bohemian life without
violating social codes, however hypocritical they may
be: ”Lizzie, when the moment came, knowing that her
betrothals had been made public to all the world, did
not dare to recede from another engagement" (p. 764).
Readers of the Palliser novels know that Mr.
Emilius proves a bigamist and a murderer in the
subsequent novel, Rhinea§_8edur- The narrator ominously
predicts that Mr. Emilius will, indeed, be more than a
match for Lizzie:
It may be that Mr. Emilius will suit her as well
as any husband that she could find--unless it
shall be found that his previous career has been
too adventurous. After a certain fashion he will,
perhpas, be tender to her: and he will have his
own way in everything, and be no whit afraid when
she is about to die in an agony of tears before
his eyes (p. 764).
Even the debauched Duke of Omnium, the most avid
audience for Lizzie's adventures, astutely recognizes
Lizzie's fate with a rogue. The Duke's final comments
to Lady Glencora bless Lizzie for the entertainment she
has provided but predict future misery for her: ‘I
call that woman a perfect God-send. What should we

have done without her?... I'm afraid, you know, that

121
your friend hasn't what I call a good time before her,

Glencora' (p. 770).

Tho_§oohaoo_p1amohoo marks an important shift in
Trollope's social satire. Even in Tho Way To Liyo how,

a later novel, the anti-heroines escape the community
to start new lives in alternative communities. Lady
Mason and Julia Brabazon attempt to gain advantage
within the patriarchy while Mrs. Hurtle attempts to
challenge the system: all finally are isolated from
the community. Lizzie participates fully in her world,
both challenging its restrictions and obeying its
strictures. She manages to escape social opprobrium,
but she actually experiences a more profound isolation
as a result of inculcating social values: she becomes
isolated from her inner self. In a very modern sense,
Trollope suggests that the modern world structures
isolation and inner emptiness by its easy acceptance of
false values, which prevents self-actualization,
particularly for women, who are conditioned to be false
as part of their social role.

Comic as much as the novel is, the world-view of
The Eustace Qiahohdo is grim. The narrator may, with
understatement, suggests that Lizzie does not have good
taste in men, even as she consorts with highly-placed
members of society. Who should be better company for

her? That she fails to see much distinction between

122
the priggish Lord Fawn and the opportunistic Lord
George may, in fact, testify to her perspicuity rather
than her obtuseness.

In Tho_Ahorioah_§oha;o;, Trollope condenses the
world of political relationships to elucidate the
dilemma further. The anti-heroine of Tho_hao;ioah
Sohator follows Lizzie's course of lies to achieve
social advantage with grim determination. Arabella
Trefoil's adventures most conspicuously illuminate
Trollope's disaffection with late Victorian values as
he shows the consequences for women in a world that
makes women's main function--marriage--a blatant form

of prostitution.

The Immoral Hunt:

Arabella Trefoil and the Mercenary Marriage

Contemporary critics of 111W

(1877) recognized the essential misnomer of the novel's
title. Reviewers for the Ahhohaoom and the fiahozoay
Royioy both suggested the Senator might well have been
deleted from the story: Tho_Timoo resoundingly
condemned the Senator as ”an excrescence on the work to
which he gives his name.”1 The Sooohahox's reviewer
agreed that the Senator fails as a focus for the novel
but suggested he might have been put to greater use in
the story since the central marriage plot is "perhaps
the least interesting our author has ever written."2

Characteristic of Trollope's novels, h an
Sohaho; contains two love stories, that of the
conventional heroine Mary Masters and that of Arabella
Trefoil, the novel's manhunting anti-heroine. And,
characteristically, the anti-heroine's story is the
main focus of the story, which perhaps explains, in
part, the general dissatisfaction with the novel. In
addition, Tho_Amo;ioah_Sohahoz extends Trollope's
social criticism from the earlier novels, permitting an
outsider to assess Victorian England and to pass
judgment on the hypocrisy of the age.3

Senator Elias Gotobed freely criticizes English

123

 

124
institutions and the customs of the country while
accompanying England's American ambassador on a visit
to his home country.‘ John Morton is facetiously
dubbed the "Paragon" of the foreign office. As squire
of Dillsborough, he is nothing more than an absentee
landlord. Trollope weaves together the larger social
theme of bad mastership through his use of the marriage
plot. Patriarchal representatives fail in their
responsibility to society. Within the smaller
construct of Dillsborough society, John Morton
neglects his tenantry while taking full advantage of
the privileges of his social position:
The estate when he came of age had already had
some years to recover itself, and as he went from
capital to capital, he was quite content to draw
from it an income which enabled him to shine with
peculiar brilliance among his brethren. He had
visited Bragton once since the old squire's death,
and had found the place very dull and uninviting.
He had no ambition whatever to be master of the
U.R.U.: but did look forward to a time when he
might be Minister Plenipotentiary at some foreign
court.5
Morton chooses to shine among strangers rather than
live with the dull and uninviting folk at home.

Although he represents his country abroad, he is an

125
alien in his home county.

John Morton's choice of a bride epitomizes his
general alienation from the society he is supposed to
represent. He engages himself to an ex-patriot English
woman, a woman without a country. Arabella Trefoil is
likewise alienated from society, but her alienation
stems from an opposite cause. Whereas Morton chooses
to ignore the responsibilities of his social position
to pursue a foreign career, Arabella pursues her career
on foreign ground to establish for herself an
appropriate social position. Her career is, as
Trollope notes, "to run down a husband."6

Arabella's corruption as a woman is the product of
her attempts to fulfill her social role--that is, to
achieve a woman's success through marriage. Arabella
appears successful in America, a country of new
identities. In Washington, she is able to fool Morton
into believing that her father is a scion of British
aristocracy, "as to which John Morton who only
understood foreign affairs was not aware, as he would
have been had he lived in England, that Lord Augustus
was nobody" (p. 52). As "a beauty, and a woman of
fashion," Arabella is able to captivate John Morton
abroad, where she can exercise her charms ”with almost

American freedom" (p. 52).

In The Way Wo Livo hay, the American frontier

126
represents a new possibility of freedom for the novel's
anti-heroines. Arabella's American experience is
limited to the British political delegation and
therefore offers only a recreation of the old society.
The charm of created identity loses it freshness in
England: Arabella's ”copious hair was managed after
such a fashion that no one could guess what was her own
and what was purchased.... If, as the ladies said, [the
brilliance of her complexion] was all paint, she, or
her maid, must have been a great artist. It never
betrayed itself to be paint" (p. 82). Unmasked,
Arabella is "haggard, almost old," with_”nothing soft
or gracious in the tresses of her hair” (p. 375). In
other words, only a fool like John Morton would
consider Arabella's glitter to be real gold.

If Arabella fools John Morton, she never fools
herself. Unlike any of the anti-heroines examined so
far, Arabella offers no exculpating rationale for her
participation in the marriage market. As ruthless as
Lizzie Eustace, Arabella is more clear-sighted about
her place in society: ”She had long known that it was
her duty to marry, and especially her duty to marry
well" (p. 82). Neither the narrator nor Arabella feels
obliged to explain the necessity. In onloy_2a:m, by
contrast, Lady Mason contracts a mercenary marriage to

relieve her family's financial distress: in Tho

127
glayoxihoo, Julia Brabazon marries for money to
maintain her family's position. In both of these
novels, Trollope works hard to excuse the anti-heroines
and to elicit the reader's sympathy for them. By the
time he writes Tho_hho:1oah_§ohahoz, however, he
expects his reader to recognize and condemn the
mercenary marriage as an integral--and corrupt--part of
Victorian society.

