In 1864 Trollope discovered he had crossed one of the more important latitudes in Victorian literature. An angry clergyman informed him that his novels were no longer fit to be read aloud to a gentleman's family, and that because of moral ambiguity in his description of Glencora Palliser's near adulterous love for Burgo Fitzgerald. The narrator, it was implied, should throw the first stone. Undeterred Trollope offended the maiden cheek again in Phineas Finn with his study of the tragically mismarried Laura Kennedy. Trollope, who was not given to self-congratulation, thought Laura was the best thing he had done in the novel. One would disagree only to add that he had as much right to be proud of all three front-line women, Laura, Violet and Madame Max. They each represent a significant complication of what, even to Victorian eyes, had been the excessively conventional heroines in many of the earlier novels. The species of womanhood Trollope had made his own is described, with gloating masculine approval, by the Contemporary reviewer of October 1866:
He has a genuine love of women, and can write of them with innocent delight. The rustle of their dresses, the free lingeringness of their movements, the gentle compulsion, the sweet, soft dignity, the light, the music, the reserved pathos, the whole aroma of their presence is never long absent from the pages of Mr Trollope.
In point of fact Trollope had shown himself able to create eccentric spinsters and in Miss Mackenzie had even devoted a whole novel to one. But he was best known and loved for his more ‘aromatic’ Eleanor Bolds, Mary Thornes and Lily Dales. Quiet, gently palpitating creatures, they express a Victorian ideal which must, to the intelligent woman of the time, have felt like a Victorian tyranny. George Eliot, one of the most intelligent, pungently dismissed the clinging love of the Trollopian heroine in a letter of 1870 – ‘men are very fond of that doglike affection’.
There is evidence to suggest that in the late sixties Trollope was coming to distrust the ‘doglike’ ideal he had so confidently propagated. More than this, that he was coming to distrust marriage, the social destiny of woman. Like Dickens, Trollope in middle age analyses unhappy marriages in his fiction. It is doubtful, or at least until we get the full biography unanswerable, whether as with Dickens this sprang from some skeleton hidden from us. Probably it was simply the longer sight of maturity (most nineteenth-century novels, as Thackeray observed, are ridiculously ‘juvenile’ on the subject of marriage). For whatever reason the clang of wedding bells and prison gates begin to sound ominously alike in Trollope's fiction after 1860. Not that his fundamental conviction about this or any other institution was broken. He never subscribed to the ‘wisdom of the beasts’, that civilized society could stand on any rock other than that of Christian marriage. But there is an increasing interest in wrecked relationships and doctrines which, if forced to put a name to, Trollope would probably have called ‘Bohemian’. They are not necessarily approved but the fact that they are so frequently there at all suggests a mind opening out.
There was a likely influence on Trollope at the time which may account for Phineas Finn's especially fresh perspective on the question of women and marriage, feminine dependence and independence. Work for the advanced Fortnightly Review must have brought him into contact with the ideas if not the person of John Stuart Mill, the leading exponent of women's rights. As Trollope wrote Phineas Finn, Mill was in parliament campaigning vigorously. Close readers will find five specific references to Mill and his feminist movement in the novel, but more notable is the way in which Trollope seems to have absorbed its influence as a willingness to question earlier certainties. In 1862 he declared flatly ‘The best right a woman has is the right to a husband and that is the right to which I would recommend every young woman.’ In 1867, the year when the emancipation of women was introduced in parliament, he does not seem so sure. The aristocrat Laura, the heiress Violet and the adventuress Madame Max are all in their ways seeking liberties, human rights some might say, normally denied their sex. Laura wants to ‘meddle with politics’ (Trollope's interestingly allusive phrase), Violet to be free of the marriage-market in which she is up for sale, Madame Max to make a place for herself in the male-dominated and traditionally exclusive ‘upper ten thousand’. The novel's main theme, the Phineas theme, is concerned with political independence and subjection to party, but it is counterpointed by these three subplots in which, inevitably, we are reminded of Mill's Subjection of Women and the ideal of feminine independence it holds out.
