Mabel's self-destructive struggles undermine the reassuring harmonies of the novel, and end in the bitter loneliness that the Duke is permitted to avoid. They are compounded by the fact that she is a woman. Over the course of his long writing life, Trollope had come to be troubled about the position of women in the complicated society he broods over. The Duke's Children offers significant evidence of his changed thinking. He had not become a feminist: his lecture of 1868 entitled ‘The Higher Education of Women’ (in short, he advised them to hem handkerchiefs instead) makes dispiriting reading now, and his hostility to the growth of feminist activism is recorded in such ugly caricatured figures as the reforming American Wallachia Petrie of He Knew He Was Right (1869), or the fraudulent Baroness Banman of Is He Popenjoy? (1878). But he had met and admired women who held feminist beliefs, notably the American Kate Field, remembered in his Autobiography as ‘a ray of light to me, from which I can always strike a spark by thinking of her’ (Chapter 17). Kate Field's sturdy views on women's rights had some influence on Trollope's thought. His flattering portrait of Isabel Boncassen, who has fashionable London at her feet, reflects some of Kate's glamour, though little of her feminism. Books, too, made an impression. He knew Mill's Subjection of Women (1869), and though he could not bring himself to share Mill's position, he found the arguments hard to ignore. Mabel's professional charm as she looks for marriage is a memorably fearful thing: ‘To be gay was the habit, – we may almost say the work, – of her life’ (p. 125). Here Trollope returns to a theme that he had studied at length in the story of Arabella Trefoil, the dedicated husband-hunter of The American Senator. Arabella and Mabel have to make sexual fascination their vocation. What repelled him about such women, and finally wins his compassion, is that they have no better work.
Stalwart women had never been rare in Trollope's novels, and in the magnificently overbearing Mrs Proudie, the dragon of the Barsetshire novels, he created an example that his readers have found unforgettable. But he was equivocal about the dominance his women are inclined to demonstrate, and the heroines who are blessed with authorial approval usually display at least occasional tokens of trembling docility. Yet Trollope's marriageable young women grow ever more likely to express their frustration in his later novels. Mabel cannot free herself from the social codes which circumscribe her status as a lady, but she knows that they are not to her advantage, and she is prepared to say so: ‘We are dreadfully restricted. If you like champagne you can have a bucketful. I am obliged to pretend that I only want a very little. You can bet thousands. I must confine myself to gloves. You can flirt with any woman you please. I must wait till somebody comes, – and put up with it if nobody does come’ (p. 225). Isabel is less liable to self-pity, but equally sharp about the advantages enjoyed by young men: ‘But take them at their worst they are a deal too good for us, for they become men some day, whereas we must only be women to the end’ (p. 209). Even the more conventional Lady Mary, her spirits subdued by her war of attrition with her father, feels her lover to be more fortunate than she: ‘He does not suffer as I do. He has his borough, and his public life, and a hundred things to think of. I have got nothing but him… A man can never be like a girl’ (p. 405).
Isabel, like Mabel and Mary, has ‘a very high opinion of herself’ (p. 210). But she is an American, and for a man with Trollope's convictions about the eminence of the English, that made a difference. Trollope claimed to believe that Americans regarded the English with something near to reverence: ‘Who… is so much an object of heart-felt admiration to the American man and the American woman as the well-mannered and well-educated English woman or English man?’ (An Autobiography, Chapter 17). Luckily for her prospects in the marriage market she is operating in, Isabel's self-esteem is therefore tinged with uncertainty. Like Henry James, whose Daisy Miller appeared in the Cornhill Magazine in 1878, Trollope writes of what James termed the ‘international situation’. In terms of the history of nineteenth-century fiction, one of the more unexpected revelations of The Duke's Children is the extent of the shared ground between James and Trollope. Hermione Lee gives a cogent account of the American perspectives of the novel in the introduction to her edition of The Duke's Children.* Isabel is no raw colonial: she has (unaccountably) no American accent, and she is, as even the Duke's concedes, ‘ladylike’ (p. 304). Her wealthy father, a very much suaver version of Senator Elias Gotobed (The American Senator), is an accomplished scholar, and possibly a future President. Nevertheless, Isabel's republican high spirits are overawed by the rank and wealth of the aristocratic circles personified by the young Lord Silverbridge: ‘Her brain was firmer than that of most girls, but even her brain was a little turned’ (p. 211). Silverbridge chooses to marry her rather than Mabel because her American origin permits her to see him as a great man. As she confesses in a moment of girlish intimacy with his sister: ‘He is my hero; – and not the less so because there is none higher than he among the nobles of the greatest land under the sun’ (p. 305).