In this sense, Arabella's complicity in the
devaluation of marriage becomes a reflection of the
reader's complacency regarding corrupt social values.
Arabella becomes an "odious female" only because she is
honest about the real value of her quest.7 The
narrator points out the general hypocrisy of society
in contrast to Arabella's harsh honesty:

With worldly people in general, though the

worldliness is manifest enough and is taught by

plain lessons from parents to children, yet there
is generally some thin veil even among themselves,
some transparent tissue of lies, which, though
they never quite hope to deceive each other, does
produce among them something of the comfort of
deceit. But between Lady Augustus and her
daughter, there had for many years been nothing of
the kind. The daughter herself had been too

honest for it (p. 82).

 

128
The narrator's commentary identifies deceit as the
basis for a social structure of general worldliness.
The "plain lessons" of the world are actually obscured
by complex layers of lies which we all apparently
understand but which we assume fool others. Arabella
masters the disguises of deceit but acknowledges her
own hypocrisy. Like Lucinda Roanoke, Arabella
participates in the social aspirations of marriageable
women even as she scorns both men and marriage.
Arabella's understanding of the advantages of
marriage underscores the emotional isolation of her
world. Marriage does not bring love, satisfaction, or
pleasure: it does, however, give a woman greater power
in society. Arabella and her mother are social
vagabonds, moving as unwelcome visitors in others'
homes. Arabella seeks marriage as a way to master her
circumstances:
She herself did not care much for pleasure. But
she did care to be a great lady,--one who could
snub others, one who could show real diamonds when
others were paste, one who might be sure to be
asked everywhere even by the people who hated her.
She rather liked being hated by women and did not
want any man to be in love with her,--except as
far as might be sufficient for the purpose of

marriage (p. 83).

129

Arabella sees society as her adversary and men as
her "enemy” (p. 135). Marriage is her only means to
achieve puissance and authority. In Arabella's
understanding of social roles, the great lady is the
complement to the patriarch: significantly, she is no
more bountiful than her husband is patronizing. The
great lady has the power to command acceptance and
inspire hatred. Power and mastery are the "real
diamonds" Arabella covets to replace her false
posturing in society.

Arabella is a perfect foil for the American
Senator. Arabella and the Senator visit John Morton's
home seat together. Both are critical of Morton's
position but for different reasons. The Senator wishes
to understand a foreign way of life whereas Arabella
understands the machinations of society all too well.
The Senator outrages Dillsborough by challenging the
custom of church patronage, by confusing the various
social ranks of the neighborhood personages, and, worst
of all, by questioning the morality of fox hunting.
Arabella, on the other hand, is conscious of each
social distinction and advantage. She ignores the
socially unimportant clergy who come to dine at Bragton
but maneuvers to achieve a conspicuous place in the
local hunt.

The hunt is an important representation of the

 

 

130

organization of society. Arabella insinuates herself
into the hunting party to prey on Lord Rufford._ With
higher social rank and greater wealth, Lord Rufford is
better game than John Morton. In her pursuit of the
lord, however, Arabella is as much the fox as the
huntress. Lord Rufford is first gentleman of the
neighborhood, but, like Morton, he is a poor master:

Lord Rufford is a rich man who thinks of nothing

but sport in all its various shapes, from pigeon-

shooting at Hurlingham to the slaughter of
elephants in Africa: and though he is lenient in
all his dealings, is not much thought of in the

Dillsborough side of the county, except by those

who go out with the hounds (pp. 6-7).

Women represent significant sport to Lord Rufford,
and Arabella becomes his pigeon as a result of her
pursuit. Arabella actually participates in two hunts,
one at Rufford Hall, as Lord Rufford's guest, and one
at Mistletoe, the home of her aunt, the Duchess of
Mayfair. The first hunt allows her the opportunity to
attract Lord Rufford's interest and establish the basis
for a correspondence filled with compromising sexual
innuendo. The series of letters fails to bring Lord
Rufford to a proposal, so Arabella arranges the second
hunt to force him into a secure attachment. In both

cases, Arabella fails in her moral choices. At

131
Rufford, a hunting accident kills one of the guests.
As the fallen rider lies dying in an upstairs bedroom,
Arabella encourages Lord Rufford to proceed with a ball
in her honor. At Mistletoe, Arabella intentionally
compromises her reputation through a sexual liaison
with Rufford during a closed carriage ride.

The Senator's question about the morality of the
hunt help underscore the hypocrisy behind Arabella's
marriage quest. To the members of the local U.R.U.,
the Senator is an "aggravating, interfering, and most
obnoxious American" only because his criticisms are so
painfully apt (p. 130). Marvelling at the number of
hounds used to track down one fox, the Senator
concludes that ‘half—a-dozen would do just as well,
only for the show' (p. 54). As Arabella plans to hunt
down Lord Rufford, she too realizes that "A great deal
must depend on appearance" (p. 135). To the high-
minded and pragmatic Senator, the Master of the Hounds
seems ‘an unwholesome sort of profession,‘ and the
entire sport is contrary to ‘either utility or rational
recreation' (pp. 55, 60). Arabella points out the
duplicity inherent in her own chase. She must demean
herself to achieve an object she despises: ‘What a
shame it is that a man like that should have so much
and that a girl like me should have nothing at all. I

know twice as much as he does, and am twice as clever,

 

132

and yet I've got to treat him as though he were a god'
(pp. 172-73).

For Arabella, the hunt is more than recreation.
Her labor to catch a man represents the hard work
society reserves for her as a woman. The expectation
that a woman must work to secure a husband exacts a
high price. With insight as penetrating as the
Senator's, Arabella complains that her position as an
unmarried woman consists of unrewarded toil for an
unwanted prize: ‘1 must settle somewhere:--or else
die:--or else run away. I can't stand this any longer
and I won't. Talk of work,--men's work! What man ever
has to work as I do?’ (p. 88). Her work is hard to
bear because it involves such relentless self-abasement
that flight, or even death, seems preferable.

Trollope's discussion of Arabella reveals his
awareness of the destructive social conditioning of the
marriage market. In a letter to Anna Steele, Trollope
anticipates criticism of Arabella's character as he
notes the humiliating consequences of marriage
expectations for women:

The critics have to come, and they will tell me

that [Arabella] is unwomanly, unnatural, turgid,--

the creation of a morbid imagination, striving

after effect by laboured abominations. But I

swear I have known the woman,--not one special

 

 

133
woman, not one Mary Jones or Sarah Smith,--but all
the traits, all the cleverness, all the patience,
all the courage, all the self-abnegation,--and all
the failure.8
Trollope recognizes that self-abnegation is central to
the woman's desperate quest for marriage. Most
poignantly, despite the mortification integral to
laboring toward marriage, the woman is a failure after
all.

For all her apparent selfishness, Arabella
resembles Georgiana Longestaffe in her self-abnegation.
The need to be married overwhelms the need for self-
actualization. Like Georgiana, Arabella rejects love
as an operative value in the world. She tells her
mother that caring for a particular suitor is
unwarranted affectation: ‘As for caring about him,
mamma... of course I don't. He is nasty, and odious in
every way. But I have got to do the best I can, and
what is the use of talking about such trash as that?'
(p. 82).

Arabella's laboriously whimsical correspondence
with Lord Rufford reveals the affectations she must
assume as she conducts her pursuit. Although Lord
Rufford encourages her advances, Arabella realizes she
must remain within the amorphous boundaries he creates

for their flirtation: "She was quite alive to the fact

 

134
and as she had adapted herself to Mr. Morton in
Washington, so could she at Rufford adapt herself to
Lord Rufford" (p. 163). Arabella's identity is
structured for her by the patriarchal representatives.
To win the man, she must play within the rules
established for women by the patriarchal system. Not
surprisingly, the rules are ill-defined, tacit, and
give the greatest advantage to men.

