Form and realism in six novels of Anthony Trollope 9783111343778, 9789027934642

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DE

PROPRIETATIBUS

LITTERARUM

edenda curat C. H. V A N SCHOONEVELD

Indiana University Series Practica,

87

FORM AND REALISM IN SIX NOVELS OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE

by

Joan Mandel Cohen

1976

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1976 Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

ISBN 9 0 2 7 9 3 4 6 4 9

Printed in the Netherlands

To my husband with all my love and thanks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank P r o f e s s o r s George Levine and Donald Gray who read and criticized in helpful ways a number of d r a f t s of the book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

7

Introduction

11

1. Orley Farm: Pain, Reality and the Green World

19

2. The Belton Estate: Romantic Comedy, Expansion and Deflation

37

3. The Bertrams: Social Satire, Melodrama and The Contingent World

47

4. The Claverings: Irony in Harmony and Tension with Romantic Comedy

63

5. Nina Balatka, Linda Tressel, Miss Mackenzie: Fairytale, Anti-Fairytale, Romantic Comedy Fairytale

83

The Art of Trollope's Realism: A Tentative Summary Index

. . .

100 105

INTRODUCTION

In 1874, and even earlier, many critics were agreeing with the anonymous reviewer of Phineas Redux who claimed, "It is not easy to say anything new of Mr. Anthony Trollope." (1) It is true that by that date Trollope had published 29 novels and was to publish 17 more b e fore he died in 1882. It became commonplace to assume, because so many works poured forth, year after year, that the author was writing the same novel over and over, simply changing the names of the hero and the heroine, or even, upon occasion, using the same names or the same characters, transported bodily from one country estate to another. And it is true that because of Trollope's prolixity, because of his announced distaste for plot as an end in itself (2) and because of his avowed belief in the primacy of the love story, (3) Trollope does often appear to employ a single plot formula for a number of novels. Further, the critics are partially correct in their assumption that the works do not change with the passage of time, for Trollope's skills do not develop in any single direction with the production of more and more novels. He writes and publishes works good and less good, dark and cheerful, complex and simple in organization almost simultaneously. (4) It would be difficult to say, for example, that Linda Tressel is significantly better, evidence of a higher stage of literary artistry, than Orley Farm which is published some five years earlier. The amazing pace he maintained, the heavy publication schedule he followed, would tend to cast doubt upon interpretations of the novels based upon the author's ever-advancing abilities. Nevertheless, too many critics have taken his autobiographical disclaimers for gospel, and have failed to pay any attention whatever to the novels' artistic organizations, and have insisted that there is only one world depicted in his pages time and time again with the same simple techniques, maintaining that the "world" is simply a photograph of the world which everyone in the nineteenth century would recognize as his own. In that regard, the kind of "realism" which certain Victorian critics, in particular, ascribed to Trollope was held by them to be antithetical to "art". Thus, he was accused of " r e alism" and then condemned for it because the realist was assumed to be not an artist but a mere copyist. (5) Said the Athenaeum critic with open condescension, "All accurate work is satisfactory to some extent, and this kind of ingenuity commands appreciation." (6) In order to deal with these issues of "Trollope's world" and of r e alism raised by the critics, I have endeavored to analyze six of Trollope's novels written between 1857 and 1869, the period Henry James

12 called his most productive and technically successful. (7) These works - Orley Farm (1862), The Belton Estate (1865), The Bertrams (1859), The Claverings (1867), Nina Balatka (1867), and Linda Tressel (1868) - although they do provide a valuable cross-sectional view of this artist's many talents, (8) have been selected primarily because of their independence of one another (they are none of them part of a continuing series), in order to illustrate how differences in worlds, in approaches to moral issues, and in techniques affect the ways in which they achieve what is called novelistic realism. The identification of a novelist's "world" is endemic to criticism of the Victorian novelists in general and to Trollope, in particular. (9) Although "world" as a critical term is seldom defined outright, it appears to mean some of the following things: that the Victorian (or any other) age is mirrored in the novels; that the novelist has constructed his own little universe which is meant to approximate, to some degree or other, the "world" as the audience of his time recognizes it, or as the audience of a later time thinks it must have been; that the author creates a world free, in varying degrees, from any recognizable world that has ever existed; that the author creates an imaginary place inhabited by a set of characters whose interaction or whose very existence possesses a vitality, a solidity, which one critic has termed "the sense of life". (10) Critics of the Victorian novel appear to assume, on the one hand, that the "world" is "life", and on the other, that the world is self-contained. What this has meant with regard to Trollope is that, in the main, criticism, particularly that which attempts to deal with the books in terms of "worlds", has focused upon the Barset series and the Parliamentary series because of the recurrence of mis en scène and character in a number of works which seem to form a visibly "on-going" society. It has then been postulated that Trollope's primary intention was to create a comédie humaine (11) and he has been judged principally upon the success or failure of that endeavor. It will be clear that I view these interpretations of Trollope's "world" as much too confining. A "world", as I see it, is a range within the novel in which the rules of the universe are constant. A world, in these terms, can include a set of interacting characters, plots, space, time, setting, or moral conditions, whatever elements divide and define the operating range of sets of possibilities for a c tion. It becomes obvious, then, that "world" is not a static but a contingent term, that the boundaries and rules must be defined novel by novel, world by world. Not only do worlds vary between novels, but in certain novels there are multiple worlds, each with its own rules and limits. Orley Farm, the first novel with which I deal in this study, illustrates the multiple worlds idea very well. In it, whole sets of characters are doomed to pain and limited in possibilities for action, while others are free to love and wed in a romantic and comic world. In The Belton Estate, The Bertrams, and The Claverings all the characters appear to inhabit a single world. However, the worlds are quite different from novel to novel. The world of The Belton Estate is ultimately romantic or comic; the world of The Bertrams is limited and painful for all; the world of The Claverings is limited for a

13 certain class of people only. These novels, each in its own way, deny the view that the Trollope "world" can be known through any single work. Moreover, the existence of multiple "worlds" signals variations in the degree and kind of realism intended in each novel. The way in which each of Trollope's novels is "lifelike" can vary not only from novel to novel but also from world to world within a novel. The reader's interpretation of each world depends on the expectations that are established within the novel for the kinds of characters and situations which can occur. These expectations are primarily created through Trollope's employment of integrated sets of conventions for fiction, or "modes". (12) Among these "modes" are r o mance, comedy, irony, tract, fairytale, satire, melodrama and r e alism. Trollope's novels, like those of most Victorian novelists, are mixtures of modes, which partly correspond to the mixtures of worlds. The employment of each mode demands that the world be shown to operate by certain rules. Conversely, in order to describe a world in a particular way, the author is constrained to employ the conventions of certain modes and not others. Thus, the nature of the world and the conventions of the mode are connected. Both worlds and modes appear to be defined by the same elements. Realism as a mode, for example, may be differentiated from r o mance in part by virtue of the distinction between freedom and limitation, in the same way that the "real" world is differentiated from the "romance" or "Green World". (13) Romance, as I am defining it, (partly in opposition to realism but also as a complementary mode) is composed of conventions which may or may not be antithetical to the conventions of the realistic mode. The conventions I am ascribing to romance include: the possibility of escape, freedom for individual endeavors, the elimination of consequences, moral or otherwise, for actions, and (if romance is allied with comedy or considered a synonym for romantic comedy), the necessity for a happy ending, preferably celebrated with a marriage union. The conventions which I am connecting with the realistic mode are, on the other hand: the existence of a complex, fully-documented society which limits individual freedom, the necessity that such a society be shown to interact in some ways with the characters, and the validation of a chain of moral consequences for actions. In the "English realistic tradition", a mixture of modes - "realism", "romance", "irony", "fairytale", "comedy" - helps to create the appearance of realism which the critics associate with Trollope and other English novelists of the century. In this kind of fiction, even elements of modes not realistic in themselves are absorbed into the mixture. For example, the "happy ending", a convention of the fairytale mode, is a standard ingredient in works of the "English realistic tradition". Trollope's novels combine modes in different ways to play upon the reader's expectations. Although no one expects social interaction in the fairytale, no one expects satire to show people precisely as they are, and everyone expects exaggeration in melodrama, when modes are combined, expectations jar against one another in such a way that the illusion of realism may result. Orley Farm relegates the conven-