Lady Mabel has a liking for Silverbridge, but knows him too well for respect, let alone worship – a fact that denies her victory in the elaborate and risky erotic game that is played out between these three protagonists. Mabel has none of the ‘trepidation’ (p. 123) that the diffident young lord finds necessary in a prospective wife. She sees and accepts this, as so much else in her own nature, and she feels herself to be in the wrong as a result. Mabel's views on the relations between men and women scarcely amount to anything that could be called feminism: ‘But I could never feel him to be my superior. That is what a wife ought in truth to feel’ (p. 130). Mabel wants to marry Silverbridge because he can make her a duchess, but she does not imagine he will be able to do much else for her. She is caught in a double bind that adds a deeply felt pathos to her situation. Trollope treats her with uneasy compassion, but conceives no way out for her. Mabel's error has been to deny her own deepest needs, for we learn that her real passion is for Francis Tregear, now suitor to the Duke's daughter. Having sent him away because he cannot make her rich, she joins the long procession of the women in Trollope's fiction who find they can never be free of their first unalterable love. Tregear, able but shifty, loses no time in making a better match for himself. But Mabel cannot forget him. She will not marry a man who is not able to offer her both sexual fulfilment and social prestige. She is therefore condemned to the perpetual maidenhood that is in her world a dreadful fate. Trollope's treatment of Mabel's joyless life shows that he had grown uncomfortable about the constraints that have penned her in. Nevertheless he remained fixed in his conviction that only marriage with a gentleman she is able to love and revere as her better can offer deliverance to a right-thinking young lady.
Trollope's position is the more contradictory in that he is unable to see men as the superior creatures that his women supposedly require. It is characteristic of his confusion that He Knew He Was Right, a novel which reflects much of his pained and divided thinking about the cultural situation of women, should be the story of a man who is utterly wrong. His fiction is crowded with women who are stronger and more astute than the men they are associated with, and their dominance is particularly noticeable in this novel. Yet his view of what the social relations between the sexes could be, or should be, is as conservative as ever. The men continue to control the property – here, as invariably in Trollope's world, indispensable to the prospects of his characters. As Mabel and Isabel point out, they also hold powers of public action from which women are precluded. All these advantages seem to do them little good. In The Duke's Children, men are repeatedly shown to be weak and self-deluding creatures beside the constancy and insight of the women who are compelled to be their dependants. Silverbridge and his brother, Gerald, are amiable and well-bred, but neither of them is at all bright. Their moneyed young male companions scarcely lift themselves above the level of the contemptible – Lord Popplecourt is a meagre puppet, Dolly Longstaff a fool, Percival Grex a lout. They earn no one's respect. Even Phineas Finn, the cen
tral figure of two earlier Palliser novels, is in this novel no more than a shadow. He is obscured by the forthright Mrs Finn, yet another of the figures who successfully compel the hapless Duke's submission before the novel is over. Tregear is a more complicated case. He has more intelligence and discipline than any other young man in the novel, but carries with him a faint but persistent taint of self-seeking caddishness. Trollope neither wholly condemns nor quite approves his cleverly managed career. Tregear, like Mabel, is punished by self-knowledge: ‘Perhaps the bitterest feeling of all was that her love should have been so much stronger, so much more enduring than his own’ (p. 494).
