Trollope and Gender: Delegates and Abstracts

• Prof. Steven Amarnick - City University of New York
• Dr. Clare Bainbridge - Independent Scholar
• Prof. Ilana Blumberg - Michigan State University
• Prof. Helen Blythe - New Mexico Highlands University
• Prof. Michael Brooks - West Chester University, Pennsylvania,
• Dr. Laurent Bury - Sorbonne University, Paris
• Hyson Cooper - Graduate Student, University of Alabama
• Prof. Mary Jean Corbett - Miami University at Ohio
• Dr. Sophie Gilmartin - Royal Holloway College, London
• Prof. Lauren Goodlad - University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
• Prof. Kay Heath - Virginia State University
• Nathan Hensley - Graduate Student, Duke University
• Yvonne J. Huang - Graduate Student, University of Sussex
• Dr. Sigi Jöttkandt - University of Ghent , Belgium
• Prof. Chris Kent - University of Saskatchewan
• Prof. Mark King - Gordon College, Barnsville, Georgia
• Dr. Margaret Markwick - Exeter University
• Maia McAleavey - Graduate Student, Harvard University
• Prof. Elsie Michie - Louisiana State University
• Prof. Ellen Moody - George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
• Kevin Morrison - Graduate Student, Rice University, Houston, Texas
• Professor Michelle Mouton - Cornell College
• Prof. Ken Newton - Dundee University
• Prof. Chris Noble - Azusa Pacific University, South California
• Dr. Galia Ofek - Hebrew University of Mount Scopus, Jerusalem
• Prof. Lynn Parker - Framingham State College
• Anna Peak - Graduate Student, Temple University, Philadelphia
• Dr. Christine Poulson - Research Fellow, Sheffield University
• Prof. Kathy Psomiades - Duke University,
• Prof. Rebecca Resinski - Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas
• Dr. Susan Shelangoskie - University of Toledo, Ohio
• Prof. David Skilton - Cardiff University
• Prof. Jennie Bourne Taylor - Sussex University
• Dr. Karen Kurt Teal - University of Washington
• Prof. Anca Vlasopolos - Wayne State University
• Prof. Tamara Wagner - Nanyang University, Singapore

Steven Amarnick

Steven Amarnick curated the exhibit “Anthony Trollope: The Art of Modesty,” at the Fales Library, New York University. He has written and lectured on many aspects of Trollope’s career, including such topics as Trollope and anti-Semitism, his rivalry with Dickens, his working methods, and his advanced conservative liberalism. A graduate of Brown (B.A.) and Rutgers (M.A., Ph.D.) universities, Steven Amarnick is currently Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York.

“(Un)Becoming Lord Silverbridge: Gender and the Manuscript of The Duke’s Children”

Only once—and then only very late in his career—did Trollope make substantial changes to a completed draft of a novel. By studying what amounts to several hundred pages of cuts in the manuscript of The Duke’s Children (housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), we can see why Trollope’s own previous judgments of his best methods were astute. For though he did about as good a job as possible in seamlessly shortening the book while leaving its overall structure intact, and though the published version contains tighter, leaner prose, the novel as a whole suffers. Subtleties of characterization are lost, as are some of the invisible threads that weave the work together. Many references to earlier parts of the Palliser saga disappear, and Trollope’s unique chummy narrator forges a less distinctive relationship with the reader. The book becomes more depoliticized, and crucial matters of pacing are altered. And while The Duke’s Children (once titled Lord Silverbridge) does not have nearly the same elegiac tone as The Last Chronicle of Barset, Trollope’s finale to his other major series, the original manuscript conveys a far greater sense of monumentality than the published version, more befitting the conclusion of such an ambitious series of works. After touching briefly on these differences, my paper will focus primarily on the altered conception of Lord Silverbridge’s masculinity that emerges when we examine the nature of his relationships with the Duke and others in the original manuscript. It will end with some speculations on Trollope himself, and how he avoided the potentially emasculating consequences of shrinking the finale to the series that he considered perhaps the best work of his life.

Clare Bainbridge

Clare Bainbridge is an independent scholar, who discovered Trollope in the 1960s, as the perfect antidote to Old High German. Her main field of research is the fiction of the 1820s and 1830s. She gained her PhD from the University of Exeter in 2003: an exploration of the cultural and literary significance of the silver fork novel, its title is Noble Bastards: the Silver Fork Novel, Politics, and History. She has edited TH Lister’s Granby (1826) in the series of silver-fork novels published in 2005 by Pickering and Chatto, and has a proposal under consideration for a monograph on this entertaining, if somewhat despised, genre.

Millinery Manoeuvres: Husband Hunting in the Silver-Fork Novel and Trollope.

When Trollope denounces girls with chignons made of false hair, he implies that the falsity does not stop with hairdressing. The figure of the girl whose lack of authenticity makes her unfit to be a heroine, and her scheming mother, who knows the Peerage off by heart, is one Trollope drew from an older genre of fiction. Silver-fork novels abound with such girls. I would like in this paper to compare Trollope’s uses of mercenary match-making with those earlier models. Trollope, for instance, draws his examples from a far wider social world, and, as Margaret Markwick has so effectively shown in Trollope and Women (Hambledon, 1997), shows increasing empathy for girls whose ‘business’ is marriage. Catherine Gore, whose The Banker’s Wife (1843) will be taken as a representative example, depicts aristocratic girls caught in the toils of an altogether artificial world, and offers a critique of them using a vision of domesticity she helped to create in the 1830s. I also intend to explore connections between the two authors’ apparent anxieties that writing, like marriage, was subverted by the intrusion of the purely mercenary. Gore’s sense that her writing was itself contributing to an artificial non-literature is expressed in an article she published in Blackwood’s in 1844, “The Monster-Misery of Literature.” I will compare this with Trollope’s energetic repudiation of trashy writing, and implicit assertion of his own superiority, as expressed in his handling of Lady Carbury’s ‘falsity’ in The Way We Live Now.

Helen Blythe

Helen Blythe received her Ph.D. From Stanford University (1998), and she now teaches British and World Literatures at New Mexico Highlands University. She is particularly interested in Trollope’s late novels and short stories for what they reveal about his attitude towards the colonies as well as the seat of empire. She has published on Trollope in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2003), and her book manuscript The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Colonial Romance deals in part with Trollope’s use of “ New Zealand” as a site for post-Romantic, revolutionary, aesthetic, utopian and satirical reflections on English culture. Her current research project Lost in Paradise expands the analysis to Polynesia and the South Seas.

“She may suffer much before she may succeed”: women in Trollope’s last little novelistic experiments.

But for men who can and will work with their hands, for women who can cook and be generally useful about a household, for girls who are ready to learn to cook and to be generally useful, these colonies are a paradise. They will find the whole condition of life changed for them. The slight estimation in which labour is held here will be changed for a general respect. The humbleness, the hat-touching, the servility which is still incidental to such work as theirs in this old country, and which is hardly compatible with exalted manhood, has found no footing there. I regard such manhood among the masses of the people as the highest sign of prosperity which a country can give. ( Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 499- 500)

Ilana Blumberg

Ilana Blumberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities, Culture and Writing at the residential college of Michigan State University, where she serves also as an associated faculty member of the Jewish Studies Program. Her memoir, Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2007. Ilana is currently working on a book-length study of ethics and economics in mid-Victorian novels and has published essays most recently on the novels of Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope. Her other scholarly interests include Hebrew Bible and Midrash, contemporary Jewish fiction, and memoir.

Trollope’s Heroines, His Heroes, and the Sacrifice of Sacrifice

“The little sacrifices of society are all made by women, as are also the great sacrifices of life. A man who is good for anything is always ready for his duty, and so is a good woman always ready for a sacrifice.” – The Small House at Allington

Like many Victorian novelists, Trollope wrote often and extravagantly on the subject of sacrifice, a value that had special applications for women in the period. Yet if excerpted statements like the above suggest that Trollope enshrines the sort of female virtue that early feminist critics usefully associated with the repressed and repressive “angel in the house,” today, when we return to read Trollope, his imagination of female self-sacrifice strikes an unusually ironic, thus complicated, note. In an era when Charlotte Bronte valorized and rewarded the intense self-discipline of Jane Eyre; George Eliot drowned the by-turns self-renouncing, by-turns appetitive Maggie Tulliver; and Wilkie Collins depended on the twin sacrifices of female reputation and life to structure his popular Moonstone mystery, it is truly noteworthy that Trollope organized his Barsetshire series to explore the failure of female sacrifice. Trollope’s good women get what they want, whereas female self-sacrifice is represented as a historically backwards, perverse masochism. Trollope thus anticipates the judgment of post-Victorians as they considered the repressive tendencies of their predecessors.

Trollope’s version of female self-sacrifice is perverse in its own right, though, since he insists on denying his female protagonists the pleasure of the sacrifice. They do sacrifice, in the end; but what they sacrifice is the very freedom to self-sacrifice. They get what they want, whether they like it or not.

By being forced to give up what they want (the satisfaction of sacrifice), for what they want (love and marriage, typically), Trollope appears to circle back to an intensely circumscribed, even caricatured view of female desire and autonomy. Yet my paper, “Trollope’s Heroines, His Heroes, and the Sacrifice of Sacrifice,” will suggest instead that Trollope’s depiction of female autonomy and self-sacrifice can be most effectively understood against his depiction of male autonomy and self-sacrifice. In an oddly egalitarian move, Trollope dissolves the value of sacrifice as most Victorian intellectuals and writers represented it to propel his men and women, and the English Church as well, beyond what Trollope saw as an anti-communal form of individualism and the most self-defeating forms of autonomy. In considering Trollope’s relation to female self-sacrifice, then, scholars have as much to gain in the arena of what we might call, “Trollope and Modernity,” as we do in the vital category of “Trollope and Gender.”