Laura is foremost in the trio. The initial physical description we have of her intimates a powerful personality stifling in the encumbrances of conventional womanhood:
Her face was very fair, though it lacked that softness which we all love in women… She would lean forward when sitting, as a man does, and would use her arms in talking, and would put her hand over her face, and pass her fingers through her hair, – after the fashion of men rather than women; – and she seemed to despise that soft quiescence of her sex in which are generally found so many charms. Her hands and feet were large, – as was her whole frame. Such was Lady Laura Standish. (Chapter 4.)
Moustached battleaxes are common enough among Trollope's women but what is evident here is that Laura's ‘manliness’ is not at all unattractive. Phineas is captivated. The heterodoxy of ‘manly-femininity’ can be better appreciated by comparing the above passage with a piece of sexual legislation by Trollope's contemporary, the popular philosopher Samuel Smiles:
A man no more desires in his wife a manly woman, than the woman desires in her husband a womanly man. A woman's best qualities do not lie in her intellect, but in her affections. She gives refreshment by her sympathies, rather than by her knowledge. ‘The brain-women,’ says Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘never interest us like the heart-women.’
Laura has manly traits and, as we see from her management of Phineas's early career, is a brain-woman. These sexually renegade aspects together with the piquant fact that they do not defeminize her make her from the start a character we watch with stimulated attention.
Early in the novel Laura is put through the classic Trollopian dilemma – marriage for love or money? She chooses money but for ostensibly noble motives. Having sacrificed her fortune to her brother she honestly believes that as Lady Laura Kennedy, millionaire's wife, she will be more useful to Phineas than as Lady Laura Finn, wife of a penniless Irish member. And, of course, she has certain ambitions of her own as a salon politician. Deliberately she rejects Phineas at Loughlinter with all Mr Kennedy's Perthshire estate spread before her. The scene is particularly arresting. Trollope is not a novelist who normally offers much of what James called ‘solidity of specification’. At most points we do not know what the characters are wearing, what furniture is around them, what the weather is doing. Nor does Trollope normally offer crises in his fiction. His is a relaxed and talkative art. Yet the scene at Loughlinter is intensely solid and critical: an example of the way Trollope can at will transcend the limitations which are sometimes mistakenly thought to be those of artistic inferiority. Phineas follows Laura to the mountain top to make his proposal in form as she looks out on all she would have to sacrifice were she to accept (the obvious religious analogy is hinted, but no more). When she turns to her suitor, gloriously clad in velvet hunting gear, Laura discovers him ‘handsome as a god’, a ‘Phoebus’ and a ‘royal Finn’. It is a moment of destiny for her yet she must turn him down, she has already accepted the millionaire Scot, Phineas's rival. The periphrasis with which she is forced to declare her preference is a confession of ulterior motive, ‘I have accepted the owner of Loughlinter as my husband…’
In the hundreds of pages which follow, this vivid scene hangs in the memory gathering ironic force as the consequences of Laura's decision hatch out. She and Kennedy find themselves chronically mismatched. Emotionally inert, nouveau riche and with a calvinistic sense of duty, Kennedy is through mere incompatibility a tyrant. Meaning well and not understanding the social euphemisms of her circle he insists, for example, that the ‘headaches’ by which Laura protects
herself from the ennui of her state are the result of stomach disorder. This is a small affliction. The full dreariness of the wife's condition is portrayed in the brilliant chapter ‘Sunday in Grosvenor Place’, where we see Lady Laura Kennedy withering from emotional and intellectual attrition, frightened to pick up a novel or so much as think of the political ‘meddling’ which had been her passion in life.
Trollope gently points the irony that Laura entered this calculated marriage to escape the limitations imposed on her sex in an unfair age. She had intended to use the world ‘as men use it and not as women do’. Aware that ‘a woman's life is only half a life, as she cannot have a seat in Parliament,’ she planned to make up the missing half by manipulating her husband's wealth and position. Alas she finds that the married woman is in no position to command her life, even in vicarious activity. She to whom ‘the Rights of Women was odious' discovers, in the bitterest way, that married women without them have no recourse against their husbands' enforceable ‘conjugal rights’ (which for Laura means legal rape).