14 tions of romantic comedy and realism to separate worlds. In The Belton Estate romantic comedy and deflationary comedy are included in the same world. The Bertrams links social satire and melodrama. In The Claverings irony is superimposed over both romantic comedy and realism to produce disjunctive solutions for the hero and heroine and for other characters as well. A novel by Trollope, then, can, by deflating the romantic comedy ending or by heightening the emotional content of certain scenes to contrast with scenes in the satiric mode, or by dealing ironically with the sexual double standard, approach realism from a number of fairly unorthodox directions. The novels can, however, achieve the appearance of realism in more orthodox ways as well. One of the most obvious is through the reproduction of surface or texture. Trollope controls the novel's texture-evocative quality, creating, in Lionel Trilling's terms, "the look and feel of things, how things are done and what they are worth and what they cost . . . . " (14) The skillful deployment of physical paraphernalia is what C. S. Lewis calls "realism of presentation" or "the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpably vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail." (15) George Levine introduces as a criterion for assessing the result of this endeavor the presence of a "densely-realized society", a fictional society in which there are various kinds of interaction among individuals on many levels. (16) Clearly, the "density" concept implies more than random, prolific, "sharply-observed" detail. Even the presence of a textured, densely-realized world within a novel, however, does not guarantee that the novel will appear realistic in every way. Lewis himself perceived this when he coined another term, " r e alism of content", to talk about that qualify within the work of art, apart from the weight of sheer physical detail, which makes its events seem "probable" or "true to life". (17) It is clear that Trollope uses a number of techniques at once to create what critics generally refer to as his realistic vision of life, and that "photography" is perhaps the least of these. Although Trollope's realism has been the most often heralded a s pect of his work, it is almost impossible to discuss the novels without dealing with their moral content in relation to their narrative o r ganization. (18) His skillful manipulation of the audience's judgments and reactions, and the integration of moral exposition with plot development are both aspects of his technical facility. (19) Critic Ruth apRoberts (20) argues persuasively that the novels tend to share a single moral design, a format in which Trollope imitates life by creating situations in which many positions are permitted to contend but no one position is allowed to dominate. The structure, as a r e sult, is essentially a continuous non-dramatic argument in which plot is simply background for the free play of idea against idea. She calls the moral attitude of the author "Situation Ethics" and the design "Situation Aesthetics". (21) Her terms, although they may accurately describe the moral and physical organization of some novels or parts of novels, surely do not do equal justice to all of them. For one thing, every mode has a different moral outline which is related to the narrative outline. The romantic comedy mode (22),

15 for example, promises that the good characters, however foolish, will, after a moderate struggle, be successful. The fairytale begins with a structure in which the hero meets some palpable form of evil and triumphs over it. Satire criticizes the existing order, making it clear that the world is imperfect and that the characters in it are either foolish, evil, or impotent. Some form of deflation, as a r e sult, is demanded at narrative intervals throughout. The expectations for moral exposition as well as for narrative development appear to be compartmentalized within each individual mode. When several modes are combined in the same novel the expectations for any single moral structure can be disappointed, since more than one design is presented. The effect, however, is not to suggest that many or all moral positions are equally valid but to force the audience to rely upon the maker of the patterns, the controlling narrator, to interpret their meaning. In such divergent formats as those of Nina Balatka, Linda Tressel, The Bertrams, and The Claverings, the narrator makes fairly obvious what position the audience is to take toward the issues and characters he presents. In Nina Balatka he enforces distaste for Christians and pity for Jews. In Linda Tressel the audience is encouraged to reject the idea of parental infallibility. In The Bertrams the satiric speaker gains the reader's assent to his view that the world is exploitative and inequitable and that love is the only antidote to society's dehumanizing processes. Even in The Claverings in which the narrator apparently refrains from overt interference, it is evident that although there are several moral patterns and several possible interpretations of the action, one of those interpretations is more correct than the others. The moral outline of events varies from novel to novel and even within each novel, but it is visibly controlled. That does not, however, mean that plot becomes unimportant. On the contrary, Trollope generally designs works in which the narrative moves toward physical, emotional, moral and dramatic climaxes. Neither The Belton Estate nor The Bertrams, for instance, is an example of "Situation Aesthetics", although there are, as always, a number of different moral positions represented. Nina Balatka, openly "argumentative", avoids the climaxes of drama, as apRoberts suggests that Trollope novels generally do, but it is not "casuistical" either since no f r e e play of idea against idea is permitted. Analysis of the six novels is aimed at showing how Trollope organizes plots and plot segments, develops scenes and sequences of scenes and employs such devices as the interfering narrator, the letter, the individual character rumination, the description of place, and the chapter division to develop worlds, manipulate modes and perspectives on moral issues, to create the appearance of reality. Orley Farm with multiple plots and worlds and combinations of modes, and The Belton Estate with its single world both give evidence of the novelist's comprehension of the requirements of various comic forms and his knowing departure from them. The Bertrams indicates how the author can manipulate satire and romantic comedy conventions, setting society against the individual to implement an almost naturalistic premise about the nature of the self in the social system. In The

16 Claverings what is most singular is the ironic mode and its unusual relationship with the romantic comedy mode. In Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, Trollope abandons the familiar English social milieu to experiment with romance, while in Miss Mackenzie he creates the social fairytale out of realistic materials. All these works reveal the presence of a sophisticated and imaginative novelist transforming convention and life into art. NOTES (1) "Phineas Redux", rev. Athenaeum 10 (January 1874), 53. (2) "I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots." An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir, Shakespeare Head edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1929), 166. (3) "It is admitted that no novel can be made interesting or successful without love." Autobiography, 160. (4) A. O. J . Cockshut's thesis in his fine and convincing study, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955), is that the novels do become darker late in Trollope's career. However, the support for this thesis is based upon a selected group of novels, and there are other novels, both early and late, which seem not to fit this pattern quite so well. (5) "Chief among the writers of the class novel is Mr. Anthony Trollope; his faculty is really amazing. . . He photographs the . . . exterior accurately; he does not go below the surface. . . " "Orley Farm", rev. Dublin University Magazine 61 (April 1863), 437, rptd. in Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), 165; "Such delineations are, to say the truth, very low art; and while they do not corrupt the morals, they may degrade the tastes . . . Mr. Trollope, it has been truly said, is a mere photographer; he manipulates with admirable skill. . . but he never attains to the dignity of an artist." "Orley Farm", rev. National Review 16 (January 1863), 35. (6) "Phineas Redux", rev. Athenaeum, 53. (7) Henry James, "Anthony Trollope", in Partial Portraits (London and New York: Macmillan, 1905), 124. (8) Published between 1859 and 1868 were the following novels: The Bertrams (1859); Framley Parsonage (1861); Orley Farm (1861/62); Rachel Ray (1863); The Small House at Allington (1863); Can You F o r give Her ? (1864/65); Miss Mackenzie (1865); The Belton Estate(1865); The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867); The Claverings (1867); Nina Balatka (1867); Linda Tressel (1868). (9) Notice, for example, the following titles: The Dickens World; The Dickens World and Yoknaptawpha County; Dickens: The World of His Novels; The George Eliot Country; The Country of George Eliot; and chapters in recent works of criticism, entitled, "The Trollope Worlds", in Bradford Booth, Anthony Trollope (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958); "The World of the Novel and the Real World", in P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope (London: Routledge and