Michael Brooks

Michael Brooks teaches English at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (Rutgers University Press, 1987; Thames and Hudson, 1989) and Subway City; Riding the Trains, Reading New York (Rutgers University Press, 1997). He is currently studying transatlantic relations in general and travelers' accounts of England and America in particular. He is also active in historic preservation and especially in efforts to preserve Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Anthony Trollope, American feminism, and the women on the New York city horse cars

In He Knew She Was Right, Jane Nardin describes a change in Trollope’s women in the 1860s and identifies the women’s movement as the cause. I will argue that Trollope’s experiences in North America in 1861-62 contributed to this development and that to trace its cause we must expand our understanding of the woman’s movement.

The women Trollope encountered during his seven months in North America can be categorized into two groups – the few but influential feminists who challenged the system of separate spheres and the many who seemed content to inhabit a separate sphere but who continually pushed at its limits. Trollope responded to the first group with an even tone and patient disagreement. His response to what he perceived as the aggressiveness of the second group was harsh and visceral.

The most important feminists Trollope encountered in North America were Kate Field and Caroline Dall. Both advocated a woman’s right to a career – Field by working as a journalist, Dall by publishing a book on Woman’s Right to Labor. Both challenged Trollope’s conviction that femininity implied timidity and that a woman’s natural career was marriage. He urged Field to marry even as she was developing her career as a journalist. He devoted an entire chapter of North America to refuting Dall’s argument that women had a right to employment by insisting that “the best right a woman has is the right to a husband.”

The second group of women presumably subscribed to the underlying ideology of separate spheres, a trope that is usually understood to assign women to the domestic circle. Trollope didn’t see many domestic circles during these seven months but he did explore America’s downtown urban cores. He encountered American women in large hotels and on public transportation.

The purpose of separate facilities for women in the cities was not to isolate women but to make them comfortable in a setting that had been previously dominated by men. Trollope declares that he is a man who delights in the rustle of skirts but he clearly expects to hear them rustle at home. The mixed company of America’s downtowns exasperated him. After experiencing innumerable ladies’ entrances, ladies’ waiting rooms and ladies’ parlors, he at last declares that “the word ‘lady’ is made so absolutely distasteful in American hotels that I cannot bring myself to use it.” The women in the crowded New York horse cars who demanded as a matter of right that he abandon his seat to them provoked an astonishing diatribe: “I have entertained on sundry occasions that sort of feeling for an American woman which the close vicinity of an unclean animal produces. I have spoken of this with reference to street cars, because in no position of life does an unfortunate man become more liable to these anti-feminine atrocities than in the center of one of these vehicles.”

The best explanation of his reaction is that while historians divide nineteenth century American women into those who were feminists and those who accepted their separate sphere, Trollope makes a simpler division into women who were soft and women who were hard. Feminists like Caroline Dall were hard. The women who demanded the rights of their separate sphere were equally hard.

This may help us understand why Trollope was so fascinated by Kate Field. An examination of her career as journalist and public lecturer will show that she advocated hard views in a soft manner – she defied categories. She didn’t change Trollope’s mind on the woman question but she unsettled it.

The impact of Trollope’s North American experience can be seen in He Knew He Was Right. That novel refers directly to the American women in the horse cars and recommends marriage to young ladies. But it also contains Priscilla Stanbury, a young woman whom Trollope, rather surprisingly, called the heroine of the novel. She refuses to marry and longs for a career. “I would sooner,’ said she, ‘write for a newspaper than do anything else in the world.” The more conventional Nora questions whether this is possible. Priscilla seems to be thinking of Kate Field when she replies: “I believe there are women who do it, but very few. One or two have done it, I know.”

Laurent Bury

Laurent Bury is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of La Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author of Seductive Strategies in the Fiction of Anthony Trollope, published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2004, and coordinated a special number of Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, “Studies in Anthony Trollope” (October 2003). He is also the author of a Short History of British Art (published in French by Editions Ellipses in 2002) and of a History of the Victorian Age for students (published in French by Hachette in 2001).

Cleanliness is next to... Femininity? Trollope’s Dirty Women

One usually thinks of Trollope’s upper-class heroines as clean ladies whose bodily hygiene the reader knows nothing about. Only scruffy termagants like Mrs Proudie are allowed to be seen in their morning deshabille. But this is only part of the Trollopian reality. The relations between women and dirt in his novels turn out to be much richer, and much more complex. The Macdermots of Ballycloran is peopled with sweaty and attractive women. Miss Mackenzie affords splendid examples of unclean young ladies offering themselves to male consumption, in the scene of the “Negro Soldiers’ Orphan Bazaar”. In The Claverings, assertive girls splash themselves all over in muddy lanes and mysterious old women fascinate men by their dirty linen. While dutiful wives can be “dragged through the mud” by criminal husbands, designing seductresses can “wallow in the mire” in order to attract their victims. Trollopian women thoroughly enjoy what David Trotter calls “the goodness of a good mess” in his book Cooking with Mud. After all, Arthur Munby may not have been the only Victorian who found dirty women attractive. Be it concretely or metaphorically, dirt might be said to be constitutive of Trollopian femininity.

Hyson Cooper

Hyson Cooper is an absentee doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama. For the past two years she has been teaching in the English department at Temple University in Philadelphia, while writing her dissertation-in-progress on male moral weakness in the novels of Anthony Trollope. She also holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, both in Creative Writing.

The Hobbledehoy’s Troubles in Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel

Using Trollope’s character Tom Tringle of Ayala’s Angel, I argue that in his portrayal of the hobbledehoy, Trollope is imposing on young men a code of behavior every bit as restrictive and every bit as unnatural as the “suffer and be still” doctrine imposed on women. Using critical tools from the fields of Men’s Studies and studies of literary character, I discuss Trollope’s portrayal of Tom Tringle as emblematic of the restrictions Victorian gender ideology placed on men, a concept that is often lost in the volume of attention paid to the more obvious restrictions placed on women. What emerges is a new dimension to Victorian gender studies. The admonition addressed to Victorian women of all ages and classes that they should “suffer and be still” in the face of any adversity is well known, and is often accompanied by the assumption that no similar restriction is placed on men. In the world of Anthony Trollope’s novels, however, unlike that of many other Victorian novelists, women seldom need much taming, as obedience is a strong character trait in the majority of his heroines. His young men, on the other hand, tend to be far less morally evolved, and in Trollope’s love plots, if anyone has to undergo profound changes of character before being suited for marriage, it is usually the man. I argue that Trollope’s stern but gentle treatment of the misfit Tom provides further answers to the constantly debated question of Trollope’s relative conservatism.

Mary Jean Corbett

Mary Jean Corbett is Professor of English and Affiliate of Women’s Studies at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Her first book, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies ( Oxford, 1992), studies self-representations by writers, actresses, and political activists. Her second book, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: History, Politics, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold ( Cambridge, 2000), includes a chapter on the Irish fictions of Anthony Trollope. Her current research concerns sex and marriage within the family from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, with essays drawn from the project forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture and Animal Dreams (ed. Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse).

“Two Identities”: Gender and Ethnicity and Phineas Finn

Several generations of critics have perceived “the Irish member” to be insufficiently Irish, which may mean many things: too much like the English, too comfortable in England; not lazy, not rebellious, not witty. From another angle, he has also been perceived to be insufficiently manly, which usually only means one thing: too much like a woman. In his departure from implicit norms for—or explicit stereotypes of—Irishness and manliness, Phineas Finn may be constituted as a hybrid thing, as mixed as the marriage that made him; or, in his own words, as “two separate persons,” at one and the same time both “a man of fashion and member of Parliament in England” and “an Irishman of Killaloe.” His closest analogue in the novel that bears his name is the Englishwoman Lady Laura Kennedy: his losing battle to follow his convictions yet keep his place within his party parallels and parodies her struggle for “independence” in marriage, and her cross-gendering may provide us with something of a clue to Phineas’s own.

My paper will explore the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the characterization of Phineas Finn within the context of the novel’s contemporary reception, informed by postcolonial perspectives on the making of colonial masculinities. In his differing relations to women in England and Ireland, his participation in the homosocial networks of Parliamentary life, and his rivalries with men over the women of his choice, Phineas also figures a tension in Trollope’s thinking about “the necessity of progression in character” ( Autobiography) that I hope to connect to the broader issue of how Trollope imagined Ireland’s “progress” in the post-famine period.

Lauren Goodlad

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is an Associate Professor of English and member of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) and the co-editor of Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke UP, forthcoming). She has recently become Reviews Editor for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and is at work completing Victorian Internationalisms: British Encounters with 'the South'.

Trollope, Gender, and Foreign Policy

Anthony Trollope has been called “the greatest traveler among mid-Victorian novelists” as well as the era’s prototypical “Imperial Man.” Yet Trollope’s novels have relatively little to say about British India, the only major imperial location that the author declined to visit. This paper argues that The Eustace Diamonds (1873) is an important exception to Trollope’s reticence on South Asia and, thus, a key to his conflicted views on Victorian foreign policy and the wider project of capitalist globalization. As it re-narrates the imperial dilemma of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Trollope’s novel translates a relatively open-ended allegory of colonial encounter into a stark exposure of dubious sovereignty and ruthless exploitation. The Eustace Diamonds thus provides the ideal opportunity to compare the realist paradigm of International Relations, which has dominated Anglo-American foreign policy since the nineteenth century, with the Victorian novel’s tendency to naturalize realpolitik. Trollope is famous for novels that skillfully negotiate political contradiction, translating the glaring asymmetries of capitalist and imperial expansion into domesticated portraits of settled hierarchy, “heirloom” establishments, and stable English sovereignty. In such novels realism’s amoral universe is offset by the transcendent magic of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. But The Eustace Diamonds undermines such strategies: first, by figuring the masculine subject of political self-interest as an aberrant woman and, second, by aligning her expropriative acts with a story of imperial dispossession. Trollope’s intervention against the sensation novel thus becomes the occasion for his own literary experiment. When the long-neglected subplot of the Sawab of Mygawb is understood in the context of imperial foreign policy, The Eustace Diamonds’ mistaken reputation as the least political of the Palliser novels becomes manifestly clear.