Arabella's letters represent her attempt to beat
the system while playing by the rules. After leaving
Rufford Hall, she tries to maintain the improper
intimacy Lord Rufford has established during her visit.
Although Arabella acknowledges her plays to herself,
she nevertheless plays the deceitful social roles in
her relationship with Rufford:

Of course she had against her not only all his

friends,--but the man himself also and his own

fixed intentions. Lord Rufford was not a marrying
man,--which was supposed to signify that he
intended to lead a life of pleasure till the
necessity of providing an heir should be forced
upon him, when he would take to himself a wife out
of his own class in life twenty years younger than

himself for whom he would not care a straw (p.

210).

The narrator explains for the readers the social codes

135
Arabella tries to manipulate. The series of letters,
however, demonstrates the limitations of the codes for
women. The harder Arabella tries, the more she loses
ground.

Lord Rufford begins the exchange of letters with
openly flirtatious references to their intimacy at
Rufford and concludes with a suggestively ambiguous
closing remark: ‘I never know how to sign myself to
young ladies. Suppose I say that I am yours....
Anything you like best, R.‘ (p. 211). Following his
lead, Arabella closes her first letter in kind: ‘I have
not had much experience in signing myself to young
gentlemen and am therefore quite in as great a
difficulty as you were: but, though, I can't swear that
I am everything that you like best, I will protest that
I am pretty nearly what you ought to like,--as far as
young ladies 90' (p. 213). Of course, the reader knows
that Arabella's experience with men is extensive: the
narrator tells us that "She had had many lovers, and
had been engaged to not a few" (p. 82). Still, she
must feign sexual innocence. Lord Rufford, on the
other hand, implies that his life includes illicit
relationships with many young women. To attract Lord
Rufford and still remain within the rules of propriety
for women, Arabella simultaneously hints that, innocent

as she is, she is erotic enough to offer Lord Rufford

136
sexual gratification.

Arabella realizes that Rufford's interest in her
is purely sexual. Since she has no fortune or social
position of consequence, sex is all she has to offer
that will interest him. Lord Rufford is ready to
exploit a sexual relationship, but he is also is able
to retreat from a compromising situation because of
his own wealth and social position. He can compromise
Arabella: if she compromises him, she is an odious,
improper female. Although Rufford suggests they meet
at Mistletoe for another liaison, he refuses to commit
himself to a rendezvous after Arabella arranges an
invitation from her uncle the Duke. In each
subsequent letter, Lord Rufford draws a protective
social shield around his activities to prevent Arabella
from snaring him. Concurrently, he continues to
maintain the false romance between them.

Arabella's letters become more desperate and less
circumspect as Rufford's become more cautious and less
engaged. Her painful display of honesty only provides
Rufford with greater amusement. She begs him to show
up at Mistletoe:

Your last letter which I have just got has killed

me. You must know that I have altered my plans

and done it at immense trouble for the sake of

meeting you at Mistletoe.... Please, please come.

137

It was to be the little cream of the year for

me.... Pray answer this by return of post.... Pray

come. Yours if you do come--: what shall I say?

Fill it as you please (p. 216).

Although the narrator suggests that Arabella's response
is part strategy, the pleading letter is nonetheless
excruciating to read. Arabella includes a shrewd
reference to the dual purpose behind their meeting: ‘I
think you are bound to go to Mistletoe though the
hunting at Melton should be better than was ever

known. When the hunting is good in one place of course
it is good in another. Even I am sportsman enough to
know that' (p. 216).

For Rufford, the hunting may be just as good at
some other estate, but for Arabella, the field is
limited. She recognizes that women are fair game for
Rufford anywhere, just as she is interchangeable with
any other woman who amuses him. Rufford's response
continues the conceit of the hunt as the basis for
their meeting, but also suggests the essential
prostitution behind the marriage hunt. As he
ungraciously agrees to meet Arabella at Mistletoe,
Rufford refers to their liaison in terms of a pay-off:
‘I can only hope that you will be grateful. After all
your abuse about my getting back my money I think you
ought to be very grateful. I have got it back again,

138
but I can assure you that has had nothing to do with
it' (p. 217). Despite the contemptuous tone of the
letter, Arabella is relieved to achieve this amount of
condescension: "Arabella felt that a great deal of the
compliment was taken away... but still she was grateful
and contented" (p. 217).

Arabella is the only woman to participate in the
Mistletoe hunt. She defies her aunt's disapproval by
riding to hounds with Lord Rufford. Her open pursuit
is too abrasive for polite society to sanction. The
narrative juxtaposes the elaborate machinations
involved in the Mistletoe hunt to its ultimate
triviality: "The sport was fairly good. They had
twenty minutes in the morning and a kill. Then they
drank their sherry. In the big wood they found a fox
but could not do anything with him" (p. 267). The hunt
requires intricate preparations for a brief twenty
minutes of mediocre sport. The violence of the kill is
followed by refined sherry-drinking. The hunt
represents society's veil of deceit as the participants
cover its essential brutality with gentility.
Arabella's role in the hunt is simply part of an
accepted social custom, a convention laden with ritual
but bereft of significance: ”The hunting field is by no
means a place suited for real love-making" (p. 268).

Lord Rufford actually controls the course of the

139
hunt, although he pretends to be the unwitting victim
of Arabella's manipulation. Rufford arranges to escort
Arabella back home in a closed carriage. Arabella
welcomes the carriage ride as an opportunity to extract
a proposal from Rufford, even if it means ruining her
reputation. For all Arabella's guile, she, not
Rufford, is the dupe in the power game of sexual
politics:
‘Lord Rufford, what does this mean?‘
‘Don't you know what it means?‘
‘Hardly.'
‘It means that I think you the jolliest girl
out. I never liked anybody so well as I do you.'
‘Perhaps you never liked anybody,‘ she said.
‘Well:--yes, I have: but I am not going to
boast of what fortune has done for me in that way.
I wonder whether you care for me?'
‘Do you want to know?'
‘I should like to know. You have never said
that you did.‘
‘Because you have never asked me.'
‘Am I not asking you now, Bella?‘
‘There are different ways of asking,--but there
is only one way that will get an answer from me.
No:--no. I will not have it. I have allowed too

much to you already. Oh, I am so tired.‘ Then

140

she sank back almost into his arms,--but recovered

herself very quickly. ‘Lord Rufford,‘ she said,

‘if you are a man of honour let there be an end of

this. I am sure you do not wish to make me

wretched.‘

‘I would do anything to make you happy,‘

‘Then tell me that you love me honestly,
sincerely, with all your heart,--and I shall be
happy-'

‘You know I do.' (pp. 269-70).

Arabella believes a confession of love and a
physical liaison is enough to force Rufford into
marriage. Rufford knows the limitations of both. A
declaration of love is not a proposal of marriage: a
tryst in a carriage does not merit for a man the
world's censure. The carriage ride signifies
Arabella's utter moral disgrace, but Rufford's comments
indicate that "fortune" has provided many such women
for his amusement. What is a desperate measure for
Arabella is apparently a commonplace for Rufford.

A seduction scene follows this conversation.
Arabella's seeming promiscuity is peculiarly asexual.
She removes herself, psychologically, from the physical
involvement as she considers the social consequences of
the affair: "She was conscious but hardly more than

conscious that he was kissing her:--and yet her brain

141
was at work. She felt that he would be startled,
repelled, perhaps disgusted were she absolutely to
demand more from him now" (p. 270). Arabella risks
social ostracism as a promiscuous woman and yet feels
unable, as a woman, to demand a commitment from Lord
Rufford. Knowing that Rufford is not an honest,
sincere man of honor, Arabella rests her hope on the
patriarchal codes for honorable conduct from men: "And
might it not be that [her uncle] would carry great
weight with him:--that the Duke might induce him to
utter the fatal word though she, were she to demand it
not, might fail?" (p. 270).