17 Kegan Paul, 1968); and Gerald Brace, "The World of Anthony Trollope", Texas Quarterly, 4, No. 3 (1961), 180-88. See also the discussion of novelistic worlds in Malcolm Bradbury, "Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 1) An Approach Through Structure", Novel 1 (Fall 1967), 45-52. (10) Arthur Mizener, "The Realistic Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Trollope's Palliser Novels", in The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 29. (11) Brace, "World of Anthony Trollope", 183. (12) The definitive statement of a theory of modes must, of course, be that of Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), 33-67, but Robert Scholes in "Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 4) An Approach Through Genres", Novel 2 (Winter 1969), 101-11, modifies the theory to make it more specifically applicable to novel criticism. What both seem to share is the general feeling that fictions tend to be of either one mode or another. Both also seem to see modes as chronological developments in a history of fiction. This makes such schemes rather more useful for classification than for analysis. I have tried to talk about specific novels and how they work or fall to work in modal terms. In my view, classification, which is a common and useful activity of Trollope critics, must be supplemented by analysis of individual works. I conceive of modal organization in part as a technique that Trollope employs to create various kinds of effects. (13) Frye distinguishes between two worlds in Shakespeare's comedies, what he calls the "normal world" and the "green world", of escape and freedom from consequences. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), 142. I use the term "Green World" almost synonymously with "romantic comedy" world, and consider his "normal world" the "real" world, generally speaking. (14) Lionel Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel", The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N. Y . : Anchor-Doubleday, 1953), 205. (15) C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961; rpt. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 57. (16) George Levine, "Romola as Fable", in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 81.

(17) Lewis, Experiment, 59. (18) Trollope's insistence on the importance of conveying the moral component of experience in fiction is easily documented. See, for example, "On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement", in Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable; Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), 118. I think you must have chosen your novels unfortunately if you have found in them the bad and not the good lessons. That the novelist deals with the false and forward, as well as with the good and gracious, with lust as well as love, with the basest of characters as well as with the best, is of course true. How else shall he do

18

his work as professor? Does not all our sacred teaching do the same ? (19) Park Honan, in a somewhat unfairly reductionist view of Robert Polhemus's The Changing World of Anthony Trollope which appears in Novel 3 (Spring 1970), 272-73, dismisses the term "moral complexity" as not useful in explaining how Trollope functions as an a r t ist. As he correctly points out, complex morality does not necessarily make a novel good. In desiring the complete separation of architectonics and morality, however, Honan goes to the other extreme, ignoring what are clearly the technical aspects of Trollope's manipulation of moral perspectives as part of his effort to control reader reaction. (20) Ruth apRoberts, "Trollope's Casuistry", Novel 3 (Fall 1969), 17-27. See also for an amplification of these views: Ruth apRoberts, The Moral Trollope (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. P r e s s , 1971). (21) apRoberts, "Casuistry", 25. (22) Romance, as I am defining it for the purposes of this study, has affinities with Frye's term, "comedy". In "comedy", as he sees it, "What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition . . . and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will . . . As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the audience has recognized all along to be the moral and desirable state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience (takes place) . . . . " Frye, Anatomy, 163-64. This, in my t e r m s , is "romantic comedy", a particular species of romance. I am not, by and large, considering romance, in the traditional definition of Walter Scott, as a work or part of a work which operates by "alarming our credulity . . . by . . . pictures of romantic affection and sensibility which . . . are of r a r e occurrence among those who actually live and die." (Quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. P r e s s ; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 142.) What both Frye and Scott's definitions share, however, is an emphasis upon the notion of escape, in different ways, from the bonds and restrictions of society, however temporarily. Edwin Muir says the same thing, "It is indispensable, then, that there should be an escape from life . . . (but) the hero, having had his fling, must return to safety and order . . . " The Structure of the Novel (New York: Harcourt-Harbinger, n . d . ) , 22. Frye notes, also (Anatomy, 162) that "comedy blends . . . into . . . romance." Romance seems to mean then, in the two senses in which I use it in this book (implying escape within society's terms or apart from it into a much less thoroughly defined area, usually foreign in setting) "escape", freedom from consequences, freedom from societal p r e s s u r e s , although it need not necessarily mean that the characters who p a r take of its conditions do invariably abandon society.

1. ORLEY FARM: PAIN, REALITY AND THE GREEN WORLD

Orley F a r m , (1) published in 1862, five y e a r s after the successful B a r c h e s t e r Towers, is a double-plot novel in which the leading c h a r a c t e r , Lady Mason, accused of forgery, is compelled to defend h e r honor in court and among h e r f r i e n d s . In the subplot, two young people fall in love, overcome obstacles, and m a r r y . The relationship between these two plots provides a key to the author's multiple worlds' design. The existence of several worlds, bounded by place, time, and p o s s i bility, s e r v e s to deny the blithely unsupported critical assertion that in this novel " . . . the whole picture is full of sunshine". (2) Place is the most visible border between worlds. Sets of c h a r a c t e r s a r e relegated to separate a r e a s , defined, it will be seen, by the kinds of existences and actions possible in them. The "places" a r e estates belonging to different c h a r a c t e r s which provide the setting f o r different kinds and segments of the action. Orley F a r m itself is the novel's starting point, the source as well as the setting f o r the original action; it i s , a f t e r all, the forgery of a will, leaving this property to Lucius Mason, which sets the plot in motion. The d e s i r e to p o s s e s s Orley F a r m is the animating device of the plot, explicable upon the grounds that land defines people in the Victorian e r a and is an index to their social and moral positions. The virtual necessity to p o s s e s s the property in o r d e r to pass it and the rank it establishes on to h e r son is the only reason f o r Lady Mason's c r i m e . Despite the importance of Orley F a r m , the principal action does not actually take place t h e r e but at the Cleeve, the neighboring estate belonging to Lady Mason's friend, Sir P e r e g r i n e Orme. Lady Mason goes to the Cleeve seeking protection and remains throughout the c e n t r a l section of the n a r r a t i v e . The Cleeve r e p r e s e n t s , before Lady Mason makes herself a p a r t of its life, an existence isolated f r o m disruptive f o r c e s ; it is the quiet home of a r i s t o c r a t s dedicated to conserving the values of the past. Nonetheless, the harmony which exists between its inmates, Sir P e r e g r i n e O r m e , his beloved daughter-inlaw, and h e r son and h e i r , is disturbed, and their peace permanently shattered by the revelations which a r e made t h e r e . The Cleeve's loss of isolation and security is significant because what takes its place is a new sense of the interconnection of all human beings who, by sharing in Lady Mason's confessions, realize their identification with all s i n n e r s . Separated f r o m both these worlds is the world of Noningsby, home of the Staveleys, a wealthy and respected family. It is a world in which romantic lovers can flourish, a holiday world in which c h a r a c t e r s play games of love, kept f r o m pain by the benevolent despotism