Sophie Gilmartin

Sophie Gilmartin is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published a book onAncestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (CUP), and edited Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset for Penguin Classics, as well as work on C19th painting, and on the writing of Thomas Hardy, the Brontes, George Meredith and Disraeli, among others. She is currently working on a book on Thomas Hardy's shorter fiction, and a book on two voyages around Cape Horn in the winter of 1856.

Trollope’s ‘Flesh and Blood’

Writing of the importance of characterization in the novel, Trollope declared in his Autobiography that ‘stories charm us…because we feel that men and women with flesh and blood…are struggling amidst their woes’. Trollope never loses sight of the ‘flesh and blood’, the corporeality, of the men and women in his fiction, and as he himself admitted, this sometimes got him into trouble with his publishers and the moral watchdogs of the day. In my proposed paper, I want to show how Trollope’s flesh and blood men and women occupy space, and how Trollope arranges their bodies in space, to achieve powerful scenes charged sometimes with eroticism and emotion, sometimes with threat or repugnance. A couple of examples from Can You Forgive Her? will give some idea here of the gendered space that I will be exploring between men and women. In the chapter, ‘The Pallisers at Breakfast’ Trollope pays meticulous attention to the arrangement and deployment of Lady Glencora’s and Plantaganet Palliser’s bodies. We know how far away they are standing from each other, and can block their movements: as Glencora starts towards him, taking him by the coat, he steps back a pace, stoops over her, then ‘softly, slowly, very gradually…puts his arm round her waist’. Her hair touches his breast, and she raises her hand to touch the back of his. The close choreography is brought to an abrupt end by the butler’s knock on the door, and this crucial chapter ends with Palliser dropping his arm from her waist, and ‘standing away from her a few yards’. In ‘The Balcony at Basle’, Alice is held a ‘prisoner’ on the hotel balcony, which becomes a sexually-charged space as she and her crinoline are unable to get past table, chairs and George Vavasor. In the instant before Kate is assaulted and has her arm broken by her brother, she looks out over the fell and registers that she is entirely alone with him: ‘she saw that it was so, and was aware that the fact pressed upon her as being of some importance.’

In my paper I will describe and investigate Trollope’s careful choreography, and will explore the electric space between men’s and women’s bodies, the closing up of that space with touch, and Trollope’s arrangement of bodies in both rooms and landscapes. I intend to discuss a fairly wide range of Trollope’s novels and will bring to bear upon his writing recent work on the body, and some more recent thinking in the field of cultural geography.

Kay Heath

Kay Heath received her PhD from Rice University in 2001 and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia State University with interests in gender and age studies. She has published essays on nineteenth-century midlife and Trollope in Victorian Literature and Culture (Spring 2006) and Frances Trollope and The Novel of Social Change (2002). "'It Ain't Manly': Aging and Masculinity in Trollope's An Old Man's Love" is adapted from her manuscript (in process of review), Aging By the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain.

"It Ain't Manly": Aging and Masculinity in Trollope's An Old Man's Love

As its title announces, An Old Man's Love explores the relationship between aging and masculinity in late nineteenth-century Britain. Written during 1882, the last year of Anthony Trollope's life, the story in many ways reworks the plot he produced a decade earlier concerning Roger Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1875), but An Old Man's Love intensifies issues both of aging and masculinity. In this essay, I argue that An Old Man's Love exposes deepening anxieties about age that confronted British manhood at the end of the century, concerns clarified by recent scholarship on Victorians and gender. As William Whittlestaff at age fifty vies with a younger suitor for the love of the twenty-five-year-old Mary Lawrie, the contest is predicated upon concepts of masculinity and age influenced by empire as well as mediated through conflicting notions of gentlemanliness versus manliness. Whittlestaff negotiates a liminal space between the roles of lover and paternal guardian, and Gordon becomes the standard against which his masculinity is measured. Gordon's fortune hunting in South Africa reinforces his manliness, confirming his ascendancy over men such as Whittlestaff who are not engaged in the service of empire. In contrast, though Whittlestaff resolves to eradicate "maundering softness" from his behavior, his lack of manliness becomes ever more evident as his hectoring housekeeper criticizes him for indecision about Mary because it "ain't manly." When Whittlestaff eventually surrenders his claim, his attempt (and failure) to emulate Gordon by going to Africa and his ultimate acquiescence to a paternal role demonstrate the extent to which considerations of empire and manliness challenge his ability to thrive as a late-midlife man. In this novel, Trollope portrays a fin-de-siècle masculinity crisis that has an especially significant impact on aging men.

Nathan Hensley

Nathan K. Hensley is a Ph.D candidate in English at Duke University, working on Victorian literature, empire, and critical theory. His dissertation asks how links between imperialism and domestic liberalism (1848-1904) are expressed, and contested, at the level of narrative form. He is the recipient of the James B. Duke Fellowship at Duke, and a Presidential Fellowship from the University of Notre Dame, where he received his M.A. He organized an interdisciplinary conference at Notre Dame, Forms of Empire which took place in Spring 2005.

Mister Trollope, Lady Credit, and The Way We Live Now

This paper examines Trollope’s linked discourses of finance, fiction, and femininity, bringing foundational work on Trollope and women into conversation with recent discussions of Trollope’s economic thinking by Kathy Psomiades and Audrey Jaffe. My suggestion is that The Way We Live Now’s (1875) narrative mode is closely, even fundamentally related to the apparently paradoxical “advanced, but still conservative liberalism” Trollope proclaimed in An Autobiography (1883).

More specifically, I use a reading of The Way We Live Now’s obsessive pairing of financial and fictional discourses – a pairing always viewed through the lens of gender – to argue that Trollope sets up what appears to be a simple dichotomy between “realist” landedness and “sensational” speculation. Parsing the gender logic of this picture, I draw on feminist work by Anne McClintock and others to propose that “land”, for Trollope, is a feminine trope: a good piece of property is like a virtuous woman. Yet the speculative economies Trollope satirizes most sharply – financial speculation and bad fiction – are also coded as “feminine” here, as the title of Lady Carbury’s falsified history, Criminal Queens, may suggest. I argue, then, that Trollope’s complex double-logic of gender, in which femininity is the sign of both landed “tradition” and arriviste “speculation”, reproduces what seems to be a long history of misogynist commentary, running from Defoe and Burke to Ezra Pound. Yet to point out that Trollope is engaged with this figurative tradition is not to indict him, for I also propose that Trollope’s well-documented ironic mode works to expose, rather than further, the very double logic in which his text appears to participate. In this way, Trollope’s “advanced, but still conservative liberalism” in matters of gender and property in fact works toward a third, more complex position, a suspended or contradictory non-position, one not yet noticed by the novelists many intelligent commentators.

By focusing on The Way We Live Now through the lens of gendered critiques of economic theory, I bring Trollope’s great novel into dialogue with the long history of discourses linking land, speculation and femininity. By attending to such links, we both complicate current understandings of Trollope’s cultural intervention in the 1870s, and suggest a connection between Trollope’s moment and our own. In closing, then, I draw brief attention to my title’s easy pun on The Way We Live Now, suggesting with economic historian Giovanni Arrighi, that Trollope’s own moment of high finance has distinctive world-historical parallels with our own. Given this, I end by proposing that Trollope’s ironized tropology of gender has something to say, perhaps, about the way we theorize gender now.

Yvonne J. Huang

Yvonne Jinya Huang is a DPhil student in the English Department at Sussex University and works as an interpreter for social services. She graduated from National Taiwan University and studied for her MA at Warwick University. She is now working on her thesis titled “The Sporting Woman in Fact and Fiction: Able-bodied Womanhood in Victorian Culture”. She has presented papers at the MLA conference and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association conference.

Trollope’s Hunting Women

In the season of 1861, Catherine Walters, alias “Skittles”, a courtesan and skilled rider to hounds, made her debut on horseback in Hyde Park. The appearance of the fascinating “Anonyma,” as the Times commentator called her, who looked like a lady, rode like a royalty and talked like a knave, took the fashionable world by storm. Novelists like Charles Reade, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and George Augustus Sala all feature this provocative and problematic figure of the fallen woman as sensational heroine in their fiction.

Hunting from the 1840s to the 1870s, Trollope was in time to witness the flux of hunting women who, instigated by the dictates of fashion, emulated Skittles and made their foray into the hunting field. Defending the morality of hunting, Trollope enjoined young men to shun the corrupting influences of the likes of Anonyma in the field, though his own conversation among hunting men was observed to be so lurid that hunting ladies were forbidden his company at hunt breakfasts.

Although Skittles may seem too provocative a subject to figure in his fictional world of middle-class respectability, Trollope draws analogies between the prostitution of Anonyma and marriage as legal prostitution for the heroines in The Eustace Diamonds. This paper explores Trollope’s use of the figure of the hunting woman as a trope for analysing the relationship between women and patriarchal society. I argue that, while seeming to disparage the notorious Skittles, Trollope, like the sensation novelists who portray the prostitute on horseback to dramatise women’s struggle for autonomy and freedom, uses the anomalous figure of the hunting woman, whose energy, drive and independence conflicted with the prevailing ideas about womanhood, to highlight the plight of the Victorian women who were given little scope outside a life defined by a passive hunt for husbands.