The patriarchal chivalry intended to protect women
actually shields men. Lord Rufford refuses to face
Arabella after the carriage ride, leaving Mistletoe
immediately afterward. Arabella has no escape from her
actions. She is forced to remain within the domestic
circle and experience the scorn of the other guests.
The Duke refuses to support Arabella, even at her
aunt's request, feigning an inability to invoke the
code of nobility his position is meant to embody:

The Duchess before dinner submitted herself and

all her troubles at great length to the Duke, but

the Duke could give her no substantial comfort.

Of course it had all been wrong.... But what could

he do? If the marriage came off it would be all

142

well. If not, this niece must not be invited to

Mistletoe again. As to speaking to Lord Rufford,

he did not quite see how he was to set about it

(p. 276) .

The Duke's attitude marks the progression of
social corruption in an increasingly sophisticated
world. In ozloy_£azm, for instance, sir Peregrine
Orme's chivalry is sincere if out-moded. In Tho_§ma11
House at Allinsten (1862), when Lily Dale is jilted by
her fiance, Johnny Eames becomes her champion to exact
public punishment of Mr. Crosbie. But the pastoral
idyll of the earlier Barsetshire novels does not exist
in Arabella's world. Here, the patriarchal figures
openly assert the supremacy of their power by ignoring
ignoble actions.

The Duke is not concerned with upholding high
moral principles but with preserving corrupt social
forms. Arabella will be socially accepted only if Lord
Rufford legitimizes her position through marriage.
Otherwise, she is banished from the family seat.
Trollope stringently criticizes the implicit
prostitution behind mercenary quests for marriage. At
the same time, he demonstrates the degradation and
desperation the marriage market involves for women.
When the Duke and her father fail to bring breach of

promise charges against Lord Rufford, Arabella's mother

 

 

143
intercedes to receive payment for damages. In essence,
Lady Augustus acts as a pimp for her daughter.
Although Arabella is willing to trade sexual favors for
a marriage proposal, she reacts against the utter
indignity of accepting, outright, cash for sex: ‘I am
to understand then you have sold me,--sold all my
hopes and my very name and character, for 8,000
pounds!‘ (p. 432). Lady Augustus articulates the real
reason for marriage as well as the complete disgrace
Arabella experiences as a result of trying to marry:

‘Is it not a good escape from so great a trouble?

Think what 8,000 pounds will do. It will enable

you to live in comfort wherever you may please to

go.... Your name and character will not be
touched, my dear. As for his marrying you I soon
found that that was absolutely out of the

question' (p. 432).

The Rufford plot is an important device to shift
our sympathies toward Arabella. Originally the
victimizer, she becomes the victim. Further, her
exploits with the lord prompt her to make moral
restitution to her fiance as she comes to important
conclusions about love and marriage. John Morton falls
ill after Arabella deserts him to pursue Lord Rufford.
After Rufford's cruel treatment of her, Arabella visits

Morton on his deathbed to apologize for her own

 

144
treatment of him. She realizes the truth of Morton's
sense of honor when compared to the faithlessness of
Lord Rufford and all her previous lovers. She realizes
that Morton's uncompromising sternness makes him more
reliable as a potential husband, although, as a man, he
remains distasteful to her:

She had found that the man's ways were in no wise

like her ways,--and she had found also that were

she to become his wife, he certainly would not
change. She had looked about for a means of
escape,--but as she did so she had recognized the
man's truth. No doubt he had been different from
the others, less gay in his attire, less jocund in
his words, less given to flattery and sport and
gems and all the little wickednesses which she had
loved. But they,--those others had, one and all,

struggled to escape from her (p. 373).

John Morton's death prepares the way for both
Arabella's future and for the future of the novel's
conventional heroine, Mary Masters. Mary nurses an
unspoken and apparently unrequited love for Reginald
Morton, John's cousin. Like his cousin, Reginald is a
poor master, reticent and phlegmatic in his
interaction with Dillsborough society. Although he is
fond of Mary, he despises her social position as the

daughter of the Morton family attorney. Worse still,

145
Mary's stepmother is the daughter of an ironmonger.
Reginald also despises Mary for attracting the suit of
Dillsborough's most prosperous farmer, Larry Twentyman,
an unabashed tuft-hunter. Reginald's general
misanthropy condemns Mary, although she tries hard to
discourage Larry's courtship:

It was grievous to him that he should have gone

out of his way to ask her to walk with him just at

the moment when she was expecting this vulgar
lover,--for that she had expected him he felt no
doubt. Yet he had heard her disclaim any
intention of walking with the man! But girls are
sly, especially when their lovers are concerned.

It made him sore at heart to feel that this girl

should be sly, and doubly sore to think that she

should have been able to love such a one as

Lawrence Twentyman (p. 37).

The narrator implies that Reginald's hostility
toward Mary is a product of unrecognized love: "He
assured himself that he was not in love with her
himself, and that he had no idea of falling in love
with her" (p. 37). The narrator does not excuse
Reginald's reserve but rather criticizes the judgmental
quality of his love: "In all this he was most
unjust..." (p. 38).

Mary's story follows the pattern of the

146

conventional heroine but with important alterations.
She endures her stepmother's persecution when she
rejects Larry's proposal while she endures Reginald's
contempt for attracting Larry in the first place. In
terms of passive endurance, Mary fulfills the
requirements of the heroine in love. However, Mary's
love problems involve many of the complications which
are part of Arabella's marriage quest. For example,
Mary is encouraged to marry for money and is well-
aware of the social differences which distinguish her
two lovers. Mrs. Masters echoes Arabella in her
estimation of the essential element for marital
satisfaction--that is, a comfortable income is more
important than affection or personal esteem. When
Mary, like Arabella, expresses an inability to care for
her suitor, Mrs. Masters responds with the harsh words
of necessity that Arabella supplies for herself: ‘Mary,
that is wicked. When your papa has so many things to
think of and so much to provide for, you should be more
thoughtful of him.... Can't help it! Did anybody ever
see such an idiot since girls were first created?...
You must help it' (pp. 225-26).

Mary herself is attracted to Reginald because of
his association with her when she filled the role as
companion to his aunt, Lady Ushant. Mary knows the

difference between genteel life and life on the farm.

147
Like Arabella, Mary exists between clearly defined
lines of social caste. More a lady than a farmer's
wife, her family is still not equivalent to that of the
Morton squires. To Mary's chagrin, even Lady Ushant
believes she would do well to marry Larry. During John
Morton's illness, Reginald prepares to become squire of
Morton and consequently becomes more remote from Mary
as a potential lover: ”He was now more beyond her reach
than ever,--more utterly removed from her. He would
probably become Squire of Bragton, and she, in her
earliest days, had heard the Squire spoken of as though
he were one of the potentates of the earth” (p. 369).
Mary's repressed hope for Reginald's affection
undergoes the self-immolation required for the heroine.
She admits his social superiority, although it places
her in an unfavorable position. Mary accedes to
conventional social distinctions but nevertheless
resents their affect on her feelings of self-worth:
There was something in his manner to her almost
protective, almost fatherly,--as though he had
some authority over her.... In every tone of his
voice she felt that she heard an expression of
interest in her welfare,--but it was the interest
which a grownup person takes in a child, or a
superior in an inferior. Of course he was her

superior, but yet the tone of his voice was

148

distasteful to her (pp. 369-70)

Reginald's elevation to squire corresponds to Mary's
fall in self-esteem. Ironically, Mary provides the
community integration which Reginald needs to become an
active member of Dillsborough society. Her social
position is a cross-section of society: her father is a
professional man, her stepmother is a merchant's
daughter, she has old connections with the landed
Morton family.

Mary's eventual marriage into the Morton family
presents several problematic issues. Reginald resists
his new role as the leading member of the community.

He is as much a shadow figure as his cousin before him:
he dislikes hunting, church-going, and dining out,
Dillsborough's main social activities. Most

important, Reginald resists marriage as necessary for
self-fulfillment or for his rise in social position.