20

of the Santa Claus-patriarch, Judge Staveley, who is the father of Madeline Staveley, the heroine of the romantic love plot. The principal characters may visit at Noningsby but they are forbidden to r e main. Instead, the estate seems quite protected from the incursions of others who are not given to share the kind of life permitted there. The main action, then, which is painful and dramatic, has very little to do with this place which provides a setting for comedy and romance. Time is related to place as a boundary between worlds and is a unique expression of the character of this particular novel; time and possibility and freedom are linked. The worlds of Orley Farm and the Cleeve are both affected by Lady Mason's illegal action twenty years earlier. She cannot escape from the past which enforces stasis by forbidding present and future-oriented actions. Further, she involves Sir Peregrine in her fate and by doing so condemns him to share her burden of enforced remembrance. In the world of Orley Farm-Cleeve, characters, though they try, cannot control time and make it serve them; their attempts are futile and pathetic. Lady Mason, by sharing her guilt with Sir Peregrine, by encouraging him to love her, elicits his proposal of marriage which is a noble but helpless attempt to forestall the actions of cruel time by asserting the right of older people to romance. Lucius, too, by exercising his rights of property in order to modernize and expand Orley Farm brings down upon himself and his mother the vengeance of the angry Dockwrath. TTiese examples indicate that a character's freedom to act in the p r e s ent is dependent upon the nature of time's restrictions in his world. As might be expected, in the world of Noningsby time is no enemy for it can be controlled. The future and not the past reigns. Such a setting implies possibility, flexibility, opportunity. Time is not absent, but it is a holiday time, implying harmony between man and his environment. In point of fact, the romantic plot, the growth of Felix Graham's love for Madeline Staveley and her chaste reciprocal passion, is centered around Christmas festivities and other joyous holiday occasions. Judge Staveley is time's agent for he can first enforce a waiting period before Madeline's marriage to Felix Graham and then, in a simple benevolent gesture, rescind his ban, manipulating time to effect the immediate happy union of the lovers. Since time is subject to human control in the world of Noningsby, it is not a b a r r i e r to happiness. Human control and individual freedom are the most important defining elements of "worlds". Spatial and temporal dimensions are merely the grounds for the distinctions which the author is making based upon the relative opportunities for freedom of action available to different sets of characters. At Orley Farm and then at the Cleeve there is no freedom. Not only is Lady Mason doomed, but she has transmitted her doom to her son Lucius and to Sir Peregrine and Mrs. Orme. Humans are given the opportunity to determine, to a certain extent, their initial actions but not the outcomes of these actions. Nevertheless, individual actions and their consequences matter extremely in the principal world. Lady Mason's forgery cannot be an isolated and forgotten action; Sir Peregrine's proposal affects his life forever; Lucius' decision to have his land back from Dockwrath

21

cannot be recalled; the passage of twenty years time cannot be erased. In radical contrast, at Noningsby, which is, in Northrop Frye's terms a "Green World", (3) consequences do not seem to matter, and individual freedom is celebrated. As if to emphasize the impossibility of fulfillment for characters in the principal world, in the Green World anything is possible. A penniless, radical-minded idealist lawyer can, if he asks, marry the fair young daughter of a wealthy upper class judge. He is not, unlike Lucius Mason, burdened by the past, and all the very real obstacles to the match vanish. For example, Felix Graham has already got a fiancée, a girl of the streets to whom he is playing Pygmalion, educating her to be a lady. This is fairytale enough, but the greater fairytale is the ease with which she vanishes, abandoned by Felix, married off to a handy drugstore clerk, permitting Felix to win and wed Madeline Staveley without so much as a backward glance. Even physical suffering becomes an occasion, in the world of Noningsby, for a character to assert his freedom from consequences. Felix, hunting at Noningsby, falls from his horse and comes near to being killed, but it turns out that he has only broken some bones, and his convalescence in Madeline's home becomes a happy time since itbrings them closer together. The contrast between the lives of Felix Graham and Madeline Staveley in the Green World and the Life of Lady Mason is meant to assert the distinction Trollope is exploring throughout the novel between r e sponsibility and freedom. Freedom means more than freedom from pain or death or even from consequences of action. It means liberation from moral responsibility as well. The Green World is illustrative of a kind of existence in which, because everyone is good and no one really suffers, there are no moral dilemmas. It is not the case that Felix and Madeline are irresponsible, simply that their world does not require a great deal from them. The existence of the Green World serves to set in relief the moral design of the principal world. That structure is expressed as a series of moral choices first for the characters and then for the audience to make. Lady Mason, of course, is involved, before the novel begins, in the selection of alternative actions based upon opposing principles. As the novel proper commences she determines upon a course of action which involves others and forces them also to choose. By turning to Sir Peregrine for assistance she makes him a partner in her own dilemma. Her next choice arises when he proposes marriage. She must decide then whether or not to confess her crime. In the second part of the novel, Sir Peregrine and Mrs. Orme and (much later) her son Lucius, react, basing their reactions upon their knowledge of her guilt, by making decisions which illuminate for the audience the difficulties involved in the judgment of one human being by another. Trollope causes his audience to recognize these difficulties by maintaining for the reader a constant tension between justice and mercy. By withholding the information of the heroine's guilt for more than one-third of the novel, he forces the reader to postpone a final judgment. Although Orley Farm develops the theme that all action results in moral reaction and that man is a free agent responsible for his sins, it is at the same time a humane exploration of the indi-

22

vidual's responses to the often antithetical pressures to be "moral" and to be "successful". The author's power to create sympathy for the sinner while at the same time judging and condemning the sin heightens the reader's awareness of his own humanity, and of his likeness to the heroine-sinner as a representative of erring mankind. Trollope carries out this plan by creating moral agents who operate within the drama but at the same time serve as surrogates for the reader and take the burden of moralizing away from the author. Mrs. Orme on one side and Dockwrath and Joseph Mason on the other are those figures. Dockwrath and Mason consider themselves agents of justice, and the lawyer, by reviving the criminal case against his neighbour, does set up the plot of reaction which forces Lady Mason to reevaluate her original action in terms of its effect upon others and upon her own conscience. Dockwrath and Mason see themselves as righting a wrong which has upset the balance of nature and, despite the malfunctioning of the legal system which twice finds the lady innocent, they are correct in their perception of her guilt, though ultimately powerless to change the legal verdict. They provide, though they are despicable characters in many ways, the counter-argument to the author's and Mrs. Orme's desire to replace justice with mercy. In point of fact, Trollope's satire upon the law and Mason's harangues against it are saying the same thing. Legal justice is impossible to obtain. It is ironic, however, that Mason should turn to Dockwrath, still another lawyer, in hopes that at long last he will be awarded his land through a decision of the courts. The importance of both of them as agents of justice lies primarily in their successful efforts to revive the case, efforts which have only a minimal connection with the mercy theme. In radical contrast to Dockwrath and Mason, Mrs. Orme is an agent of mercy as well as of justice. She functions as the conscience of Lady Mason, bringing about her repentance and conversion. Therefore, just as Dockwrath is responsible for precipitating the action of the plot to bring the "criminal" to trial and to get her convicted, Mrs. Orme is the instigator of the internal plot in which Lady Mason progresses through the Christian stages of confession and repentance, toward Divine forgiveness for sin. (4) Mrs. Orme, furthermore, has a double role. Though she causes the conversion of the heroine she is at the same time directing her interpretation of events toward the audience. Because she is basically asocial and unconcerned with what the world outside the Cleeve might think of her she is in a good position to advise the audience. Mrs. Orme's internal struggles with the problem of mercy versus justice reflect, infact, the difficulties with which the audience must cope. Her own doubts cast light upon their doubts with regard to the proper attitude to take toward an avowed criminal, and it is instructive to see how she succeeds in accepting the crime within her moral framework. She does it by comprehending the pressures which have brought Lady Mason to the point of committing the crime - mother love, an unhappy life, an ungrateful husband - and by conceiving of the twenty-year period after the crime, a time of pent-up guilt with no outlet in confession, as a hell from which the criminal is only