Sigi Jöttkandt

Sigi Jöttkandt is a post-doctoral research fellow in the English Department at Ghent University, Belgium. She is author of Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic ( Albany: SUNY Press, 2005) and has published essays on Turgenev, Beckett, Pater and James. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on five texts titled First Love (Beckett, Turgenev, Clare, Welty, McEwan) that explores the question of why love invariably seems to refer us back to the concept of the One.

Truths of Beauty, Truths of Love in Trollope’s Novels of Beautiful Men

Why are Trollope’s men so frequently so beautiful? Felix Carbury, Phineas Finn, Gerald Maule, George Vavasor, Frank Tregear all have a distinctive “manly” form of beauty, says Trollope, who only rarely describes women in this way. In most cases (Lizzie Eustace and Isabel Boncassen notably excepted), narratively attractive female characters are distinguished by their loveliness, or their delicacy, or their diminutive charm, but only rarely by their “beauty.” Like Hetta Carbury, they may possess a disarming “sweetness of expression”; they may well be “pretty” with “regular features,” “flaxen hair” and a pleasing “softness” and “whiteness” of complexion like Lily and Bell Dale; they can exhibit “grace” and “tenderness” like Marion Fay. In some cases, like Eleanor Bold, they may even be permitted to be judged “beautiful” but this is qualified by the narrator’s reminder that this is a subjective opinion, made by “her old friends” and appearing “marvelously exaggerated to those who were only slightly acquainted with her” (SHA, p. 129).

In contrast, there is a distinctive type of male character in Trollope who is distinguished by a beauty that is universally undisputed. Describing Felix Carbury, for example, Trollope tells us he is “beautiful to look at” but unlike Eleanor’s, Felix’s beauty is not subject to differing standards of taste for it comes on the heels of, and is followed by, pieces of information that within the conventions of Trollopian narrative we are to understand as objective fact.

This paper analyzes Trollope’s statements about desirable male and female appearance in the context of two influential aesthetic traditions: the 18 th century’s pronouncements on beauty and sublimity, and the Greek ideal of beauty, already in full swing of its nineteenth-century revival by the time of Trollope’s writing. I argue that while the traditional features of beauty from the eighteenth century tradition are retained for Trollope’s women, his descriptions of beautiful men hark back to the Greek ideal, thereby introducing a potential problem for any straightforward troping of a desiring aesthetics along the established gender divide of female beauty and male sublimity. Trollope’s solution, I will suggest, lies in the aesthetic re-education of his women who, while persisting in their passion for beautiful men, finally learn to appreciate sublimity through the act of confessing their love.

Chris Kent

Christopher Kent is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. He is past editor of the Canadian Journal of History (Annales canadiennes d'histoire) and past president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP). He has published on various topics, including Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope, Victorian actresses, journalism, and Bohemia, as well as historiography and postmodernism. He is currently finishing a book on Victorian clubland, and researching another on Victorian gentlemen and their tailors.

Clubmanship and the Discipline of Masculinity

One of my favourite scenes in Trollope is in Doctor Thorne when Frank Gresham assaults Gustavus Moffat, horsewhipping the man who has jilted his sister Augusta outside Moffat’s Piccadilly club. It nicely combines my main research interests – gentlemen’s clubs, the relations between gentlemen and tailors, and the implications of these for the study of Victorian masculinity. Moffat was a tailor’s son, a dapper little cad who had risen to the heights of being an MP. His electoral opponents invoke the well-known slur on tailor’s manhood: “It takes nine tailors to make a man.” What was a tailor’s son doing in so gentlemanly a place as a West-end club, let alone Parliament, “the best club in London”? Perhaps recalling the tailor’s bill brought him considerable financial distress as a young man, Trollope seems to be venting a certain personal animus here. The discipline of being beaten like an animal in plain view of his fellow clubmen is particularly cruel.

Trollope was famously a clubman. Between 1861 and 1864 he was elected to three exclusive but quite different clubs, the smart liberal-radical Cosmopolitan, the high bohemian Garrick and the establishment intellectual Athenaeum. His novels demonstrate a growing insider’s knowledge of the role of clubs in regulating the privileged embodiment of masculinity that most interested him – the gentleman. Locating his fictional representations in their historical context this paper will examine the various ways, both positive and negative, in which clubmanship disciplined gentlemanly masculinity in Trollope’s world.

Mark King

Mark King is an Assistant Professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia, where he teaches writing and literature. He received his doctorate from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2005. His doctoral dissertation, "The Hobbledehoy's Choice: Anthony Trollope's Awkward Young Men and Their Road to Gentlemanliness," was nominated for the university's distinguished dissertation award. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as The Upstart Crow, College Literature, and The Journal of College Writing. Dr. King's research interests include Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century novel, masculinity studies, and composition studies.

“To What Height a Dull Boy May Grow”: Reading Anthony Trollope’s Hobbledehoy Novels as Critiques of Samuel Smiles and the Carlylean Gospel of Work

In his 1995 work, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood, James Eli Adams asserts “the gentleman, as we have noted, is the most pivotal and contested norm of mid-Victorian masculinity, because it served so effectively as a means of regulating social mobility and its attendant privileges” (152). One locus in which this norm was contested was in the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope. My discussion will examine changing notions of gender and gentlemanliness vis-à-vis Trollope’s use of the hobbledehoy archetype in The Three Clerks (1857), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), John Caldigate (1879), and The Prime Minister (1876).

These novels rely on a set pattern, or hobbledehoy paradigm, in which the protagonist falls in with low company, receives assistance from the gentry, faces a crisis, and chooses gentlemanliness. Early hobbledehoy novels remained linked to England’s agrarian past while simultaneously moving toward a more liberal and open behavior-based reckoning of what constitutes gentlemanliness.

Significantly, hobbledehoy novels from later in the era (i.e., 1868-1875) reverse this liberalized conception of gentlemanliness and revert to a more traditional, birth-based notion of gentlemen. It is possible to read later hobbledehoy works as responses to social and economic changes affecting commonly held conceptions of masculinity. Furthermore, they respond to the burgeoning sub-genre of conduct literature for men and changes in Trollope’s reckoning of the hobbledehoy as gentleman can be read as a response to the growing popularity of a conception of industrial giant as gentleman—a portrait disseminated by the works of Samuel Smiles. In this manner, later Trollopian texts see the author abandoning his previous implicit endorsement of the Carlylean “gospel of work.”

Margaret Markwick

Margaret Markwick is an honorary fellow at Exeter, and has been writing widely about Trollope for several years. Trollope and Women, 1997, was her first full-length study of the novels, and her next book, New Men in Trollope’s Novels: Rewriting the Victorian male, will be published by Ashgate in the near future.

Out of the closet: Homoerotic relationships in Trollope’s novels

Views of nineteenth century homoerotics tend to be overshadowed by the Oscar Wilde trial. However, this creates an unbalanced picture, for Wilde’s trial in 1895 took place under very different circumstances from those that held sway for the larger part of the century.

In the times in which Trollope was writing, the concept of homosexuality, per se, did not exist. Sexual relationships between men were called Socratic, urning, invert, or simply contrary to instinct. The term “homosexual” first appeared in 1869, in the writings of the Hungarian physician Benkert, and did not gain any currency in Britain until the mid-1890s. The legal position was also significantly different. Until Labouchere introduced the concept of “acts of gross indecency” into his amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, only the strictly-defined buggery was illegal. The rest of the gamut of sexual expression between two men fell within the law.

This paper examines Trollope’s novels to establish his vocabulary to describe homoerotic behaviour. By uncovering his codes, a liberality of thought is revealed which sits comfortably with attitudes today, and which is sharply at odds with the thinking and responses which dominated the homoerotic history of the twentieth century. There is, however, a paradox in this liberality, which lies in unresolved issues between an antagonistic presentation of feminism and the feminist expression of those views, and a constantly presented sub-text advancing just those principles in different circumstances. This can be tellingly explored by comparing the presentation of Priscilla Stanbury with Wallachia Petrie in He Knew He Was Right. The authorial voice’s response to men of ambiguous orientation is subtly different. An exploration of Bertie Stanhope’s behaviour in the ha-ha at Ullathorne leads into the outing of Patrick Desmond, whose physical expression of passion for another man is a remarkable episode in a truly remarkable book.

Maia McAleavey

Maia McAleavey is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, where her interests focus on Victorian fiction and its narrative formations of love, marriage, adultery, divorce, and bigamy. Her research centers on questions of reader response and involvement as they are shaped by narrative structure. Her interest in Trollope began with a childhood present of the Palliser series, but Barsetshire has now won the field. Maia was born in Washington, D.C. and earned her B.A. at Stanford University in 2003.

Loving Lily Dale: Gendered Reader Address and Erotic Involvement inThe Small House at Allington

"Lilian Dale, dear Lily Dale – for my reader must know that she is to be very dear, and that my story will be nothing to him if he do not love Lily Dale..."

The reader's interest in The Small House at Allington is predicated on his love for the fictional Lily. What does this gendered address suggest about the precarious position of a reader of a courtship and marriage plot? Where does Lily’s unresolved marriage plot, in a novel of only two volumes, leave the novel’s erotically implicated reader?

Elaborating Mark Turner’s analysis of Lily Dale’s daring redundancy in the face of contemporary debates about single women, I will argue that Lily’s single status both thwarts and palpitates reader’s desires. Trollope himself declared a distaste for Lily, but notes her popularity in his Autobiography, describing the many letters he has received “to beg me to marry Lily Dale and Johnny Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the author concerning her fate.” Here the readers’ love for Lily is at once created by her availability and longing to correct it – both conflicting symptoms of an intense involvement in the romances of a fictional character.