One of the most intriguing developments of Trollope's uncertain thoughts about the social identity of women in the novel is in the briefly sketched marriage of Mr and Mrs Spooner, a couple whose part in the novel is confined to the hunting scenes that Trollope was rarely able to keep out of his fiction. It might seem that Trollope's passion for hunting simply reflected his wish to associate himself with the life of a country gentleman. The new convenience of railway travel enabled him to combine regular hunting with his Post Office duties. But like all Trollope's activities, hunting took its part in a complicated and intense imaginative life. It meant more than horses and hounds. He had little time for those who devoted themselves singlemindedly to the pursuit and slaughter of game, and in the fatuous figure of the sportsman Reginald Dobbes (yet another of the novel's male boors) he points some caustic satire in their direction. Hunting was different, for its demanding rough and tumble temporarily neutralised the stifling distinctions of social convention, without representing a serious challenge to the status quo. In pursuing the fox, Trollope could play with notions of a different and perhaps less trammelled way of life. And hunting could offer a peculiar kind of freedom for women.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, women had rarely hunted, and those who did were frowned on. Women began to hunt more regularly in the 1850s, partly because of changing social conditions, but also as a result of the development of better side-saddles. In the 1860s, it became a fashionable pursuit for women. For Mrs Spooner, it is a vocation. The ‘penniless daughter of a retired officer’ (p. 392), her social position was ambiguous at best, and at worst hardly respectable, before she had the good fortune to marry Spooner, a hard-riding farmer who figures as a comic character in Phineas Redux (1874). Trollope's astute treatment of her equivocal status is one of the points at which The Duke's Children discloses his profound debt to Thackeray. Mrs Spooner's extravagant devotion to the sport is absurd, but her expertise in the field grants her a freedom of action and of speech that would have been out of the question in the drawing-room. No other female character in the novel uses slang. Her open and friendly domination of her dim husband would have unnerved Trollope in any other context, but is here treated with sympathetic forbearance. When Silverbridge, incompetent as ever, has parted company with his horse in a ploughed field, she cheerfully comes to his rescue:
She went straight after the riderless horse, and when Silverbridge had reduced himself to utter speechlessness by his exertions, brought him back his steed.
‘I am, – I am, I am – so sorry,’ he struggled to say, – and then as she held his horse for him he struggled up into the saddle.
‘Keep down this furrow,’ said Mrs Spooner, ‘and we shall be with them in the second field. There's nobody near them yet.’ (p. 399)
It is a minor incident, but Mrs Spooner's calm command here suggests a relation between a man and woman quite unlike that which is usually encountered in Trollope's fiction. It is one of the many small black marks against Francis Tregear, who likes his women safely conventional, that he does not at all take to the sound of Mrs Spooner. Silverbridge has been impressed, and speculates as to how Tregear might react:
‘I wonder what you'll think of Mrs Spooner?’ he said.
‘Why should I think anything of her?’
‘Because I doubt whether you ever saw such a woman before. She does nothing but hunt.’
‘Then I certainly shan't want to see her again.’
‘And she talks as I never heard a lady talk before.’
‘Then I don't care if I never see her at all.’
‘But she is the most plucky and most good-natured human being I ever saw in my life.’ (p. 400)
In Mrs Spooner, who is a comic figure and safely confined to horseback, Trollope gets as close as he ever dares to an image of real change in the social position of women. Once in the saddle, Mrs Spooner evades the definitions of gender – she is a ‘human being’ rather than a lady, something Trollope's women rarely manage. Trollope's hunting scenes here, as elsewhere in his novels, allow him an oblique approach to areas of speculation that might otherwise threaten the decorous equilibrium of his fiction.
Hunting is a strenuous physical activity, and it sometimes touches the current of retributory violence that moves beneath Trollope's cultivated world. His most despicable rogues (Adolphus Crosbie in The Small House at Allington, Mr Moffat in Doctor Thorne, 1858) rarely escape a beating. Tregear is no rogue, and cannot be treated as such. It is important to the plot that he should be seen as a ‘worthy young man’, or the Duke's prejudice would have more justification than it would suit Trollope's purposes to allow. Nevertheless, he is coldly presented. It is significant that it is only after Tregear has been seriously hurt while hunting, the only occasion in the novel where Silverbridge puts him down (albeit quite. by accident) and the first real misfortune his smooth life has encountered, that he is permitted to claim his prize of marriage with the steadfast Lady Mary.