23

just now being released. If Mrs. Orme can cause Lady Mason to alter her relationship with God, to confess and to repent, she can ignore the fact that Lady Mason has broken man's laws. Since "the law is an ass", her view which is at the same time judgmental and merciful is a valid corrective to Dockwrath and Mason. Mrs. Orme functions as a spokeswoman for the author's position. Her merciful but not laissez-faire view of human sin reflects Trollope's acceptance of fallen man's nature and his potential for goodness. Though he does, as intrusive author, suggest various alternative views, he does not subvert Mrs. Orme's interpretation of events. Mrs. Orme is, therefore, the second most important figure in the novel, making a bridge between the author and the audience. Because one of Trollope's objects is to force the reader into viewing the old situation continually through new eyes, giving him, as it were, more and more "eyes", Mrs. Orme is important to him. However, as a representative of the ideal of abstract justice, Sir Peregrine Orme, less flexible than she, has another function as he debates with Mrs. Orme and with himself the proper attitude toward sin. His decisions, though essentially the same as hers, are reached by another route. While Mrs. Orme translates justice into mercy, and Dockwrath and Mason give vengeance the name of justice, Sir Peregrine alone cannot distort the system by which he copes with life, cannot distort "justice". He is destroyed by the battle between his love and his ideals. His horror at sin and his fear for the sanctity of the family name conflict with his emotional needs, with the desire to protect the woman whom he has come to love because she has needed him. The dilemma causes him anguish; his pain defines his humanity but makes him at the same time impotent and "dead" in life. If Mrs. Orme and Dockwrath are agents of judgment Sir Peregrine is both an ideal and a victim; as an "ideal" he is shown to be victimized when he becomes involved with the less-than-ideal, pain-filled world. Through these characters Trollope manipulates his audience, overturning certain stereotyped notions and expectations. He shows, for example, that sacred mother love is the cause of the commission of a serious crime, and that filial love, as expressed by Lucius' devotion to Lady Mason, can be diminished by a sense of wrong. Further, although crime must be punished one way or another, the law, the supposed repository of the power to decide guilt and innocence, e r r s . It exonerates a guilty person. Through Lady Mason, Lucius, Sir P e r e grine and Mrs. Orme, Trollope shows that humans are fallible, and right action not always clear, and, if clear, not always happy. The moral design reflects Trollope's consistent effort to destroy complacency in the audience (as a number of recent critics have noted) by forcing them to deal with the problems of moral choice raised initially through the heroine and her sin, and, beyond this, to manipulate the way in which the audience perceives and considers the moral alternatives, and to lead them to accept his own perhaps tolerant but not non-judgmental assessment. The narrative develops in several different directions, reflecting all of these intentions. In the Green World, the plot moves conventionally toward the integration of its hero into a life without responsi-

24

bility, a life of game, and, simultaneously, directs itself toward the uniting of the two predictably romantic lovers. Nearly all of Trollope's romantic love plots are climaxed with marriages. The novel depicts a series of love stories, marriages in potentio, but the differences between them are manifestations of the differences between worlds. Lucius Mason and Sophia Furnival go through the motions of courting at Noningsby but he is doomed to unhappiness because of his mother's crime. Perry Orme proposes to Madeline Staveley but she loves Felix Graham, and Perry therefore must remain a part of the Cleeve and its sadness. Sir Peregrine and Lady Mason fall in love in what is a poignant May-December romance but their marriage is impossible. The felicitous conclusion to a romantic love plot is conceivable only within the Green World. The unhappy love stories in the pain-filled world emphasize the conventionality of the romance plot in the Green World. While Felix and Madeline work out their happy ending, the principal plot moves downward, toward the trial of Lady Mason for forgery, and toward the eternal separation of the aging lovers. The plot is organized around the confessions and the trial. Most of the novel is devoted to exploring the responses of others to the suspicion or knowledge of Lady Mason's guilt. The natural pattern, then, is of revelation or confession. In point of fact, there are two levels of revelation. Lady Mason makes known her guilt to those people for whom she cares. The author reveals the truth about her crime to the audience. The two disclosures are not made simultaneously. Instead, Trollope chooses to keep the audience in suspense for a good part of the novel, involving them in Lady Mason's fate before they can obtain the knowledge with which to make accurate judgments. In effect, he makes the audience into participants, along with some of the other characters, in the act of discovery. The novel's moral organization is based upon the idea that Lady Mason will come to recognize her sin and to confess, and to repent and to expiate it. The plot depicts her soul's progress through these stages, aided by Mrs. Orme. At the same time, when Lady Mason goes from Orley Farm to the Cleeve the plot chronicles the abandonment of isolation and therefore of "safety" by all those who dwell at the Cleeve. Her confessional pattern is the direct result of the confession of love by Sir Peregrine. Everyone comes to share her experience and in sharing it to change. The reader, too, is a participant in the tensions of life at the Cleeve during and after the confessions. The original suspense with regard to the truth about Lady Mason's guilt is superceded by a greater tension built out of an involvement with the heroine and those who are responding to her suffering. Though it appears that the plot is going to unite all the characters in love, the union can only be temporary and each individual is fated to isolation; the movement is toward permanent separation. Lady Mason's journey to Germany with her son, and his eventual immigration to Australia without her, Perry Orme's voyages and safaris, are illustrative of the final expression of loneliness for all, of enforced separation from loved ones. The confession-union-isolation pattern is complemented by the operative metaphor of the trial which informs the entire structure of

25

the work. The trial provides, first of all, the reason for the plot. Twenty years earlier, we are told at the opening of the novel, there was a trial at which Lady Mason, accused of forgery, was acquitted by the jury. The plot chronicles the fearful progress toward the s e c ond trial, a symmetrical pattern. Although, technically, the second trial is the climax of the action, it becomes increasingly evident through the juxtaposition of the "confession" pattern with the preparation for the trial that Lady Mason's internal change is more significant to Trollopethan what the law decides. Nonetheless, fear for the safety of the heroine motivates the expectations for the major trial scene. It is actually the case, however, that Lady Mason is "on trial" throughout the novel. The audience is the jury, and evidence attesting to her character and to her guilt is presented by the people around her, and by the kinds of actions she performs (i.e. principally her confessions) within the novel's present. The trial simply formalizes the book's moral and structural preoccupations. As more facts are learned a greater certainty comes to exist that Lady Mason has committed forgery, and the audience in its role as jury is in possession of more information than that which is available to characters within the novel. Judgments are made but continually reevaluated in the light of new evidence. Once Trollope reveals all the truth, however, the position of the audience vis a vis Lady Mason is changed and she becomes a figure of sympathy, a person not so much to be judged as to be understood. In the second half of the novel, then, Trollope is her attorney instead of her judge, and the audience her inner circle of concerned friends rather than her jury. The plot patterns which I have described, the movement toward the public trial and the impetus toward confession and expiation on a p e r sonal level and toward the involvement of all characters in the fate of the heroine and in her ultimate isolation, are complemented by the comic sequences or comic plots which surround and are connected with the main action. The Green World is a comic world, in the largest sense, expansive, benign, present and future-oriented. In addition it is a place where, as we have seen, characters can play games and remain f r e e from consequences. Felix Graham alone dares to be critical of the self-sufficient society he sees there, but even he comes to accept its laws and is absorbed into the comedy. In radical contrast, comedy as commentary or criticism is an important plot element in the pain-filled world. There are two kinds of comedy in Orley Farm in addition to the comedy of the Green World - domestic comedy, represented by the chronicle of the marital difficulties of Mr. Furnival, Lady Mason's lawyer, and his wife which is a commentary upon the actions of Lady Mason, and comic satire which works through such figures as Mr. Moulder in order to convey the attitude of the world toward Lady Mason and toward the abstract issues of justice and mercy. There is, however, no fully developed comic plot in the pain-filled world. Mr. Furnival who has been married for many years to an aging and no-longer-beautiful wife is attracted to Lady Mason. His wife, s u s pecting much more than there has ever been between them, ignorant of the coming trial, seeks out Lady Mason at the Cleeve, makes a