The irresolution of The Small House, and of the reader’s position within it, is connected to the problematic nature of the hero in this plot, a part which is “cut up, as it were, into fragments." Among those fragments of Johnny, Crosbie, and Bernard, the reader, himself in love with Lily, may be constructed as an erotic rival, a pretender to the role of hero. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Trollope codifies the reader’s rivalry: “The reader … may, perhaps, think that a young man who could amuse himself with Miss Demolines was unworthy of Lily Dale." An analysis of Trollope’s gendered reader addresses will help to complicate our conception of the reader’s position as s/he engages with a courtship novel.

Elsie Michie

Elsie B. Michie is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. She has published on Mary Shelley, the Brontes, ElizabethGaskell, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Margaret Oliphant, and AnthonyTrollope. She is currently completing a book entitled The Vulgar Questionof Money that links political economy to the woman of wealth in novels of manners from Austen to James.

The Vulgar Question of Money “It is horrible to think what power money has these days.” (The Prime Minister [I.191]).

Readings of Trollope in terms of contemporary economics have typically focused on the speculators Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister and Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. To do so is to look at half the equation. While these male characters embody fears of the market, they never possess money. The female characters that do possess money in these texts, the heiresses who reemerge throughout the Barchester and Palliser novels, mark the anxieties that emerged when, as Harold Perkin has argued, “for the first time in history, non-landed incomes and wealth had begun to overtake land alone as the main source of economic power” (Rise 64). Miss Dunstable, as a patent medicine heiress, is associated with commercial fortunes (like those of men like Lord Lever). Lady Glencora’s wealth, coming as it does from coal mining and rental properties, is a mixed rather than landed fortune. Madame Max Goesler’s East European origins, Jewish overtones, and ability to travel the world associate her with thee international money market, “the cosmopolitan loan fund” that “runs everywhere as it is wanted, and as the rate of interest tempts it” (Bagehot Economic Studies 89). Following Bourdieu’s observation that women are closer to the truth of economic exchange than men, this paper argues that Trollope’s heiresses mark deep contemporary anxieties about what Frances Trollope called, “the vulgar question of money.”

This paper looks at Miss Dunstable, Lady Glencora Palliser, and Madame Max Goesler in light of contemporary analogues (in the case of Miss Dunstable the ointment and patent medicine magnate Sir Thomas Holloway, of Lady Glencora and Madame Max, the Liberal Party hostess, Lady Frances Waldegrave). It reads Trollope’s fictional representations alongside contemporary responses to these historical figures, using that comparison to explore how late nineteenth-century responses to the increasing power of non-landed wealth follow the pattern mapped out by Max Weber when he argues that, “all groups having a special interest in the status order react with special sharpness against the pretensions of purely economic acquisition. In most cases they react more vigorously the more they feel themselves threatened” (192). We see that backlash in the mocking descriptions of Miss Dunstable as “a gallipot wench whose money still smells of bad drugs” (FP 488) and when Plantagenet Palliser condemns his wife’s expenditures as vulgar, a gesture that marks non-landed wealth as incapable of full assimilation into the refined power structure it seeks to influence. In Madame Max Goesler we see the full working out of such non-assimilation when she marries not an English duke but an Irish MP, thereby reinforcing the exogamous status that both Weber and Simmel have argued was characteristic of the position of the Jews, as avatars of money and banking, in late nineteenth-century society.

Ellen Moody

Ellen Moody has been facilitating reading and discussion of Trollope's writings in cyberspace for more than 10 years. Her book Trollope on the Net was the chosen book for the Trollope Society in 1999, and her paper, "Partly Told in Letters: Trollope's Story-telling Art," given at a meeting of the Trollope Society, was published in Trollopiana. She maintains a Trollope-focused web-site: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/emhome.htm. She is now studying Trollope's travel books, with a view to writing a paper entitled "On Living in a New Country: Trollope's North America and Australia and New Zealand." She teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Heterosexual Male Heroism in Trollope's Fiction

The argument of my talk is Trollope's most profound analyses of character are located in his depictions of male heterosexual patterns of masculinity as then and now enforced by modern cosmopolitan communities. Trollope is iconoclastic: his cherished heroes are males who react to or regard the norms of macho male heterosexual masculinity as behaviors which are distasteful, against the grain of their characters, or immoral. At the same time as their inability to enact the macho male ideal disables them in the continual struggle for dominance against submission that Trollope depicts as at the heart of all human relationships, and destroys them when they cannot throw off their anxiety over how they appear in the eyes of others, their very sensitivity, diffidence, vulnerability leads them to live richer lives in private and do more good in the world. In an era where we find ourselves in the midst of a re-masculinization of the norms of behavior and art in terms of a narrow macho male ideal, where not only a woman's freedom to express her sexuality is contested, but a man's is too, Trollope's male romances provide a salutary alternative and ironic reading of heterosexual male personalities.

While I could demonstrate these patterns from the famous two series, or the novels recently adapted into successful films, I will rather concentrate on the lesser known novels: three "heroine's" texts (Rachel Ray, Miss Mackenzie, Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel), three later novels linked by an examination of unconventional male sexuality and sexual anxiety (Ayala's Angel, Is He Popenjoy?, John Caldigate and Cousin Henry) and a few short story masterpieces whose non-English setting or brevity gave Trollope the license he felt he needed to be frank ("The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne," "Aaron Trowe," "Journey to Panama").

Trollope examines male heterosexuality in a context shaped by falsifying norms of female sexuality. Paradoxically, the novels which most show how destructive of selfhood and hopes for individually fulfilling lives the macho male norms can be to all are those which put at the center of the stories strong female personalities struggling to build a life for themselves which they see as useful to others without having to cut themselves off from self-fulfillment to do it.

Kevin Morrison

Kevin A. Morrison obtained his MA degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied nineteenth-century British cultural nationalism, and is now pursuing a PhD in the Department of English at Rice University (Houston, Texas), where he works on Victorian literature and culture. He has written forthcoming or recently published articles on George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and the textual history of Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village series.

Lawrence Twentyman’s Paradoxical Manliness

Scholars working on the history of masculinities have, in recent years, forced us to reconceptualize our understandings of Victorian manhood. For some time, the “crisis of masculinity” thesis predominated. According to this line of thinking, there was one single model of manliness: the strict patriarch who expressed his authority in the household arbitrarily. This model, so the story goes, was increasingly challenged by an emergent feminist discourse that, while not necessarily calling on women to abandon the roles assigned to them by gender ideology, insisted on expanded responsibilities and greater legal rights. Within the past fifteen years, however, scholars have questioned these long-standing critical assumptions. Yet the emphasis on Victorian manhood as a social performance, as a form of self-stylizing, unduly emphasizes individual preference and choice and downplays the extraordinary social and familial constraints one might experience.

In my paper, I argue that Anthony Trollope’s representation of Lawrence Twentyman in his 1877 novel The American Senator is torn between a conception of masculinity as a social performance, anchoring one’s position in a class-based hierarchy, and as a psychic identity concerned with authentic self-expression. Indeed, there is a genuine tension in the novel between Trollope’s resistance to the emergent characterologies of modernity—chiefly the liberal ideal of manliness—and his sense of the inadequacy and superficiality of a model of gentlemanliness which privileges social performance over authenticity. This tension—between conceiving of masculinity as a social performance and as a subjective identity—troubles current scholarly accounts that focus solely on Victorian masculinities as a number of different styles that can be deployed according to social circumstances.

Michelle Mouton

Michelle Mouton is an Associate Professor of English at Cornell College. Prior publications include articles on Sarah Grand, Margaret Oliphant, and Anthony Trollope, in addition to Victorian popular culture. Her current research focuses on the Parliamentary Novel and the Second Reform Act.

Trollope’s Desiring and Appreciating Narrators

. The narrators of Trollope’s novels often revel in descriptions of male characters, sometimes taking a sort of personal pride in their appearance, at other times verging on expressions of desire or envy: “though the only boy of the family, [Frank Thorne] excelled all his sisters in personal appearance. The Greshams from time immemorial had been handsome”—Dr. Thorne. “ He was one of those young men with dark hair and blue eyes — who wear no beard, and are certainly among the handsomest of all God’s creatures”—Can You Forgive Her? When the narrator does not entirely approve of a male character, desire and appreciation may be displaced onto women: “But in other respects George’s face was not ugly, and might have been thought handsome by many women”—Can You Forgive Her? I propose that Trollope’s physical descriptions of characters, unlike those of physiognomists, for example, do not create a controlling and critical distance from male characters through verbal portraiture, but more often set up processes of identification and desire. More specifically, while mindful of the risk of setting up a false dichotomy between Trollope’s gendered “portraitures,” this paper focuses on Trollope’s use of narrators’ gazing and identification to construct male homosocial spaces (male clubs, House of Commons, students) that are at once erotic and platonic—and often entirely comfortable with that potential for eroticism.

Ken Newton

Ken Newton is Professor of English at the University of Dundee and has published mainly in the areas of nineteenth-century fiction and literary theory.

Trollope: a proto-postmodernist?