In essence, he temporizes about any human interaction:
"he would take up his residence as squire of Bragton as
soon as he married a wife,--should he ever do so” (p.
486). Even as he comes to admit his love for Mary,
Reginald continues to qualify the state of his
affection: ”If he loved any one it was her. If he had
ever known a woman with whom he thought it would be
pleasant to share the joy and labours of life, it was

Mary Masters. If he could imagine that any one

149
constant companion would be a joy to him, she would be
that person" (p. 487).

Reginald's proposal is especially patronizing, and
once he assumes a patriarchal role, he claims complete
mastery: ‘I will be your true husband for the rest of
the journey:--by which I mean it to be understood that
I take you into patnership on equal terms, but that I
am to be allowed to manage the business just as I
please' (p. 495). Mary must submit to Reginald's
tutelage, although his experience as an active
participant in society is limited. Although she has
lived with Lady Ushant in the Morton family home, she
assumes an inability to accept the rank she has
closely observed as a lady's companion: ‘...I shall
know so little about anything.... You ought,--you ought
to have chosen some lady of high standing...‘ (pp. 495-
96). Mary affects the role of the grateful but
incompetent bride. Fortunately, though, Dillsborough
has no lady of higher rank to compete with her for
Reginald's hand.

The death of Arabella's fiance allows Mary to
exchange places with the anti-heroine and become the
first lady of Dillsborough society. The social
position which Arabella loses is not lost on Mary's
family. Mrs. Masters is delighted that Mary wins the

richest man in the neighborhood: "The girl had been

150
made fit to be the companion of such a one as Reginald
Morton, and had now fallen into the position which was

suited to her" (p. 499). As in Tho_§1ayozihgo, the

heroine achieves an exalted station through marriage.
However, in Tho_hmo:ioah_§ohahor, Reginald's position
is part of his attraction whereas, in Tho_§1ayo;ihgo,
the Burton family's scorn for Harry's idleness closes
the novel. The shift in attitude suggests that
mercenary or social considerations influence even a
”good" heroine's perspective on marriage.9

Arabella's story deviates from Trollope's own
earlier alterations in the plots involving lady
criminals. The anti-heroines who precede Arabella
commit legal crimes--theft, forgery, perjury, for
instance. Arabella's crimes are moral rather than
legal. Unlike her predecessors, Arabella actually
marries and reestablishes herself in society to a
limited degree. However, her marriage, like Mary's, is
filled with ambiguities and likewise suggests that
mercenary considerations operate even among partners
who achieve mutual confidance and understanding.

Arabella's marriage is preceded by two important
events. First, despite her faithlessness, she is left
a legacy from John Morton. The five thousand pounds
gives Arabella the means to reestablish herself in

polite society. The legacy is blood money, in a way,

151
but it gives Arabella limited economic independence,
thereby granting her a greater degree of autonomy and
power. Although her reputation is compromised enough
to make her a topic of sport for the foreign office
men-about-town, the legacy still makes her attractive
game for socially adventurous fortune-hunters. Second,
Arabella responds to her financial gain and loss of
reputation by stalking down Lord Rufford, forcing a
confrontation on his home ground. The scene entails
both humiliation and great courage on Arabella's part.
With John Morton's legacy behind her, Arabella can
reject Lord Rufford's attempt to buy her off with
righteous indignation.

The legacy, coupled with her relations with Lord
.Rufford, presents a problematic issue only if we expect
a moral rejuvenation to result from Arabella's
experience in society. On the strength of John
Morton's money, Arabella marries Mounser Green,
Morton's replacement in the foreign office. Lord
Rufford, a scamp till the end, sends her a valuable
diamond ring as a wedding gift. In consultation with
her fiance, she decides to keep the ring. Together,
they conclude that Lord Rufford owes her the price of
heartache and silence: ”He had certainly behaved very
badly to her, but she was quite sure that he would

never tell the story of the ring to any one. Perhaps

152
she thought that as she had spared him in the great
matter of the eight thousand pounds, she was entitled
to take this smaller contribution" (p. 532).

Mounser Green's complicity in Arabella's checkered
past is positive in the sense that their relationship
is open and honest: she hides nothing from him, and
they comfortably scheme together for their future. In
many respects, Arabella's marriage seems more an equal
partnership than that which Reginald Morton promises
Mary. The narrator describes Arabella's relationship
with Green as being based on good terms of friendship.
Further, a marriage to Green provides her with the
possiblity of a more satisfying career as the wife of
the Patagonian ambassador: "Among Patagonian women she
would probably be the first. Among English ladies it
did not seem that at present she had prospect of a high
place" (p. 524).

Obviously, though, Arabella's marriage merely
reinforces the corrupt values the novel exposes and
criticizes. Arabella's own husband conspires to
promote a form of prostitution by advising her to
accept Lord Rufford's ring. The marriage also
represents Arabella's public acceptance into polite
society only when she agrees to leave England. By
sending a letter to her uncle, dictated by her fiance,

Arabella persuades her family to allow her to be

153
married from Mistletoe. They agree only because the
marriage will rid them of a troublesome member of their
clan. Green accepts the Patagonian position as a way
to escape public disapprobation for marrying a
compromised woman for mercenary reasons. Marriage is a
relief to Arabella: ”She need never again seem gay in
order that men might be attracted" (p. 535). At the
same time, Green advises her that marriage and
Patagonia represent an end to enjoyment: "he preached
her a sermon, expressing a hope as he went on, that as
she was leaving the pleasures of life behind her, she
would learn to like the work of life" (p. 535).
Arabella no longer works to win a husband: now she will
work for her husband.

In many ways, Arabella is the most ”successful" of
Trollope's anti-heroine in that she achieves marriage
rather than isolation and position rather than total
exile. But, as Trollope's discussion of the novel
indicates, Arabella's success is also her failure. She
fulfills her social role by marrying. She redeems a
place in society through marriage. The process that
leads toward marriage, however, marks her as an immoral
woman. Everyone becomes corrupt as a result of the
general social hunt, so that even the highest
representatives of the patriarchy become tainted with

the tacit acceptance of marriage as a form of

154
prostitution.

Senator Gotobed's lecture to high society helps
close the novel. Appropriately, his main topic is ”the
absurdity and illegality of British hunting" (p. 546).
Trollope's contemporaries may be right in viewing the
American Senator as superfluous to the novel. But the
Senator provides Trollope with an essential strategic
device to denounce the excresences of the age. As
Trollope remarks, the Senator "is not himself so absurd
as the things which he criticizes."10

That the Senator considers the hunt illegal
reinforces the general pattern of Trollope's texts
involving anti-heroines. The marriage hunt, of course,
is not illegal, but it is a destructive custom that
devalues the individual. As women try to fulfill the
expectations of society through the mercenary marriage,
they become moral criminals. Arabella prostitutes
herself in her efforts to capture a rich husband, but
she is not very different from her counterpart, the
conventional heroine, or from the men who represent the

patriarchal system she tries to manipulate.

The Lady as Criminal

The fifteen years between QIToy_£a;m and Tho
Ahorioah_§ohato1 mark a development in Trollope's
growing criticism of the values of his age. The
patriarchal traditions are repeatedly called into
question, particularly the traditions surrounding
marriage. ”The Woman Question" remained unanswered
throughout the Victorian period, helping to perpetuate
dichotomous images of women in the literature.1 Later
Victorian writers, such as Gissing and Hardy, explore
the difficulties of revising these images, but
Trollope's fiction complicates the dichotomy by
subverting expectations for both the conventional
heroine and villainness.