26

fool of herself, and returns home chastened and wiser. Lady Mason and Mrs. Furnival are placed in situations in which they must act for self-preservation, must act or choose to act anti-socially or i m properly. Mrs. Furnival, however, does not destroy her marriage, does not face any serious consequences from her single act of selfassertion. She has only the discomfort of self-comprehended foolishness to bear. Ironically, she has been in part correct about Mr. Furnival's infatuation. She has sensed the danger to her marriage but has been confused between the appearance and the reality of truth. Lady Mason, too, has been confused. She has failed to take into consideration the consequences of her action, has failed to see her crime as antisocial action. She has been morally blind just as Mrs. Furnival has been "blind" to the truth about the romance she has imagined. Character comedy, here joined to pathos, examines the same questions which are being treated more painfully in the main plot. Another commentator figure who is in some respects comic, Mr. Moulder would be quite at home with "flat characters" such as the Smallweeds, Krook, and the Veneerings. He is a representative of the vice of absolute selfishness as expressed by his gourmandizing habits as well as by his attitudes toward moral issues. (5) Moulder is shown at his Christmas board, serving up an almost mythically elaborate dinner to assembled relatives and friends. He is old Father Christmas, fat and jolly, except that his jollity is never more than a surface thing, and that underneath he is despicable. His concern is not for his guests except as they praise him and his table. Moulder bullies his wife and relations and "justifies" his behavior on the basis of his concern for their welfare. At his Christmas "festivity" Moulder overstuffs his guests because he has "created" and paid for the bird they are eating. Their fullness is evidence of his prosperity. There is a certain parallel between his and Lady Mason's rationales for action. Moulder is all selfishness masquerading as altruism. Lady Mason commits her crime for her son and never admits that the pride in the son she has created, which is also selfishness masquerading as altruism, is the cause of her illegal action, an action which places Lucius in a false position in relation to his world. Moulder's scenes suggest that gourmandizing is both a physical and an emotional activity and provide a visible corrective to platitudes regarding the virtues of mother love and misconceptions regarding the motivations for criminal activity. Mr. Moulder's simple physical presence as a comically exaggerated expression of one of the principal issues of the novel is complemented by what he says about those issues. His comments about the nature of law and justice make him an advocate for one segment of the world's opinion which would not otherwise be represented in the novel. Moulder himself is connected to the main plot only through his brother-inlaw John Kenneby, a witness at both trials. This position, however, gives him the license to express his view that Lady Mason is guilty but that justice will not prevail because the law is administered by men and is also manipulated by men who have, he suspects, the basest of motives. Moulder sees the trial as a show which will exonerate Lady Mason. Should it be necessary to intimidate witnesses in order to at-

27

tain that end, he would not be surprised. His is a voice, then, which anticipates the distortions of the legal system visible in the trial of Lady Mason for perjury, which expresses the point of view of those in the audience who themselves feel that law will not produce truth. If the discovery of "truth" ought to result in conviction for crime then the acquittal of Lady Mason will be unsatisfying to some members of the audience. Moulder expresses that dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, because he himself is such an unpleasant character the corrective element in his commentary does not overturn the author's own view that both mercy and justice can be arrived at in spite of the human and therefore faulty operations of the legal system. Thus the comic sequences and comic characters in Orle.y Farm function not to relieve the dramatic tension nor to further the plot but to comment upon the issues raised by the main narrative and to reinforce the active participation of the audience in the judging and evaluating processes which Trollope requires of them. It will be seen, in summary, that the pattern of the plot is surprisingly unified when one considers the large number of characters and the multiplication of what may appear to be tangential plot segments. That unity is achieved through the focus upon a core group of principal characters whose fates matter - Lady Mason, Mrs. Orme, Sir Peregrine and Lucius - in a narrative structure composed of two parallel lines of development: one toward the private confessions and the other toward the public trial. Such a structure is reflected in the two types of scenes in Orle.y Farm and two types of sequences. Scenes which record the small changes of attitude in a character, which move toward confession of sin, toward the comprehension of that sin in terms of the character's relationship to the rest of the world, scenes which commit a character to loving, which declare love or reveal dependency, are "private" scenes. In them, the internal lives of principal characters are laid bare. In the other type of scene, the "public" scene, the author depicts the world inside the novel but external to the intimate group directly concerned with the fates of the principals. In the public scenes the author satirizes institutions such as the law, presents debates between partisans of Lady Mason and Joseph Mason, and generally creates fora to objectify discussion of the issues and personalities. To these scenes the members of the audience are relatively disinterested spectators because they are absorbed in the fate of the heroine and in her moral progress which is more significant. It will be useful to analyze the principal sequence of private scenes and the major public scene in order to isolate the methods employed in each, to clarify the relationship between individual scenes and the larger structure and to point out some of the author's techniques of novel construction. The principal sequence includes Sir Peregrine's proposal of marriage, Lady Mason's confession to him, and her meeting with Mrs. Orme in which the pattern of explanation and expiation is initiated. At the point in the narrative at which his proposal comes, the forgery case has been revived but Sir Peregrine does not doubt that she is

28 being "ill-used". The author manipulates the scenes based upon the discrepancy of awareness among characters and audience. The expression of love, always a powerful force in a Trollope novel, r e sults in a countering honesty on the part of the heroine. The scene proper begins (although it has been prepared for by Sir Peregrine's impulsive kiss, earlier, and by his announcement to Mrs. Orme of his intentions) when Sir Peregrine sends for Lady Mason. This is no casual or impulsive encounter. Its formality is emphasized by Sir Peregrine's ruminations before Lady Mason arrives, "He would have been glad that the coming scene should be over . . . there would be a sort of pleasure to him in speaking even of her sorrow, and in repeating his assurance that he would fight the battle for her with all the means at his command." [I, 35] Sir Peregrine is in fact rehearsing his scene and its outcome, something which Lady Mason does also. Such "acting", however, ends with Lady Mason's confession. The language, too, supports the time-stopped quality of the moment. Lady Mason speaks in the courtly tones of the romance heroine, "It would be my duty to come to you, if it were half across the kingdom, - and my pleasure also." [I, 35] This dialogue at the beginning of the scene might have come from any other Trollope love story with young lovers who have a future together. Because the audience is unsure of Lady Mason's guilt, because these are old and courtly lovers, because the language is formal, there is created in this scene the sense that for a moment the characters have escaped into the Green World, that they are enisled in this room safe from their enemies. The pathos is there in Sir Peregrine's ". . . 1 am an old man . . . but I am not too old to love you. Can you accept the love of an old man like me ?" [I, 35] Sir Peregrine makes his proposal and the author immediately distances the audience with his interjection. "Lady Mason was, as we are aware, not taken in the least by surprise; but it was quite necessary that she should seem to be so taken." [I, 35] Though his remarks seem to contain the pathos, Lady Mason's gesture, set out as a stage direction, "and then she knelt before him, leaning on his knees, as he sat in his accustomed armchair" [I, 35] and the adjectives used to describe the love scene "glorious", "bright", and "beautiful" bring the audience close to the emotions of the moment once again. Swept on by her love for Sir Peregrine and her desire to forget the past, to believe in his power to protect her, Lady Mason accepts him. " 'If you wish it, Sir Peregrine', she said at last." [I, 35] The scene is framed first of all by his thoughts about how he will protect her and secondly by Lady Mason's self-debate. "Lady Mason escaped across the hall to the stairs, . . . Then she sat herself down and began to look her future world in the face. Two questions she had to ask. Would it be well for her that this marriage should take place ? And would it be well for him?"[l, 35] She recreates in her mind the night, twenty years earlier, when she attempted to persuade her husband to alter his will in favor of their son. The scene ends with the tantalizingly enigmatic statement, "She had succeeded in getting the inheritance for the baby at her feet." [I, 35] This exceedingly private scene has developed, then, in what I take to be a typical fashion in Orley Farm. Framed on the one side by Sir