Finally and most horribly the heart which she thought so well controlled betrays her. ‘Criminal’ thoughts and tendernesses for Phineas obsess her. Here, as Trollope well knew, he was treading dangerous ground and he turns to the code of hints and half statements which the more sophisticated Victorian novelists used in their necessarily constrained discussions of sex. Kennedy, whose moral vocabulary owes much to the Old Testament, accuses his wife of unworthy ‘idolatry’ for Phineas and the word rings in her mind:
PHINEAS AND LAURA AT LOUGHLINTER
Then Lady Laura was left alone to consider the nature of the accusation which her husband had brought against her; or the nature rather of the accusation which she had chosen to assert that her husband had implied. For in her heart she knew that he had made no such accusation, and had intended to make none such. The idolatry of which he had spoken was the idolatry which a woman might show to her cat, her dog, her picture, her china, her furniture, her carriage and horses or her pet maid-servant. Such was the idolatry of which Mr Kennedy had spoken; – but was there no other worship in her heart, worse, more pernicious than that, in reference to this young man?… when something almost like idolatry grew upon her, she determined that it should be the idolatry of friendship, that she would not sin even in thought, that there should be nothing in her heart of which she need be ashamed. (Chapter 44.)
The echo thrown back is, of course, ‘adultery’ and (to paraphrase) ‘whosoever looketh on a man to lust after him hath committed adultery with him already in her heart’. Laura has her weakest moment. Married life is impossible to her feeling as she does, residence in England impossible the marriage laws being what they are. She is forced into flight and the terrible realization that ‘the curse is to be a woman at all’.
There is a completion in Laura's story which is withheld in Phineas's. And this completion draws Trollope into a much less facile relationship with her. Crossgrained is, perhaps, a term which describes it. Superficially Laura is held to be blameworthy for her misfortunes; she preferred purse to passion, has made her bed and must lie in it. Yet simultaneously we are led to commiserate with her as the victim of an inequitable society, one of those whom Mill describes – ‘What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupation, but either such as cannot be filled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance.’ The contradiction between a Laura personally culpable yet socially victimized is not resolved in Trollope's novel nor, one suspects, in his mind. What we have is an enactment of the conflict current in 1867 on the female question. In the commentary on Laura we feel the impulse of protest and the inertia of entrenched social attitudes. Trollope, it was generally said in his obituaries, would be excellent material for future social historians: ‘his novels will be helpful in time to come to those who wish to learn what people talked about towards the close of this century.’ True as it is, this standard tribute to his realism does not go far enough. It is not only the surface of contemporary life which Trollope reflects but its unclear depths, not only what people were saying but what they were feeling and perhaps not saying.
Though Violet Effingham is further in the background than Laura her story is as carefully worked through. Bullied by the savage Chiltern before marriage, what protection, after she has surrendered, will she have from his ‘beastliness’? And Chiltern is only one jaw of the vice which is crushing her. Hawked round by her aunt as a desirable item on the marriage-market (marriage is like buying a house or a horse, she bitterly reflects), eligible maidenhood holds no pleasure. And to join the pathetic band of ageing spinsters of her own class with their Female Protestant Unmarried Women's Emigration Society is unthinkable. The only freedom Violet can enjoy is that of a nineteenth-century Millamant, constantly attracting and as constantly rejecting men: an assertion of power the world calls flirtatiousness and which she is too intelligent to see as other than a waste of life. Disgusted self-consciousness is characteristic of Violet's serious utterances:
‘…so many men love me! But, after all, what sort of love is it? It is just as when you and I, when we see something nice in a shop, call it a dear duck of a thing, and tell somebody to go and buy it, let the price be ever so extravagant. I know my own position, Laura. I'm a dear duck of a thing.’ (Chapter 10.)