Trollope's anti-heroines possess many of the
qualities of the conventional heroine even as their
actions resemble the rebellion characteristic of the
Victorian sensation heroine. The anti-heroines are
charming and beautiful and are able to assume a lady-
like docility to disguise their inner rebellion against
socialrestrictions and hypocrisies which limit their
opportunities as women. Diverging from both the
conventional and the sensational heroines, however, the
anti-heroines actually do not rebel against social

values but attempt to infiltrate the patriarchal

155

156
structure to participate fully in society. Their
efforts to marry well, gain wealth, and assume
powerful positions in the world are coincident with the
ambitions of their male counterparts. Refusing to
endure in silence, they act for themselves with
calculation and circumspection and achieve a measure of
worldly success. Their moral failures come from their
attempts to conform to, rather than rebel against, the
larger social values.

Although the anti-heroines of Trollope's earlier
novels commit legal crimes, they escape legal penalty
by reconciling with the patriarchy, and they do so
without compromising their personal senses of honor as
women. In these novels, Trollope works to gain the
reader's sympathy for the criminal women by showing
the extenuating circumstances which compel them to
crime and by stressing their efforts to make
restitution. After their subversive attempts to gain
property, for example, Lady Mason and Lady Ongar both
return the misappropriated estates and accept exile,
not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to establish
a better life outside of Victorian society.

The later anti-heroines, particularly Lady Eustace
and Arabella Trefoil, learn to manipulate the
patriarchy enough to remain, at least peripherally,

within their societies. In contrast to the earlier

157
anti-heroines, however, they lose not only their senses
of honor but also their senses of self. Unlike her
earlier counterparts, Lady Eustace refuses to restore
the Eustace family heirloom, asserting her right to
retain her husband's property. Ironically, Lizzie is
embraced by society because of the notoriety she
achieves from the theft. Nevertheless, Lizzie's story
ends more ominously than either that of Lady Mason or
Lady Mason. The wealth she acquires from the Eustace
estate also makes her the target of fortune-hunters as
unscrupulous as she is. Marrying Mr. Emilius does not
insure her social position but rather augurs personal
restraint, loss of property, and, possibly, abuse.

The development of the anti-heroine is indicative
of Trollope's development as a social critic. As the
novels progress, the anti-heroines become increasingly
absorbed by social values. They commit "crimes" in
order to conform to society's expectations for them as
women. The anti-heroines of the later novels are,
perhaps, not sympathetic as characters, but their
stories are poignant examples of how social
conditioning helps shape their criminality. Whereas
Lady Mason commits the sensational crimes of forgery
and theft, Arabella Trefoil merely seeks marriage to
attain a respectable place within her community.

Arabella's ruthless manhunt seems reprehensible only

158
because she is honest about the real purpose behind her
efforts to marry: to secure position and maintenance.

Arabella's story most stridently portrays the
mercenary marriage as a social crime which harms women.
In Tho_glayozihoo, Trollope offers exculpation for
Julia's mercenary marriage. By marrying a rich lord,
she helps her family's position at the cost of her own
happiness. In Tho_Anozioah_§ohahor, Arabella is
disenfranchised from her family as well as from society
as a whole. Marriage is her only means to gain social
acceptance, yet her machinations to gain a husband
propel her into virtual prostitution. Most
disturbingly, though, her family condones her moral
fall as long as it helps her to marry.

With his focus on the hypocrisies of Victorian
marriage customs and the failure of family life for
women, Trollope's fiction closely resembles the
sensation novels of the period. Sensation fiction
also focussed on women's stories and portrayed women as
criminals rebelling against their traditional roles in
society and the family. The main difference between .
Trollope and the sensation writers is that his anti-
heroines do not rebel so obviously or with such violent
result.

Curiously, though, sensation fiction affirmed

traditional values even as it attacked the family

159
structure. Women writers of sensation fiction devised
the most violent plots against the family, but their
heroines are punished severely for their rebellion. In
both LQQY_ABQIEYL§_§§£IEE (1352) and East_LMnns (1395):
for example, the sensation heroines have legitimate
reasons for rejecting the family structure, yet they
suffer appalling consequences as a result. With few
alternatives beyond family life, the heroines
ultimately return to the family under false identities
and false premises.

In LQQY_AQQIQYL§_§§£I£&. Helen Talboys is deserted
by her husband. To support herself, she assumes a new
identity as a governess. As Lucy Graham, she becomes
Lady Audley, but George Talboys returns to threaten her
prosperity as the wife of a wealthy baronet. He also
threatens her with physical abuse. During their
struggle, she pushes him down a well. Miraculously, he
lives but keeps his survival a secret, causing her to
commit more crimes to conceal the "murder."

On the brink of exposure, Lady Audley is asked to
choose between prison and the madhouse. Declaring
herself insane is her only means of defense. Lady
Audley must admit to being either a criminal or a
madwoman for trying to restructure her life. She not
only experiences society's condemnation but is forced

to condemn herself as well. Through the voice of the

160
male doctor who commits her to his asylum, Braddon
draws a relationship between the madhouse, the home,
and death:

‘From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that

house...her life, so far as life is made up of

action and variety, will be finished. Whatever
secrets she may have will be secrets forever!

Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be

able to commit no more. If you were to dig a

grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury

her alive in it, you could not more safely shut
her from the world and all worldly associations.

But as a physiologist and as an honest man, I

believe you could do no better service to society

than by doing this....'2
The "honest" man believes that society must be
protected against the active woman, that a woman's life
should remain secret, in fact that the subversive woman
is better off dead. The asylum offered her is actually
her grave. Shut out from life, Lady Audley dies in the
asylum of an undefined malad1o_oo_1ahooooz (p. 286).

In an;_Lyhho, too, a disaffection with family
life leads Lady Isabel to rebel against prescribed
social roles. Actually, Isabel is denied even her
accepted roles of wife, mother, and mistress of the

house. Her husband considers her too ornamental to run

161
the home competently. Like Lady Audley, Isabel
develops an unidentifiable malady: her husband's
response to her illness is to isolate her further by
leaving her alone for a rest cure. She, too, is
essentially deserted by her husband. After Mr.
Carlyle repeatedly ignores her pleas for attention and
affection, she runs away with a cad.

The subtext of an;_Lyhho is particularly
disturbing. Isabel's displacement from her family
propels her into a relentless series of humiliating
experiences. She endures the desertion of her lover,
the death of her illegitimate child, and finally
disfigurement in a train crash. Left for dead and
losing her identity, she returns, with a new name and
face, to the newly-married Mr. Carlyle, acting as
governess to her own children. Lady Isabel expresses
anger at her lot, but Mrs. Wood ultimately counsels
patience and endurance--the traits of the conventional
heroine--as Isabel's means to salvation:

The cross had been too heavy, and she was sinking

under its weight. Can you wonder at it? It might

have been different had she yielded to its weight:
striven to hoax it in patience and in silence,
after the manner she had carved out for herself.

But she could not do so. She rebelled against it

and it was costing her her life.3

 

162
Isabel also dies of "no decided disorder” (p. 446), her
real crime being rebellion against the husband who
banishes her from her place in the family.

Questions of identity are not limited to sensation
fiction but figure largely in much Victorian
literature. The twin, the double, the orphan are all
motifs that run throughout nineteenth century fiction.
Trollope's anti-heroines suffer the loss of identity
experienced by their sister sensation heroines. Their
crimes become less sensational and more difficult to
define, but their efforts to conform to social values
have a destructive effect on the women as individuals.
Whereas Trollope shows the inner isolation that results
from the women's efforts to assume false identities,
sensation novelists take this general theme and distort
it to incredible lengths.

Sensation heroines nearly always have more than
one identity. Lady Audley, for instance, is also Helen
Maldon, Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham, and Madame Taylor.
In Wilkie Collins' Armaoalo (1866), Lydia Gwilt changes
names whenever expedient. An illegitimate child, she
has no real identity: "Whose child was she? A very
sensible question. Sorry to inform you that nobody
can answer it--Miss Gwilt herself included."4 In Tho
Wohah_ih_flhiho, Laura Fairley is both angel of the

house and madwoman. A victim of mistaken identity, she

163
is confined to a madhouse, given a false name, and, as
a result of her harrowing experiences, she actually
becomes mentally incompetent. Without a recognized
place in society, the sensation heroine is without a
genuine sense of self. She is denied the identity, and
the right to a husband's name, that should be
guaranteed her by the family.