Postmodernism is generally seen as anti-foundationalist in that it is unconvinced of the existence of or of need for fundamental values or standards that stand apart from the exigencies and particularities of life or the world. For Richard Rorty anti-foundationalism entails pragmatism. In The Warden and Barchester Towers the postmodern makes its presence felt to a significant degree. James’s objections to Trollope in his 1888 essay are those of a critical foundationalist with regard to theory of the novel. Whereas James believes the novel should cover up the discontinuity between narrative as history, i.e. the belief that it can and should be a truthful reflection of the world, and the rhetorical and poetic means necessarily employed in narrative as representation, Trollope playfully acknowledges this discontinuity in the manner of Sterne and later postmodernist writers. But the conflict between scepticism about the possibility of neutral forms of representation and extreme positivist claims that reality can be truthfully reflected is one that Trollope refuses to engage with, by accepting the implicitly pragmatist position that there is no need to commit oneself to one view or the other or even look to some way of resolving them. For Trollope foundationalist views, such as those of Tom Towers, are merely the vehicle for rhetorical posturing: ‘On what foundation, moral or divine, traditional or legal, is grounded the warden’s claim to a large income for doing nothing?’ Foundationalist views of every type are called into question, since Hiram’s Hospital is ruined by the adherence to such foundationalist positions. Foundationalist principles necessarily create irresolvable conflict or tragic collisions, as one sees in The Warden in particular, but Trollope (or more precisely Trollope’s narrator) aims to defuse such conflicts and collisions with his implied anti-foundationalist pragmatism.

Chris Noble

Christopher Noble is associate professor of English at Azusa Pacific University in southern California, where he teaches composition, British literature, and literary theory. In addition to Trollope, his research interests include literature and mourning (especially the elegy), Romantic/Victorian poetry and, most recently, the relationship between gender theory and religious identity. His current project analyzes representations of widowhood in nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

Trollope’s Masculine Widows

In 1837 Bentley’s Miscellany published a satirical “Chapter on Widows” which defines a widow not as “a woman who has lost her husband” but rather as “a woman whose husband is dead” – “dead in fact, and comfortably buried, or otherwise safely disposed of.” The satire reflects a longstanding representation of upper-class widows as women incapable of loss. Losses, in fact, must be read as gains in inheritance, legal authority, social independence, and sexual experience – all, for the Victorians, unmistakably masculine traits. Victorian widows, it would seem, could be “men” without having to be gentlemen. This paper will compare three Trollopian widows – Arabella Greenow, Madame Max Goesler, and Emily Lopez – in an attempt to evaluate the narrative potential created by the masculinization of female characters. Greenow’s comic mastery and conscious manipulation of the performance of mourning etiquette, Goesler’s sublimated political desire to “vote for everything that could be voted for,” and Lopez’s resistance to abandoning her seclusion after Ferdinand’s suicide are all seen as ambivalent representations of male independence issuing from their status as widows, despite the fact that they differ so significantly in other ways. Paradoxically, the social strictures governing Victorian mourning create an uneasy agency for Trollope’s widows, a middle way between marriage and death. No doubt the remarriages selected by these characters are questionable expressions of independence, but they nevertheless complicate the facile portrait of Victorian domestic femininity.

Galia Ofek

Dr Galia Ofek (B.A. Hebrew University, M.Phil, D.Phil Oxford University) is a Golda Meir Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Mount Scopus, Jerusalem. She is writing a book about Victorian representations of women's hair in literature and culture from 1850 to 1900. Her paper will explore Anthony Trollope's deployment of hair imagery between 1869 and 1875 as a tool to examine the novelist's ambiguous reaction to the changing power-relations between the sexes.

Anthony Trollope, False Hair and False Models of Femininity 1865-1875

While Trollope’s public pronouncements were often hostile to aspirations of the women’s movement, his later novels betrayed a growing concern with and sympathy for independent women, thus “conceal[ing] an unorthodox subtext beneath the conventional surface of novels written to please a conventional public”.¹ Trollope’s representation of his heroine’s hair in novels from 1865 to 1875 may be viewed as a palimpsestic, subversive design that lies beneath the conventional plot and reveals an alternative voice. Trollope’s hair imagery in He Knew He Was Right (1869) and The Way We Live Now (1875), for example, is central to the understanding of the author’s relation to women and their struggle for more power in the 1860s and 1870s, and it illuminates his reaction to broader cultural and social changes in late Victorian England.

In 1867, Margaret Oliphant distinguished Trollope’s œuvre for its lack of dramatic descriptions of women’s hair rather than otherwise. She complained that many novelists deployed the heroine’s hair so extensively, that it had become “a leading property in fiction”. Trollope, according to Oliphant, was quite different: “here is a novelist to whom the colour of a woman’s hair is not of first importance . . . her author is indifferent on the subject. To him her hair is clearly a secondary matter”.² Oliphant’s comment on Trollope’s indifference to women’s hair is important, but Victoria Glendinning, contrary to Oliphant, thinks that Trollope’s “observation of the colour, smell, texture and arrangement of women’s hair was . . . obsessional”.³ I wish to review and reassess these contrasting claims in the light of contemporary representations of women’s hair in debates about feminine identity and women’s status in the 1860s and 1870s.

Critics like Glendinning agree that Trollope’s conservatism and abhorrence of false chignons align him with anti-feminist characters like Aunt Stanbury and the Rev. Mr Gibson, who view Arabella French’s chignon as a symbol of modern, twisted, and emasculating women in He Knew He Was Right (1869). As Mr Gibson’s power shrinks, his perception of the chignon becomes increasingly distorted and hysterical, and the woman is transformed into and supplanted by her false hair, which dominates his view: “he could see nothing but the shapeless excrescence . . . that distorted monster . . . It grew bigger and bigger, more shapeless, monstrous, absurd, and abominable, as he looked at it. Nothing should force upon him the necessity to carry such an abortion through the world”.⁴ Arabella must sacrifice her chignon in order to prove that she is a manageable, docile and yielding woman and gain Gibson’s affection back. By doing so, she symbolically relinquishes her power in their relationship, and indeed, “the whole French family suffered a diminution of power from that strange phantasy which had come upon Arabella. They all felt . . . that they had to a certain degree lowered their flag”.⁵

However, notwithstanding the critics’ conflation of Aunt Stanbury’s and Mr Gibson’s views with the author’s own opinions, I wish to analyse Aunt Stanbury’s aversion to modern hairstyles as a comic reflection – indeed, almost a caricature – of Mrs. Lynn Linton’ s commentary on the rebellious, sensual, husband-hunting “Girl of the Period” (March 1868, Saturday Review), who was characterised by her “false hair”, and as a critical projection of some of Trollope’s more conservative stances and tastes. Thus, Arabella’s chignon becomes a mocking allusion to social prejudice and prudery rather than a manifestation of it.

1. Jane Nardin, introduction to He Knew She Was Right (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989) xviii.
2. Margaret Oliphant, “Novels”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (September 1867): 222, 277.
3. Victoria Glendinning, Trollope (London: Pimilco, 2002) 266 .
4. Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Oxford: OUP, 1998) 443.
5. Ibid. 452

Lynn Parker

Lynn Parker received her Ph D. from Brandeis University and specializes in nineteenth-century literature as an Asst. Professor at Framingham State College. Her conference presentations include work on Dickens and the Brontë's, and she has published work on Thomas Hardy and on Wilkie Collins. She is currently working on a manuscript on the connection between sibling relationships and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel.

The Predatory Brother in Phineas Finn and Can You Forgive Her?

The significance of brother-sister relationships both in the historical family and its literary representation has been argued both by historians, such as Davidoff and Hall in their recently updated Family Fortunes and by literary critics, including Valerie Sanders, whose work, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, emphasizes the centrality of brother-sister bonds to Victorian conceptions of the family. However, these studies have not specifically emphasized the ways in which an individual’s marriage decisions were impacted by this sibling bond. Trollope’s fiction abounds with portraits of brother-sister pairs, and his representation of the ways in which sibling relationships influence, and are influenced by, the marriage market is striking. Contrasting Trollope’s complex portrait of sibling interaction with the marriage market in Phineas Finn with his powerful representation of a seemingly aberrant, and notably violent, dependency between a brother and sister in Can You Forgive Her?, reveals Trollope’s interest in challenging the authority of affectionate sibling bonds even as he reveals the extent of their presence in the Victorian marriage market.

Anna Peak

Anna Peak graduated with honors from Rosemont College, Rosemont, Pennsylvania, in 2002. Her paper, “Trollope’s Anti-Anti-Semitism”, is based on the senior thesis she wrote for Rosemont English department. She is currently enrolled at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is working towards a Ph.D. Her research interests are the Victorian novel, relationships between music and literature, and women in literature.

Trollope’s Anti-Anti-Semitism

Trollope’s portrayal of Jews, particularly in The Way We Live Now, has rightly been called to account for its use of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Most critics have based their case largely on the way in which the character of Melmotte is portrayed in the novel. However, I will argue that identifying Melmotte as Jewish is problematic; further, it is important not to examine Melmotte apart from the other major Jewish character in the novel, Mr. Brehgert. An analysis of the portrayal of both suggests that Trollope uses those stereotypes in an attempt to revalue them and ultimately deconstruct them altogether. Trollope accomplishes this by placing ugly stereotypes about money and physical appearance in a context which revalues them by juxtaposing them against what the Trollopeian narrator clearly identifies as the real problems. Nor does Trollope imply that the difference between what he criticizes in Gentiles and what is criticized in Jews is a matter of degree; the difference is one of mutually exclusive opposites. By the end of the novel, however, Trollope no longer uses these anti-Semitic stereotypes even to revalue them. Instead, he engages in direct satire of anti-Semitism, targeting its holders for their stupidity and for their clinging to false traditions. Analyzing the end of the novel will demonstrate that The Way We Live Now, which has often been seen as a profoundly conservative novel, is in fact a novel in which tradition is seen as deeply problematic and subject to both interrogation and rejection, precisely because it marginalizes.

Christine Poulson

Christine Poulson has a Ph. D on Arthurian legend in fine and applied Victorian and Edwardian art. She has worked as a curator at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and at the William Morris Society at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith. She was a lecturer in Art History at Homerton College, Cambridge (1990-1997) and a member of the faculty of History of Art in the University. She is now a research fellow at the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies at Sheffield University. She has written widely on nineteenth century art and literature, and her most recent book is The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Her most recent project is concerned with the Victorian and Edwardian stepfamily. She is also the author of a series of crime novels set in Cambridge.