In Violet as in Laura we feel defiant intelligence imprisoned in a crinoline. Unlike Laura she finally capitulates to the man she loves, at the fourth time of asking. Such scenes of reluctant consent are Trollope's stock-in-trade, but this is quite different from any other he wrote:
‘How is it then? Violet, speak to me honestly. Will you be my wife?’ She did not answer him, and he stood for a moment looking at her. Then he rushed at her, and, seizing her in his arms, kissed her all over, – her forehead, her lips, her cheeks, then both her hands, and then her lips again. ‘By G—, she is my own!’ he said. (Chapter 52.) Chiltern's liberties and his exultant pride in ownership are gross, suggestive of the animal appetites Violet fears in a husband. Her acceptance is acceptance only by virtue of being no refusal and the declaration of love which Chiltern demands from her has a paralysed intermittence: ‘I, – love, – you, – better, – than all the world beside; and I mean, – to be your wife, – some day.’ The fact that all this takes place at Loughlinter with the Kennedys' breaking marriage in the background confirms a sense that Violet like Laura is victimized by her sex. But in spite of the auguries this marriage between the Bohemian and flirt succeeds because, Trollope tells us, it was based on love, not, as with Laura, the intention to love.
Laura and Violet, despite the handicap of their sex, enjoy the place which English society grants ladies of their rank. Madame Max Goesler has not even this. She does have money, inherited from her Jewish husband, but as Bagehot observed, ‘The experiment is tried every day, and every day it is proved that money alone… will not buy “London Society”.’ With Madame Max, however, it is less an experiment than a Napoleonic campaign. As we follow her career we cannot help but notice how Trollope has drawn it parallel to Phineas's, but with sharper and less sympathetic lines. She too is an outsider possessed of sexual charm trying first to enter, then conquer, English society. Her climactic renunciation when she refuses to become mistress (or even wife) of Omnium is equivalent to Phineas's resignation from political office. And her consolation, like Phineas again, is that ‘she would still be free’.
Trollope was curiously ambivalent about outsiders like Madame Max Goesler who could not, or would rather not, reveal who their grandfathers were. Sometimes the Americans, Jews and middle Europeans who swarm in the late novels are shown as providing useful crossbreeding. This is one of the principal themes of The Duke's Children, where the future Duke of Omnium finds his mate not in the purple of his own rank but in an American girl of obscure ancestry. At other moments in the series the gra
ndfatherless outsiders are shown as predators and parasites battening on a decomposing English society. Such is the mood of The Eustace Diamonds, harshest of the Palliser novels.
Trollope's attitude to Madame Max in Phineas Finn is, one suspects, uncommitted for most of the novel. There is something sinister and predatory in the way she consciously trades on her charms. Phineas is attractive because ‘he cannot help himself’ and is redeemed by his blushes. Madame Max has no blushes; in captivating the Duke her techniques are those of the seductress. Trollope makes this clear in his carefully worded descriptions:
As she spoke her eyes sparkled more and more, and her colour went and came, and she shook her curls till they emitted through the air the same soft feeling of a perfume that her note had produced. Then her foot peeped out from beneath the black and yellow drapery of her dress, and the Duke saw that it was perfect. And she put out her finger and touched his arm as she spoke. Her hand was very fair, and her fingers were bright with rich gems. (Chapter 57.)
The transitive verbs ‘shook… put out’ emphasize the dispassionate intelligence operating the charm. At moments like this one shares Lady Glencora's apprehensions, if not her hysterical cattiness, lest ‘a thin, black-browed, yellow-visaged woman with ringlets and devil's eyes and a beard on her upper lip, – a Jewess’ should become the most powerful woman, bar one, in England. But Madame Max is, finally, a benign outsider: one who will help fortify the English social establishment not destroy it. And, curiously, it is to the Jew's widow (in chapter 64) that Trollope gives his finest tribute to the ‘ancient mystery of rank’. It was, one imagines, an irony he relished.
Phineas Finn, the Irish Member Page 3