• Prof. Robert Polhemus - Stanford University
• Prof. Deborah Denenholz Morse - College of William and Mary,
• Mark Turner - King’s College, London

Robert Polhemus

Robert M. Polhemus, the Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities at Stanford, did his graduate work in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught for nearly 40 years at Stanford, where he has been Chair of the English Department for 8 years until his sabbatical this year. He studies nineteenth-century British literature (especially the novel), twentieth-century British fiction and visual arts, including film. His work centers on fiction and art as a means to express the longing for secular faith in the last two centuries, and in representing, shaping, and determining belief.

Older men-younger women, father-daughter relationships in Trollope: the Lot complex and (a)genda trouble.

This paper will look at the crucial development of older men-younger women interactions, tensions, and desire in some novels by Trollope (Barchester Towers, The Last Chronicle, He Knew Hew Was Right, Phineas, and An Old Man's Love ), and in his life. Trollope's sense of the patriarchy, as he renders it, has much more in common with the Biblical story of Lot, the patriarch in the closet (more precisely, the cave), than with the history of the orthodox Abraham. He is fascinated by women's quest for authority.

Deborah Denenholz Morse

Deborah Denenholz Morse, Inaugural Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence at the College of William and Mary, is the author of the first feminist study of Anthony Trollope, Women in Trollope's Palliser Novels, as well as a co-edited anthology (with Regina Barreca), The Erotics of Instruction (1997). Her collection of essays, Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations in Literature and Culture, co-edited with Martin Danahay, will be published by Ashgate Press in 2007. Professor Morse has published articles on Anne Brontë, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, A.S. Byatt, Elizabeth Coles Tayler, and Kay Boyle, among others. In December of 2003 Morse was on National Public Radio to discuss the work of A.S. Byatt.

“ Some Girls Who Come from the Tropics”: Imperial Selves and Colonized Bodies in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right

Anthony Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right is a story of the imperial self gone mad. In this very long narrative, Trollope painstakingly shows the destructive nature of the masculine English will to power. Although He Knew He Was Right has been praised since Ruth apRoberts’s germinal article for its powerful indictment of Victorian gender oppression, 1 the novel is just as potent in its critique of the British Empire. Over the course of the story, the masterful Englishman enslaves and imprisons himself, exoticizing his starved, self-tortured body in a cruel parody of the colonial bodies of mastered West Indian slaves. In this scarifying novel, the mediating body in the struggles of race and gender is that of the dark Englishwoman brought up in the colonies. Through the survival of her dark-haired. ‘brown’-skinned body and the resistance of her rebellious spirit, the dark Englishwoman is coded as the slave who rebels against her master and usurps his authority. Ultimately, the dark Englishwoman lives through her tragic oppression, while the Englishman, become a primitive recluse, dies – wild, feeble, crazed with his frustrated desire for mastery over his strong, dark English wife.

In this tragic narrative, Louis Trevelyan is master of his destiny, a wealthy and well-educated Cambridge man who travels out to the Mandarin Islands (probably the West Indies) and meets a beautiful, dark English girl, Emily Rowley, with whom he falls in love. At first, he is attracted to her great beauty, to her powerful, lovely body and her independent spirit. He admires her strength: ‘And she was very strong, as are some girls who come from the tropics.’ Although Lady Rowley, Emily’s mother, reflects that both Louis and Emily like to have their own way, no one expects the marital struggles that ensue after only two years of marriage, when Emily refuses to allow her ‘lord and master’ to be a god who must be worshipped. By this time, Louis has decided that ‘he should like his own way completely’. He begins to reflect upon the voluptuous woman he has married as perhaps not quite the kind of pure English matron that he deserves, and recalls that men have warned that ‘no man should look for a wife from among the tropics, that women educated amidst the languors of those sunny climes rarely came to possess those high ideas of conjugal duty and feminine duty which a man should regard as the first requisites of a good wife.’ Like Rochester in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (and perhaps in Jane Eyre itself, as Gayatri Spivak, Elsie Michie, and most recently Carl Plasa have shown us), Louis Trevelyan begins to desire the imprisonment of his wife’s sexually desiring body and the quelling of her rebellious spirit. There is a subtext to Louis’s fear of Emily’s sexual license that becomes more clear as that novel progresses, and the husband’s fear becomes hysteria, in a reversal of gender expectations: Trollope hints that either Emily is too sexually responsive for Louis’s tastes, or that Louis is at times rendered impotent by her liberated sexual desire.

In Trollope’s Othello-imbued tragedy, the novelist calls attention to the erotics of race as well as the deathly power of jealous mastery. Trollope’s Desdemona, unlike Shakespeare’s pale heroine, is the dark Emily Trevelyan, still alive and in ruddy health at the novel’s end. She is also the surviving parent to their only son, also named Louis, who – Trollope makes clear – will be raised to be a very different kind of Englishman. Trollope’s Othello is an Englishman who diminishes so much in moral stature throughout the novel that Trollope clearly does not want us to think of him as a tragic hero. He is, moreover, so physically enervated by his self-imposed ordeal that he dies from fever and starvation, in a kind of terrible parody of the deaths of West Indian slaves.

Against the psychic violence that Louis Trevelyan visits upon his wife and himself, Trollope relates the stories of three intelligent, sensitive Englishmen who make egalitarian marriages during the course of the novel. These men – Hugh Stanbury, a reporter for a penny newspaper; Brooke Burgess, a clerk in a London office; and Charles Glascock, a forward-thinking aristocrat – are variously progressive in their political views, but are all united in wanting women to be equal partners in love, with the implication that they will be equal partners in the marriage bed as well. All of these men reject mastery as a mode of relating to the world, both in their English homes and, Trollope strongly implies, in homes that are not English. It is in these young Englishmen – and even more, in their strongly feminist wives – that Trollope constructs a new vision of Englishness in which he sees the possibility of a future in which there will be no mastery – and no slaves.

See especially Jane Nardin, He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) and Deborah Denenholz Morse, ‘Educating Louis: Teaching the Victorian Father in He Knew He Was Right’ in The Erotics of Instruction, ed. Regina Barreca and Deborah Denenholz Morse (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997).

Mark Turner

Mark Turner is Reader in English at King’s College London, where he is also Head of the Department. His publications include Trollope and the Magazines (2000) and Backward Glances (2003) and he is currently co-editing, with John Stokes, Wilde’s journalism for the Oxford English Texts edition of the complete works. His most recent work on Trollope is a review of Trollope studies since 1987, to be published in Dickens Studies Annual in autumn 2006.

Global Trollope

By the time Trollope made his first trip to Australia, in 1871, he was already a well known figure in the colony because of the serializations of The Belton Estate, Phineas Phinn, and He Knew He Was Right which had appeared in the Melbourne weekly, The Australasian, between 1867-69. These three serials were followed by four more in the 1870s, in addition to the publication of Trollope’s travels volumes on Australia, New Zealand and New South Wales. My talk will address the serialization of Trollope in Australia, and consider the ways his constructions of gender ‘sit’ within the context of Australian print media. In particular, I will focus on two areas: the ways gender might be read according to the different international contexts for Trollope’s fiction, and the ways we might understand Trollope’s fiction as part of a burgeoning global network of print culture. Rather than understanding Trollope’s varied constructions of gender as static and ‘local’, I seek to re-read his fiction in the light of a continually moving circuit of print.