Like sensation heroines, Trollope's anti-heroines
find that marriage does not guarantee a fully realized
self. The widows--Lady Mason, Julia Brabazon, and Mrs.
Hurtle--seem to be promised brighter futures than the
brides. Lizzie Eustace and Arabella Trefoil,
especially, are most false to themselves during their
efforts to marry. Even with their strong
personalities, Lizzie and Arabella are such creatures
of social conditioning that they are unable to
establish true senses of themselves apart from their
social roles. Society enjoys and encourages the many
roles that Lizzie plays, which thereby prevents her
from establishing a true identity. Arabella, too,
changes identity for each potential husband in her
effort to achieve the one undisputed role allowed to
women--to be a wife.

Trollope's darkening vision precedes Hardy's
late-Victorian fatalism. Hardy, too, continually

explores the destructive effects of love and marriage

 

164
as practiced in Victorian society. In T§§§_Q£_Lh§
p;n;ho;y111oo, particularly, Hardy questions society's
assumptions about marriage. Tess's suffering as a
woman is the result of her attempt to find happiness
through marriage to men of greater wealth and social
position. Like Trollope, Hardy shows that marriage may
not bestow identity on the heroine but may, instead,
destroy her.

Tess lacks a firm identity and, like the sensation
heroine, experiences a series of name changes which
force her to confront not only her self but her place
in society. As Tess Durbeyfield, she is a peasant and
a child of nature. As Tess D'Urberville, she is an
aristocrat and a fraud. The polarities of the two
roles bar Tess from finding an comfortable place in any
community. As a result of her spurious "marriage" to
Alec D'Urberville, she becomes a fallen woman. Tess
believes that her legitimate marriage to Angel Clare
will elevate her to middle-class gentility, but instead
she becomes a forsaken wife.

Actually, as both a wife and a fallen woman,
Tess's lot in life is the same. Her past with Alec
and her marriage to Angel both displace her from the
community. She feels she is unworthy to associate with
either men or women of any class. For instance, her

experiences make her an unfit companion for the other

165
dairy maids for antithetical reasons. By conventional
standards, she is both their moral inferior, as a
fallen woman, and their social superior, as a wife to a
parson's son. Tess's sister milkmaid articulates for
Tess the injustice and the paradox of her fate as a
woman: ‘But you ho a gentleman's wife: and it seems
hardly fair that you should live like this!‘5

Marian grasps the inconsistencies inherent in the
promises society makes to women. Marriage to a
gentleman does not bring Tess happiness but only
subjects her to greater abuse and rejection. Tess
murders Alec in an act of rebellion, but she fails to
see that Angel, as her husband, has victimized her as
well. Angel's conventionality structures his response
to Tess. He can see her only as a pure maiden or a
fallen woman. Further, he considers her a criminal for
being raped.

Like Trollope, Hardy shows the appalling irony of
the woman's "crime.” Tess's original passivity with
Alec makes her a victim but, to Angel, it also makes
her a whore. Her final act of aggression, however,
makes her a criminal. Tess' desperate measure to
reject victimization is more threatening to the
community than the violence perpetrated against her.
Society's condemnation of women's sexuality is so

powerful that Tess not only accepts society's

166
punishment for the murder but also assumes culpability
for the rape.

The cult of Victorian womanhood fails the
individual woman and fails society by creating an
’impossible recipe for women to follow. The mixed roles
convict women as being either victims or criminals and,
most disturbingly, lead women to condemn themselves.
Hardy's fatalism reflects the despair of the sensation
writers. The limited roles allowed to women ultimately
condemn them to death.

Although Trollope's anti-heroines experience the
abuse and duplicity of the Victorian marriage, they
are nevertheless allowed to recover and seek new lives
as independent women. They may not achieve the
conventional happy endings promised to women by
marriage, but they do survive to test new possibilities
for their lives. As he offers hope for the future,
Trollope is characteristically Victorian even as he
expresses much of the disillusionment present in modern
fiction. As exiles from the community or as exiles
from the self, the anti-heroines experience the inner
isolation which distinguishes the modern protagonist.
Trollope's astute valuation of the effects of the
marriage market on women anticipates the work of early
Modernists like Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow.

If Trollope only wrote for his day and moment, he

167
nevertheless anticipated the concerns of his literary
posterity. Perhaps his ability to appreciate,
completely, the usual workings of his society is
exactly what helps Trollope's fiction remain
interesting and topical for contemporary readers of his
art. Trollope may not provide an answer to the Woman
Question of the nineteenth century, but he vividly
describes the social issues which surround the lives of
Victorian women. As he grows more sophisticated as a
novelist, however, he becomes more difficult to define.
He is, as a novelist, as hard to pin down as the common
reality he sought to portray--and, perhaps, portrayed
all the more effectively by resisting the social and
fictional Victorian conventions that so rigorously

defined the role of women--in life and in literature.

10

11

12

13
14

15

16

168

Notes, Chapter One

Henry James, £§£L121_£QIL221E§ (London: MacMillan,
1911), pp. 100-101.

James R. Kincaid,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p.11.

Kincaid, p. 7.

Raymond Williams, The_9ountry_and_the_§ity (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 175.

Michael Sadlier. Trellonei_a_£ommentary (London:
Constable and Co. Ltd., 1927), p. 146.

James, p. 106.
Sadlier, p. 146: James, p. 121.
James, p. 132.

Robert M. Polhemus, a ' W t n
TooTTooo (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1968), p.2.

J- Hillis Miller. The_Eerm_ef_Yisterian_Eiction
(South Bend: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p.

35.

"Sympathy" is a powerful concept that pervades
Victorian fiction. Charlotte Bronte gives
sympathy an almost supernatural quality: Eliot
suggests that a sympathetic nature

creates heroism. Trollope uses sympathy in a more
every-day sense, a general head-shaking at the
mishaps of the ordinary individual.

Anthony Trollope, hh_thohioo;aohy (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1947), p. 189.

Autobiography. p- 191-
Autobiosranny. p- 191.
Anthony Trollope. The_Eustase_niamonds (Middlesex:

Penguin, 1973). p. 357.

Anthony Trollope, Tho_g1ayo;ihgo (New York: Dover,
1977), p. 239.

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

28

29

30

169
Kincaid, p. 5.
Deborah Denenholz Horse. Homen_in_Trellepele
£a111oo;_fioyola (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1987), p. 2.
David Aitken, "Anthony Trollope on 'The Genus
Girl '"Nineteenth_£entury_£ietien 28. pp 420-
421.

John Glavin, "TrollOpe' s 'Most Natural English

Girl "nineteentn_§entury_fietien. 28. p- 483-
Glavin' s essay on Ezahloy_£a;oohago proposes that

the sexuality of the heroine, Lucy Robarts, is
”the loss of maiden identity in marriage [which]
suggests a kind of ritual sacrifice out of which
new life is produced."

Polhemus, pp. 3, 8.

Merryn Williams, W the s ove 00-
1229 (London: MacMillan, 1984), pp. 3-35.
Patricia Stubbs. Eeaen_and_Eietieni_£eminiem_ead

hhe Novol. 1552:1220 (Sussex: Harvester Press,
1979), p. 7.

Patricia Branc, ste

silent_§i___rheedi_niddle_£laee
Hemen.in the_Yieterian_Heme (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-
Mellon Press, 1975).

Phyllis Rose, Eagallol Lives (New York: Vintage
Books, 1983), p. 68.

Nina Auerbach, "The Rise of the Fallen Woman,"

Nineteenth sentury_£ietien. 35 (June. 1980): 48.
p. 38.