Remarriage and the Step-family in Trollope's Fiction

In his Advice to Young Men, published in 1829 and reprinted many times during the nineteenth century Cobbett's view was that 'a second marriage is in the woman more gross than in the man [for it] argues great deficiency in the delicacy, that innate modesty, which, after all, is the great charm . . . in the female sex . . . it comes to this at last, that the person has a second time undergone that surrender, to which nothing but the most ardent affection could ever reconcile a chaste and delicate woman.' And if the motive is to provide a home for her orphaned children, she is no better than a prostitute.

There was a further prejudice against second marriage, and this was fear for the fate of the children at the hands of a step-parent. New attitudes towards children and towards maternity in the first half of the nineteenth century contributed to a new sense of the family, in which the maternal bond and the nature of childhood experience were considered very important. The corollary was that the step-family was often seen as potentially problematic, unnatural, and deviant rather than as a normal part of the social structure and of family life. Yet stepmothers there were, and in abundance. In fact second marriage was necessarily commonplace in the nineteenth century and proved fertile ground for the novelist. The exploration of emotional adjustment (or non-adjustment) between step-parents and children could encompass a wide range of contemporary concerns including property and rightful inheritance, heredity and 'bad blood,' even religious controversy.

This paper will examine the ways in which these issues are reflected in the treatment of second marriage and stepfamilies in Trollope's fiction. Texts will range from the Palliser and Barchester novels and The Way We LiveNow to less frequently read works such as The American Senator, Marian Fay and the short story, 'Alice Dugdale.'

Kathy Psomiades

Kathy Alexis Psomiades is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism and coeditor with Talia Schaffer of Women and British Aestheticism. Her current work is on the novel and Victorian anthropology.

He Knew He was Right: The Sensational Tyranny of the Sexual Contract and the Problem of Liberal Progress

In The Sexual Contract (1988) the feminist political theorist Carole Pateman launched what has become a classic feminist critique of liberalism. Pateman claimed that the social contract described by Locke, Hume and Rousseau, under which men agree to give up certain right for the benefit of equality before the law is underwritten by a secret sexual contract that gives all men compensatory sexual access to women. Liberal society is thus divided by a private sphere in which men oppress women in the family and a public sphere in which gender-neutral liberal subjects engage in contractual relations. Women’s access to such universal subjectivity is, however, compromised, since their unequal role in the home precludes the autonomy on which the liberal subject is predicated. Pateman’s argument is that the sexual contract is always present in liberal social contract theory, from the initial debates about patriarchy between Locke and Filmer. But my argument here is that the idea of the sexual contract itself emerges in the 1860s at a variety of cultural sites – sensation fiction, anthropology, political theory – and is part of a project of using gender and marriage to think about the problems of a liberalism increasingly organized around the idea of mass-democracy. In other words, it is no accident that the sensation-fiction story of the tyrannical husband, and Victorian anthropology’s sensational tale of the violent origins of primitive marriage in “capture” and Mill’s Subjection of Women should share with Pateman’s 80s feminist political theory this common story of primitive sexual and marital violence – for the 1860s lurid story of sexual violence is connected to the larger problem of violence and Reform. Trollope’s He Knew He was Right is one of the places where this story of the sexual contract emerges. Tyrannical husbands, mixed blood wives, matriarchal family structures, aristocrats who fall for Americans (who always stand in, in Reform era discussions of democracy, for democracy’s excesses, not just feminism’s), penniless spinsters, men who work for a living – these are the figures not only in a series of arguments about marriage and women’s protection under the law, but also about larger issues of authority and consent, right government, and ways of thinking about collectivity and individualism.

Rebecca Resinski

Rebecca Resinski is an Associate Professor of Classics at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She is a book critic for Phi Beta Kappa's Key Reporter and has published on topics as various as the adorned female body in ancient literature, the poetry of Bacchylides, and the relationship between Homer's Iliad and Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam. She is currently developing a website with her students that explores the uses of Classics in Trollope's Barsetshire novels (www.trollope-apollo.com).

Invoking Antiquity: Classical References and Gender Difference in Trollope's Barsetshire Novels

Although most of the classical allusions in the Barsetshire novels are voiced directly by the narrator, Trollope sometimes puts references to Greco-Roman antiquity into his characters' mouths. This paper will examine how classical references made by male characters differ – in perhaps counter-intuitive ways – from those made by female ones.

Generally speaking, Trollope's male characters refer to antiquity in order to assert status or strengthen the relationship between themselves and their interlocutors. Such invocations of antiquity, however, often misfire. Sometimes men ineptly apply classical models to present circumstances; other times, men's attempts to identify themselves via classics are shown to be misguided. In deploying classical references male characters may become the butt of Trollope's joke. Instead of demonstrating mastery of cultural currency, classical references made by men often reveal men to be insufficiently masterful: they have an incomplete understanding of themselves and the action of the narrative.

By contrast, Trollope's female characters generally put classics to keen use. Not only are Trollope's women more likely to use classics to reflect critically on their circumstances, but they are also more likely to use classics in ways that are akin to Trollope's own citations of the classical past. And in two striking instances female characters make classical references that especially tie them to Trollope. Miss Dunstable uses the gigantomachy analogy for contemporary politics that Trollope himself elaborately develops in Framley Parsonage. And Lily Dale introduces the Crosbie/Apollo identification that Trollope uses throughout The Small House at Allington. Characters like Miss Dunstable and Lily Dale become miniature narrators through their use of classical references; they temporarily participate in the narrator's register and idiom. More often than their male counterparts, female characters who invoke antiquity assume a privileged position: their use of antiquity's authority makes them more like the author himself.

Susan Shelangoskie

Susan Shelangoskie recently completed her Ph.D. program at the University of Utah. Her dissertation project, entitled Transmitting the Home: Photography, Telegraphy, and Victorian Domestic Narratives, explores the interface between Victorian literature and the social diffusion of emerging technologies of the period. Susan has presented several papers on various aspects of this project at international and national conferences and is working on articles for publication. Currently, Susan is employed as an instructional designer for Distance Learning and instructor for the English Department at the University of Toledo (Ohio).

Loyal worker to Loving Wife: Technology and Gender in Trollope’s The Telegraph Girl

Though it has received little critical attention, Anthony Trollope’s short story The Telegraph Girl is an important nexus of the socio-narrative conventions of gender and the social application of new technology. In Victorian England, telegraph work was a new answer to a dire problem: the growing number of middle and upper-middle class “redundant” women. However, granting women a measure of financial independence and allowing them space in the public sphere was also extremely problematic in Victorian culture.

Trollope’s Telegraph Girl examines these issues through the characters of two telegraph girls working in London. The story of each girl fuses necessary economic work with the marriage plot, showing how existing narrative conventions conflict and combine with the new narrative potential of telegraph work. Trollope’s story demonstrates various dangers and temptations that faced the woman worker—from losing her femininity to becoming a dangerously sensual seductress. However, the narrative also shows that so long as the ultimate goal of working women remains marriage, telegraph work can be a safe and proper pursuit. In this paper, I will show how Trollope uses narrative conventions of gender to position telegraph work within a domestic (rather than economic or political) context, and how he constructs a paradigm for the successful transition from worker to wife that integrates the social ideals of a productive worker into the narrative conventions of the “proper” woman.

David Skilton

David Skilton is Research Professor in English at Cardiff University, where he was Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy 1988–2002. He is author of Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (1972, 1996), Defoe to the Victorians (1985) and The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (1993). He was General Editor of the Trollope Society and Pickering & Chatto edition of Trollope’s novels, and has edited numerous Victorian works for OUP, Penguin, Everyman, etc., including the Penguin edition of An Autobiography (1993). He writes on the art and literature of London, and is part of a large project on Victorian illustrated literature.

" Depth of Portraiture”: What should distinguish a Victorian Man from a Victorian Woman?

One way in some which mid-Victorian thinkers conceived of “character” psychologically was in terms of division between “depth” and surface – a version, perhaps, of Wordsworth’s “two selves” from The Prelude.. Critics who thought like this advocated different ways of constructing male and female characters in a novel. Trollope was seen as defective in his characterisation because he neglected “depth of portraiture”, including the experience of religious faith. He was more successful with men than women, under this system of thought, because men were seen to present a recognisable “profile” to the world, whereas women should ideally be expressed by “a lyrical cry”, like the song of a bird or the scent of flower, since they were deemed to be defective in a characteristic position vis-à-vis the world.

Although Trollope advocated separate spheres of influence for men and women in life and literature, when we look at how he deals with characterisation himself, we can distinguish what separated him from those who constructed men and women differently. The distinction lies in the way Trollope gives his women mental lives analogous to those of his men. That is why, it seems to me, we can make a case for Trollope being of his age in the social roles he assigns to women, while many intelligent women are on record as very much admiring his women characters.

The consequence in the novels is that talk of “a career” for a character like Alice Vavasour is not a mere image. His men and women seek different careers, but the choice a career and the choice of whether to pursue it honestly or dishonestly is parallel for men and women.

Jenny Bourne Taylor

Jenny Bourne Taylor is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. Her work includes In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology; (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (in press); ed. with Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, an Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, and ed. with Martin Ryle, George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed. She has also published various articles on the construction and significance of illegitimacy in nineteenth-century culture.