29

Peregrine's rehearsal and on the other by Lady Mason's linkage in her mind of the proposal and the crime, the scene focuses upon the heroine and the hero, an older couple, but makes their love credible and noble. The audience's sympathies are manipulated but not totally engaged because the intrusive author comes between the emotion and the statement of it. The tension between sympathy and judgment is maintained by keeping the audience in doubt still as to Lady Mason's guilt. Trollope's surrounding commentary and the characters' own thoughts set off what might otherwise be a simple declaration of love, and create the feeling that despite their love these characters are somehow doomed. The confession, however, is needed to fulfill the sequence; because of the multiple characters and scenes and because the author wishes to maintain the suspense throughout the public response to the knowledge of the engagement of these lovers, that confession, so long awaited, is postponed, giving to the sequence the quality of a long-held breath. It is not, in fact, until the beginning of volume two that the scene takes place and it is the more dramatic for having been postponed and for being the means by which the audience, as well as Sir Peregrine, is informed of the fact of Lady Mason's guilt. Making the revelation simultaneous for both is a compelling dramatic touch, and unique in Trollope novels ordinarily built around a totally shared confidence between the author and the reader. The scene begins, characteristically, with a gesture. Sir Peregrine takes Lady Mason's arm and moves close to her. She announces, with no preparation, "I have done very wrong." [II, 44] Reiterating the statement, she refuses at first to clarify it. She turns down his offer of marriage as too much of a sacrifice for him to make, and once again he assumes the rhetoric of the white knight, the role he is now playing, "For the world's talk . . . I care nothing . . . In doing this I shall gratify my own heart, and also serve you in your great troubles." [II, 44] Even here, as in the larger narrative pattern, the movement toward revelation is deliberately retarded, prolonging the suspense for the audience, although Trollope has taken care that there should be little surprise when the revelation is finally made. The authorial interjections describe the gestures and movements of the principals. "And she did sit down, while he stood leaning over her and thus spoke." [It, 44] "And as he spoke he held out his hand to her and she could not refuse him hers." "And now she stood before him, not looking him in the face but with her face turned downwards to the ground, and speaking hardly above her breath" [II, 44] - Sir Peregrine puts Lady Mason into a position, both physical and moral, in which she can do nothing except reveal the truth or tell a lie to the man whom she loves. The gesture prepares the way for the confession. "Sir Peregrine, I am guilty . . . Guilty of all this with which they charge me."[n, 44] This is the climax arising out of the emotional tensions of the situation and not rehearsed as the first scene of the sequence was. This, too, is at the same time a confession scene and a trial scene and the gestures which are the principal structuring devices emphasize the nature of Lady Mason's position with respect to Sir Peregrine and his life code. "And then she threw herself at his

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feet, and wound her arms round his knees." [II, 44] The author's commentary puts the confession into the perspective which the audience is to assume for the duration of the novel and brings the reader closer to Lady Mason. Lady Mason's suffering in the present is contrasted with her past action, an action now regretted. The scene proper resumes with exposition which sets the stage for the response of Sir Peregrine and then Mrs. Orme. Lady Mason has lost control of her own fate and will henceforth be dependent upon Mrs. Orme, Sir Peregrine and Mr. Furnival for direction. The fall to her knees, that characteristic gesture, illustrates her final surrender of power. Fragmented speeches by the two principals revealing the aimlessness of their present situation are interrupted by the description of still another gesture " . . . she had risen from the sofa, and was now standing before him resting with her hands upon the table like a prisoner in the dock." [II, 45] In this microcosmic trial, private and remote from the tumult of the public hearing, the actual judging takes place. The legal system discourages truth. Love results in genuine remorse; while emotions may hamper judgment they do not forbid it. Sir Peregrine here speaks, in his dilemma, for the author, questioning, evaluating, judging, sympathizing, and finally thinking, "Hecould not let the poor, crushed, broken creature wander forth in her agony to bruise herself at every turn, and to be alone in her despair." [II, 45] What follows is Lady Mason's "penance", a compression of years into hours as she sits totally alone in the cold and darkness of an empty room, waiting for Mrs. Orme and contemplating her sin. The sequence depends for its dramatic effect first of all upon the shock value of the confession but secondly upon the response of the other principals to their new knowledge and its attendant responsibilities. After confessing, Lady Mason has nothing further to do. The "action" now consists not in what she has done or in what she may confess to but in what may be done to her as a result of her original commission of a crime. For this reason, the structure of public scenes takes on greater importance in the latter part of the novel. While it appears that her fate will be determined by the legal body, the audience becomes increasingly aware that the verdict of the jury will not affect the state of Lady Mason's soul and is therefore only important as it disposes of her person. Nonetheless, the author gives no hints as to the verdict, permitting both sides to indicate equal confidence in the result. The trial scenes (there is a series of them, depicting the actions of the participants on successive days) complement the private scenes with their emphasis upon individual guilt and r e sponsibility, by making a statement about public morality and reality. These scenes are circuses with formal rules, "plays" within the play where, in contrast to the private scenes, members of the court put on their roles and even their characters with their robes. The d i r e c tion of the narrative is never toward confession, toward shared comprehension and emotion. As a result, the principal characters retreat into the background. Public and manipulative characters take their places. The trial is a game which professionals play with and against each other. The aims and, as a result, the structures of the scenes are different.

31 Trollope begins the series with an announcement to the audience, "And so the play was beginning on each side." [II, 67] In the "play", the action consists in the manipulation of witness-victims by skillful and usually unscrupulous lawyers. " 'Come Sir . . . out with it. If I don't get it from you I shall get it from somebody else. . . .' " ' "There is no reason my heart should fail me", said Dockwrath in an angry tone.' ' "Is there not, I must differ from you there, Mr. Dockwrath . . . " 1 [II, 68] Tension is maintained by stretching the trial "scene" into several scenes in as many days, slowing the pace once again toward this public climax. Placement of the two scenes is most significant. The circus atmosphere of which I have spoken is emphasized by the author's description of the waiting trial audience. " . . . the crowd had been gathered outside the doors of the court from a much earlier hour. As the trial progressed the interest in it increased, and people began to believe that Lady Mason had in truth forged a will, so did they the more regard her in the light of a heroine. Had she murdered her hus band after forging his will, men would have paid half a crown apiece to have touched her garments. . . . " [ I I , 71] He continues also to stress the artificiality and theatricality of what is taking place, "These (the lawyers) were now in their established places . . . An easy way is always made for the chief performers in a play." [II, 71] And further, "It was again the duty of Mr. Furnival to come first upon the stage. . . . " What happens in the succeeding cross-examination is that the lawyers confuse the evidence and the evidence-givers whenever possible, making a mockery out of the trial system and its method of finding out truth. In the summing up, Mr. Furnival, almost certain of Lady Mason's guilt, makes a passionate defending speech which even he, victim of his own acting, almost believes. It is a brilliant speech which Trollope has created for him, despite the fact that his client is guilty. 'Gentlemen of the jury, there sits my client with as loving a friend on one side as ever woman had, and with her only child on the other. During the incidents of this trial the nature of the life she has led during the last twenty years, - since the period of that terrible crime with which she is charged, - has been proved before you. I may fearlessly ask you whether so fair a life is compatible with the idea of guilt so foul ? I have known her intimately during all those years, - not as a lawyer, but as a friend, - and I confess that the audacity of this man Dockwrath, in assailing such a character with such an accusation, strikes me almost with admiration. What! Forgery! - for that, gentlemen of the jury, is the crime with which she is substantially charged. Look at her, as she sits there! That she, at the age of twenty, or not much more, - she who had so well performed the duties of her young life, that she should have forged a will, - have traced one signature after another in such a manner as to have deceived all those lawyers who were on her track immediately after her husband's death! For, mark you, if this be true,