Auerbach, p. 49.

Mary 8- Hartman. Yietefien_nurdereeeeei_a_1rue
histozy of e es e t e e
Uneneekeble_§rimee (New York:

Schocken Books, 1977).

Elaine Showalter, "Family Secrets and Domestic
Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s"
in The_Yieterian Eemilyi_§trueture_end_§treeeee.
ed. Anthony S. Wohl (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1978), p. 101.

Showalter, p. 112.

31

32

33

34

170

Winifred Hughes. W
W (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1980),

p. 27.

Hughes, p. 44.

Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets,
and William Veeder,

WW
Toooooy_1§11_1§§1 (New York: Garland Publishing,
Inc., 1983), p. 105.

See Polhemus, pp. 110-121. A frank treatment of
sexuality in Trollope is both refreshing and
necessary, although Polhemus veers toward imposing
twentieth century sexual psychosis on Victorian
love rituals.

10

171

Notes, Chapter Two

Anthony Trollope, ozloy_zazn (New York: Dover,
1981), p. 10. All references to QI1§!_EEII are
from this edition and will be cited
parenthetically.

Laura Hapke, 'The Lady as Criminal: Contradiction
and Resolution in Trollope's QIl£Y_ZAII.'

Wiener. 1984: 66. p- 18-
Hapke, p. 21.

Elaine Showalter, “Family Secrets and Domestic
Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 18808"

in ____i__r__n'lhe V‘cto ia MW.
ed. Anthony S. Wehl (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1978), pp. 102-104.

Anthony Trollope. WW. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1947), p. 214.

Showalter, pp. 104, 113.

Margaret F. King, "Trollope's 921211—292: Chivalry

versus Commercialism,‘ Essays in Litegatozo, 3:
181-93, 1976-77.
Ruth apRoberts . Walleye (Athens : Ohio

University Press, 1971).
Mary S. Hartman, yictoriah Murderessoog h Tzoo

Histogy of rteen es ctable renc d l'sh
Winen W (New York:
Schoker Books, 1977).

Winifred Bushes. The_lieniec_ir_l__the_£eller.:_
Wis eLthelfiéQs (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 44.

172

Notes, Chapter Three

Anthony Trollope, Tho_o1ayo;ihgo (New York: Dover,

1977), p. 3. All references to Tho_§1ayoxihoo are
from this edition and will be cited

parenthetically.

Anthony Trollope. An_Antebiegranhy (Berkeley:
University of Southern California Press, 1947),
pp. 164-65.

Elaine Showalter, "Desperate Remedies: Sensation
Novels of the 18608." Yieterien.flereletter. 49.
1976, p. 2.

Showalter, p. 2.

Patricia Stubbs. flemen_and_£ietieni_£eminiem_and
hhe Noyol. 1e32:1229 (Sussex: Harvester Press,

1979), pp. 3,5.

Stubbs, p. 3.

Trollope makes a similar assertion about the
realities of domestic roles in Tho_§o1hoh_fiohaho
(1865): "The theory of man and wife--that special
theory in accordance with which the wife is to
bend herself in loving submission before her
husband, is very beautiful: and would be good
altogether if it could only be arranged that the
husband should be the stronger and the greater of
the two. The theory is based upon the
hypothesis:--and the hypothesis sometimes fails of
confirmation. In ordinary marriages the vessel
rights itself, and the stronger and the greater
takes the lead, whether clothed in petticoats, or
in coat, waistcoat, and trousers,"

Eotaho (New York: Dover, 1985, p. 121). Of
course Trollope's best-known examples of

marital role reversals are the Bishop and Mrs.
Proudie in the Barsetshire series.

10

11

173

Notes, Chapter Four

Elaine Showalter, "Desperate Remedies: Sensation

Novels of the 18608.” Yieterian_neyeletter. 49.
1979, p.4.

Anthony Trollope. The_HeY_Ee_LiYe_Ee! (oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 2. All

references to WKLN are from this edition and will
be cited parenthetically.

Showalter, p. 2.

Elaine Showalter, "Family Secrets and Domestic
Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s"
in The_Yieterien Iemilyi_§trueiuree_end_§treeeee.
ed. Anthony S. Wohl (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1978), p. 101.

The_Lettere_ef_AnthenY_Trellene. ed. John N- Hall
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), v. 2,
p. 660.

LQLEEIE: V- 2: P- 531-

LQLLEIE. V- 2. P- 550-

Showalter, "Desperate Remedies," p. 4. Showalter
lists flight, adultery, divorce, and murder as
typical experiences of Victorian sensation
heroines.

R.D. McMaster, "Women in The Way Wo Livo hay,"
English Studiee_in_genede. 7(1). 1981. p- 69.

For an insightful discussion of the antithetical
ideals for Victorian domestic life in Trollope,
see Christopher Herbert's "Ho_Khoy_Ho_flao_31ghh,
Mrs. Lynn Linton, and the Duplicities of

Victorian Marriage." Teaae_§tudiee_in
Lensuese_end_Literature. 25(3). 1983. pp- 448-469.

McMaster, p. 69.

 

 

 

174

Notes, Chapter Five

Aniheny_Trellenei_The_Eueteee_niamende (Middlesex:
Penguin, 1973), p. 39. All references to Tho

Eueteee_niemende are from this edition and will be
cited parenthetically.

Juliet McMaster, ' v °
and Foghorn (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 79.

Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets,

William Veeder, e s : t
Toooooy_1§;1;1§§1 (New York: Garland Publishing,

Inc., 1983), p. 159. This assessment of Trollope
is by a contemporary reviewer, Alfred Austin,

writing for Toho1o_fiaz in 1869.

Helsinger, p. 12.

Rene Girard discusses the relationship between

desire, object, and hatred in Doceit, Desiro, and
the.Neyeli Self_end_Qthere_in_Literery_§trueture
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1965).

 

10

175

Notes, Chapter Six

Anthony Trollope, Looteza, v, 2, edited John N. Hall
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 731.

Trollope. W. p- 731.

In its review of the novel, the Exaoiho; complain that
"Mr. Trollope has not yet recovered from the attack of
misanthropy from which he was suffering when he wrote

The_fley_fle_Liye_Ney" (Trollope. Lettere1_yi_2. p. 730)-

The allusion to Edith Wharton seems apt. Trollope
dissects the marriage market in England as relentlessly
and in much the same manner as Wharton criticizes New
York society a quarter of a century later.

Anthony Trollope. The_Amerieen_§eneter (New York:
Dover, 1979), p. 13. All references to Tho_hmo;ioah

Sohaho: are from this edition and will be cited
parenthetically.

In a letter to Mary Holmes, Trollope expresses his
contempt for Arabella's husband-hunting in terms of a
general social criticism, a practice, Trollope says,

"gaining ground in this country" (Lootego, y. 2, p.
702).

Trollope, Lottogs, v, 2, pp. 701-702.
Trollope, Lothozs, v, 2, p. 710.

Even five years earlier, in Laoy_hhha (1872), Trollope
reinforces the value of love in marriage over mercenary
considerations. Anna's social-climbing mother nearly
tortures Anna to marry the lord. Anna, a good heroine,
explores new heights in passive resistance, rejecting
the socially prominent suitor for the tailor she loves.

Trollope, Lohhozs, y, z, p. 701.

176

Notes, Chapter Seven

Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, William
Veeder, e ' 7-
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983), pp. xi-
xvii.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Laoy_Aoo1oy;a_§ooro; (New York:
Dover, 1974), pp. 250-51.

Mrs. Henry Wood, an;_Lyhho (Bath: Cedric Chivers Ltd.,
1974), p. 423.

Wilkie Collins, Axoaoalo (New York: Dover, 1977), p.
464.

Thomas HardY. Teee_ef_the_Qlurheryillee (New York: W-W.
Norton, 1979), p. 236.

177

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