‘Bastards to the time’: legitimacy as legal fiction in Trollope’s later fiction

‘“Nothing is more difficult to decide than questions of legitimacy”’, remarks the solicitor Mr Flick in Lady Anna, recalling a case (MacFarlane v MacFarlane) in which ‘they had to go back a hundred and fifty years and at last decide on the memory of a man whose grandmother had told him she had seen a woman wearing a wedding ring”’. This paper will explore how Trollope plays with this slippery boundary inRalph the Heir (1871), Lady Anna (1874), Is He Popinjoy? (1879) and Mr Scarborough’s Family (1883) to probe a complex set of relationships between legitimacy of birth and wider forms of economic, legal, political and symbolic power.

As both legal fiction and cultural trope, illegitimacy has an extraordinarily wide range of meanings and uses in mid-Victorian culture. But by the end of the 1860s the natural son, who both confirms and undermines patrilineal inheritance, has returned as the focus of renewed interest in the nature of legitimate authority - but as an ‘older’ anachronistic figure, and conduit of cultural memory: in Trollope’s ‘legal’ fiction; in Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869); George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1865), and, more ambiguously, Daniel Deronda. The late 1860s not only saw contests over political representation and debates on the nature of the family and legitimate inheritance (with the publication of Maine’s Ancient Law and McLennan’s Primitive Marriage) but also disputes concerning inheritance highlighting the entangled relationship between legitimacy and nationality, which coalesced around specific legal cases and amplified the existing legal complexities around legitimacy itself. My paper will place Trollope’s four novels within these intersecting contexts, exploring how legitimacy of birth is mediated through division of gender, class and nationality, and will argue that the uncertain figure of the bastard is a particularly effective means of highlighting the contradictions within his ‘conservative liberalism’.

Karen Kurt Teal

Karen Kurt Teal is a graduate of Smith College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She teaches writing at the University of Washington and Edmonds Community College in the state of Washington. Her article on Trollope and Disraeli has been accepted for publication in The Victorian Newsletter. A member of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, she most recently delivered a paper on Trollope’s Christmas stories to the annual conference. Dr. Teal is also a reviewer and assistant bibliographer for the Victorian Periodicals Review. She lives in Seattle with her husband, Thomas Teal.

Έcriture as Weapon: Arabella Trefoil and the Social Dragons of The American Senator

“Like ourselves, Victorians did not always believe where they approved …” – Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon

In Trollope and the Magazines,(2000), Mark Turner reminds us of a powerful challenge regarding Trollope’s works. He notes that according to Ruth apRoberts and Robert Polhemus, the Bakhtinian possibilities in Trollope had not yet been explored. Furthermore, he states that “Robert Tracy deems Trollope ‘a prime candidate for critical attention in terms of the Barthes-Foucault notion of écriture: writing that attains an impersonal objective existence of its own, independent of author or circumstance”. Turner’s study confirms the major impact that other writers and editors in weekly and monthly journals had on Trollope’s narrative strategies in the early years. This paper tentatively extends that thought to later years. Recently working in the British Library, I noticed how perfectly a Trollopian short story in Good Words fit the tone and even the vocabulary of the neighboring texts. I looked into the matter, and saw that little has been said about the novels of the 1870s. I would like to look at the intertextuality of The American Senator. The American Senator was serialized in Temple Bar between May 1876 and July 1877. Written in the aftermath of many contentious cultural debates over woman’s rights to property and autonomy, the novel is a likely candidate for a Bakhtinian examination. I would like to establish the readership and material of Temple Bar and examine what I suspect is the case here: Arabella Trefoil’s struggle to woo marriageable men is made to appear as ignominious as a slave auction, and that Trollope’s narrative manages to use the journal’s own discursive style to puncture its readers’ prejudices.

• What I seek to pinpoint are the articles which inform Trollope’s text, and confirm the sense that Trollope is, as usual, bucking a conservative tide while pretending to knuckle under to it.
• I propose to establish that Trollope’s narrative was infiltrated with modern and contradictory voices.
• I propose to establish that like all the people caught in a liminal state, Arabella risks and performs transgressive acts to save herself.
• And finally I propose to establish that the readership of Temple Bar could be driven by a technique that embodies écriture and be forced to accept or at least acknowledge the value of more liberal temperaments. I do, also, fully acknowledge the seeming contradiction of “using” écriture as a weapon, when it is an impersonal process that takes on a life of its own. I will address the semi-automatic process critics have called Trollope’s “casuistry.”

Anca Vlasopolos

Anca Vlasopolos published a non-fiction book, No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000; recipient of the National Writer’s Voice Award for Creative Non-Fiction; and of the Board of Governors and Life Achievement in Arts awards from Wayne State University). She also published two chapbooks of poetry, a detective novel, and over two hundred short stories and poems. Her scholarly publications include a book of literary criticism, entitled The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats (1983), and over twenty scholarly articles and book chapters on British, French, Italian, and comparative literature, theatre, and film.

Dying of Virtue : Women under Erasure in Trollope’s Shorter Fiction

In both Mary Gresley and Sir Harry Hotspur, Trollope presents us with female protagonists who take the Law of the Father literally. Since such adherence to overt codes of Victorian duty leads to the death of a promising young novelist in the first case and of a beautiful, clever, rich, accomplished, and potentially living wife and mother in the next, we are left with the problem of intention, however despised intenionality may have become in recent theoretical approaches. What is Trollope saying in these two texts? From our perspective, informed by thirty-some years of the latest wave of feminist thinking, Trollope clearly subverts the operations of Victorian codes by showing their dire effects on what the Victorians might have termed the flower of womanhood. Feminist scholars have already mined the novels for signs of Trollope’s latent and sometimes more open critiques of gender expectations and enforcement. Yet Trollope is also a solidly Victorian writer, whose views on social issues cannot without a stretch be deemed revolutionary.

Need we worry what Trollope intended by these texts? Or need we merely read them closely to see how he works the theme of Duty in order to expose its logical consequences, allowing readers from different ages and perspectives to perceive the “meaning” of the texts? I would propose the latter, and I expect that the two readings that I offer are not a banal illustration of the rewards of close reading. The short story and the novella present us with contrasting ways in which Trollope adapts the medium of fiction to his ends. In the short story, Mary Gresley is seen entirely from the outside, and her inner life is pieced together by her elderly editor, friend, and admirer. At the end, we are left with the question of the justness of such an appraisal of a young woman by an old man when that old man is not the authorial persona. The truly limited “royal” first-person-plural viewpoint offers us only a distanced look at the destruction of a young woman’s talent and, not long after, life. The approving tone that tells us of her sacrifice is the voice of the Father, the phallogentricism that drives Mary to the choices leading to her death in early adulthood.

In Sir Harry Hotspur, Trollope allows us glimpses of the inner workings of Emily Hotspur’s mind, as well as the way in which she is viewed by her family, her would-be lovers, and the social circle of gentry and aristocracy in which she moves. Nonetheless, what we hear from Emily’s inner life is a perverse echo of the Law of the Father, distorted to a malignant degree into the Duty that grinds her down and finally kills her. Trollope in the novella develops a narrative richness of viewpoints that gives the reader a more nuanced insight into Victorian gender politics, a richness that nevertheless circles around the principal issue: the marriageable woman as commodity. In embracing fully, to a fervent and perverse degree, her role as commodity, Emily manages to “devalue” herself so as to take herself out of the market, but only by driving herself to an untimely death.

Female sacrifice, the cornerstone (literally, in folk tales) of empire, nation, and domestic felicity, appears in Trollope with great frequency. While operating under the approval of an overt discourse devoted to Victorian verities about Duty, the trope of young female bodies dying of virtue becomes troubling and painful, and even leads the reader to melancholy or regrets about wasted potential. These emotions in turn make us wonder whether empire, nation, and domestic felicity can long endure the deaths of promising young women.

Tamara Wagner

Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2002 and is currently assistant professor of English Literature at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at Nanyang in Singapore. She is the author of Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004) and Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819-2004: Colonial and Postcolonial “Financial Straits” (2005). Her previous publications include articles on nostalgia, occidentalism, and the functions of commerce in fiction. Wagner’s current project is a book-length study of financial speculation in Victorian literature. She is also editing a collection of essays on nineteenth-century consumer culture.

Capital Women in Victorian Stock-Market Fiction: Financial Speculation and Trollope’s Reinvestment in Foreign Women

Like her husband, Madame Melmotte is an ambiguously foreign threat, yet unlike this sought-after speculator, she is an object of pity as well as of contempt: a pathetic figure of fun. The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s most famous financial novel as it registers an uneasy awareness that foreign shares in British business are ruling the Victorian home, but what share do women play, and especially foreign women? If Madame Melmotte’s social inadequacy, combined with her inability to manage for herself, encapsulates some of the most memorable scenes of Victorian stock-market fiction, and the novel’s rewriting in Ouida’s Massarenes substantiates Trollope’s role in this neglected subgenre, his increasingly complex portrayal of women who not only have the means, but also the independence, daring, and ability to engage actively in financial speculation, indicates a fascinating gender split in his representation of finance capitalism that intriguingly accords women the better share. Speculating men regularly fall short of their own, and others’, expectations, but when some of the strongest women of his fiction manage their finances disconcertingly well, it empowers them in importantly ambiguous ways that re-inflect cultural fictions of speculation as well as of moneyed women. Lady Mabel’s suggestion “to get up a company of British females, limited, for the express purpose of putting [an American beauty] down” in The Duke’s Children may parody domestic use of financial discourses; in Marie Goesler, by contrast, the Palliser novels engender a foreign woman of capital who powerfully works against cultural stereotyping, putting a different spin on Lady Glencora’s political schemes as well. In a similar vein, Aunt Stanbury’s management of legacies is juxtaposed with the colonial woman’s (literary) evaluation in He Knew He Was Right. These women of capital figure not as pawns, but as players, in the gambles of financial speculation.