Silverbridge never has much notion of what is going on, but in his reaction to Mrs Spooner he shows himself capable of sound choices. He has to decide what to admire, and what to be. In the end he admires his father most, which directs the course of his life, but he makes several false starts. His unlucky courtship of Lady Mabel is his most hazardous wrong turning, and he is not quick to put it right. Nor does he easily identify the father he needs. As the novel begins he is entangled with Major Tifto, a gambling adventurer with whom Silverbridge jointly owns a racehorse called, hardly tactfully, Prime Minister. Tifto is both a seedy father substitute and also, curiously, a travestied spouse. Like Mrs Spooner, he is a character who eludes the categories of gender. Hermione Lee has noted how the story of Silverbridge's relations with Tifto has ‘the air of courtship, marital quarrel, divorce, and maintenance arrangements’.* Vulnerable and dependent, emotional, tearful and ‘full of mysteries’ (p. 38), Tifto is a military man who finds masculinity hard to live up to. He is a ‘little man’, ‘light-haired and blue-eyed’ (p. 37), a man who looks younger than his years and, disconcertingly, is even suspected of painting his face. Yet he is also, again like Mrs Spooner, a bold and skilful horseman, with the wit to make a precarious living as Master of the Runnymede Hounds. Despite his murky credentials as a gentleman, his association with Silverbridge allows him to edge into fashionable society as a member of the Beargarden Club.
There is a barely detectable suggestion of homosexual feeling between Silverbridge and Tifto – the moment of severance between them comes when the Major intrudes upon the young man as he lies in bed. That is not, however, the point of what happens between them. The air of sexual licence that clings to Tifto is only part of the evasive marginality that makes him dangerous. His ambivalent function in the novel is another reminder of what Trollope owes to Thackeray. He has no discernible family, always a sign of incipient villainy in Trollope's characters. The fact that the Beargarden welcomes him says much about the rackety nature of that bachelors' den: ‘Such a man, – even though no one did know anything of his father or mother, though no one had ever heard him speak of a brother or a sister, though it was believed that he had no real income, – was felt by many to be the very man for the Beargarden’ (p. 37). Tifto turns out to be treacherous as well as devious. In another surprisingly graphic moment of violence, here with perceptible sexual implications, the discarded Major takes a
vicious revenge by hammering a nail into the hoof of Prime Minister on the morning before the St Leger. As a result, his young patron loses £70, 000 – a huge sum, as much as Trollope earned over a lifetime's indefatigable writing. The defrauded Silverbridge is exposed to an important lesson about the advantages of respectability.
Yet Tifto, like Lady Mabel, sounds a persistently dark note in the novel. It was not hope for financial gain that led to his betrayal of Silverbridge, but wounded pride and the desire for vengeance. As he moves closer to an adult world in which such things matter, Silverbridge feels disgraced by the Major's tacky companionship and casts off his outgrown friend. Tifto's humiliation is sympathetically rendered. As always, Trollope's most inward engagement is with the loser rather than the winner, and Tifto is very evidently a loser. The scene of his abject confession to Silverbridge, here unwontedly and coolly in command of the situation, is one of the most painful in the novel. It is painful because Tifto has nothing to lose from telling the truth: ‘“You turned me out.” “That is true, Major Tifto.” “You was very rough then. Wasn't you rough?” (p. 475). A dingy counterpart of Mabel, Tifto is like her consigned to a wretched exile which shadows the nuptial concord affirmed in the novel's conclusion.
Silverbridge has public as well as private choices to make. The product of the old Whig aristocracy, his wish to enter Parliament as a Conservative distresses his father almost as much as his selection of an American bride. Silverbridge claims to have political convictions of his own. In so far as he has (they are expressed with a naïvety that is comic), they bear little relation to the romantic and idealistic Conservatism of Disraeli's Young England movement, which had drawn the allegiance of public-spirited young aristocrats in the 1840s. Thirty years later Silverbridge's political ideas amount to nothing, more than the crudest class interest. ‘We've got to protect our position as well as we can against the Radicals and Communists… The people will look after themselves, and we must look after ourselves. We are so few and they are so many, that we shall have quite enough to do’ (pp. 45, 46). The outraged Duke rightly suspects that Silverbridge has picked up this infection from his rising friend Tregear, who is a Conservative of a very much more knowing kind.
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