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with her own hand she must have done it! There was no accomplice there. Look at her! Was she a forger? Was she a woman to deceive the sharp bloodhounds of the law? Could she, with that young baby on her bosom, have wrested from such as him' - and as he spoke he pointed with his finger, but with a look of unutterable scorn, to Joseph Mason, who was sitting opposite to him - ' that fragment of his old father's property which he coveted so sorely? Where had she learned such skilled artifice? Gentlemen, such ingenuity in crime as that has never yet been proved in a court of law, even against those who have spent a life of wretchedness in acquiring such skill; and now you are asked to believe that such a deed was done by a young wife, of whom all that you know is that her conduct in every other respect had been beyond all praise!' [II, 72]. In this ultimate public scene the audience is distanced by the rhetoric, by the authorial interjections and by the knowledge it shares with Trollope and with Mrs. Orme and Sir Peregrine. The verdict, postponed, comes after the most heartrending private confession to Lucius, the disaster of revelation here leading to separation and isolation instead of love. It is not surprising that the legal decision finding Lady Mason not guilty is anticlimactic. To emphasize this the author limits the dialogue in favor of summary and concludes, "Lady Mason was unable to speak, but she signified that she was ready, and then they went into court. . . . 'Not guilty, my lord', said the foreman. Then the verdict was recorded, and the judge went back to his dinner." [II, 75] This is the conclusion of the most public sequence. After it the "public" characters, the assorted judges, lawyers and witnesses, members of the audience fade out and thereby return the focus to the principal characters and their fates. In summary, the public scenes differ from the private scenes first because the movement within the scenes is not toward revelation and shared emotion but toward obfuscation of the truth, and toward the humiliation of truth-tellers, toward dissociation of the individual and the community. Public trials have a prescribed form which is shown to mediate against truth and against union, two of the principal concerns of the private scenes. In these scenes, and in the novel generally, there is a certain amount of attention paid to making the nineteenth century existence this novel faithfully depicts tangible, comprehensible, recognizable. (6) Realism, in this novel, however, is the result not so much of particularity but of a universalization of emotions which encourages the audience to identify with the values of "truth" and of "union" which are the principal concerns of the novel. By engaging the audience's sympathy and judgment, the author makes more real than the plot would suggest, the values of shared love, responsibility and mutual culpability which the novel asserts. Variations in kinds of realism in the novel are tied to the multiple worlds structure. (7) The worlds of Orley Farm are more distinct than they are in many other of the author's works, and the boundaries between them are, as we have seen, not merely physical and temporal. They are boundaries of realism, as well. The same qualities which

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make the Green World of Orley Farm unrealistic are the qualities which in novels such as The Belton Estate denote r e a l i s m . The lack of r e a l i s m in the Green World of Orle.y F a r m is determined p r i m a r i l y by comparison with the qualities of the other world within the novel. In the Green World the language of "game" prevails. Even the love scenes a r e not so much revelations of feeling as manipulations of comic language to a comic end. F u r t h e r m o r e , both language and a c tion have, as I have shown, no consequences. A principal distinction between worlds and between " r e a l i s m s " has to do with consequences. Realism in this novel is measured by pain, suffering, loss and i s o lation. It is c l e a r that the r e a d e r is to assume that the p r i m a r y world is pain-filled and real and that the Green World is p a i n - f r e e and t h e r e f o r e l e s s r e a l . This equation of r e a l i s m and pain is not typical of Trollope but h e r e it is connected to the author's assertion that to be human (and therefore to be real) is to s u f f e r . (8) The world-division which is manifested structurally is complemented by the complex relationship of audience and author to the conception of reality. The fulfilment of expectations with r e g a r d to conventions generally produces a kind of " r e a l i s m of agreement". However, e x pectations of the audience a r e not met in the pain-filled world. The r e a d e r is s u r p r i s e d f i r s t by a guilty heroine and second by h e r fate. In the Green World the expectations on both sides function to produce a kind of r e a l i s m but also to unite the beautiful girl and the good man. In the pain-filled world, however, the r e a d e r is continually d i s oriented. Few fictional conventions a r e operative. Lady Mason, the heroine, is guilty, but she neither dies nor goes to prison nor is exonerated in some magical way. None of these conventions is employed to work out the plot. The relationship between the author and the r e a l i s m of Orley F a r m is even m o r e complex. While the lack of conventional plot draws the audience into participation in the fiction, while the dramatic scenes c r e a t e immediacy, and the emotional appeals, verisimilitude, the intrusive author controls and reduces the r e a l i s m by framing the e n t i r e work and emphasizing the artificiality of his construct. If he w e r e content to be simply an observer he might maintain the pose of t r u t h t e l l e r . Henry J a m e s was one of the early c r i t i c s to take issue with his intrusive method on the ground that it interfered with r e a l i s m . "He took suicidal satisfaction in reminding the r e a d e r that the story he was telling was only after all a m a k e - b e l i e v e . " (9) George Becker, too, u s e s as a criterion f o r the realistic novel, the absence of the author. (10) Trollope, however, seeming to flaunt his interfering pose, begins the novel with a discussion of his own efforts as an author, and concludes by reinforcing his own presence in the f r a m e . "And now we will say farewell to h e r , and as we do so the chief interest in our tale will end. I may perhaps be thought to owe an apology to my r e a d e r s in that I have asked their sympathy f o r a woman who had so sinned as to place h e r beyond the general sympathy of the world at large" [II, 79] and also, "We must now go back to Noningsby f o r one concluding chapter and then our work will be concluded." [n, 80] Such direct intervention cannot help but modify the r e a l i s m if r e a l i s m is taken to mean, in Elizabeth Drew's p h r a s e , the "illusion that we

34 are contemplating life itself". (11) Trollope's manipulation of the conventions of the realistic mode in Orley F a r m , however, r e q u i r e s that the relationship between author and audience take primacy even over the fiction itself, that the intrusive author's contract with the audience be m o r e r e a l than the story which is told. (12) Supporting this evaluation of Trollope's brand of r e a l i s m , Paul E l m e r More notes, ". . .the author's habit of interrupting the n a r r a t i v e to e x patiate on his own feelings does not diminish but heightens the r e ality of his imaginary world, and . . . he converts his r e a d e r s into accomplices with him in executing the law of poetic j u s t i c e . " (13) The relationship between the m o r a l design, the function of the author, his relationship to the audience, and r e a l i s m is clarified in the conclusions f o r both worlds of Orley F a r m . The c h a r a c t e r s in the pain-filled (and " r e a l " world) live on in eternal m i s e r y through separation and isolation. Suffering equally a r e the guilty and the guiltless. Lady Mason and Sir P e r e g r i n e and M r s . O r m e and Lucius Mason a r e all b e r e f t of consolation. There is no attempt by the author to organize f o r the audience the meaning of events, to follow out the lives of the c h a r a c t e r s , or to offer to the r e a d e r simple a n s w e r s . There a r e few compromises with sentiment. It is significant that having settled the fates of the principal c h a r a c t e r s the author, by way of contrast, concludes with a m o r e typical and r e s t o r a t i v e ordering through weddings in the Green World. The union of Felix and Madeline, however, does not contradict the pattern of separation and isolation but r a t h e r reinforces it. Felix alone, of all the principal c h a r a c t e r s , is able to escape into the unreal world. Escape, the antithesis of reality, is equated with romance. Robert M. Adams recognizes romance qualities in Orley F a r m but simplifies the novel by a s s e r t i n g that romance elements a r e its sole identifying c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s . He says, "the novel i s , after all, at an almost audacious remove f r o m its own r e a l i t i e s , so that it may be considered, in the highest, as well as the lowest sense of the word, a romance. . . . " (14) Orley F a r m , as he says, is indeed a romance, but only partly a romance. The juxtaposition of worlds is a juxtaposition also of realities and the escape f r o m them which, according to Edwin Muir, c h a r a c t e r i z e s the romance. (15) The romance world and the world of reality comment upon each other. The novel, then, evidences the author's organizational skills based upon an original concept of form which r e s u l t s , through the multiple worlds construction, in his own version of nineteenth century r e a l i s m - a mixture, in Orley F a r m , of romance and reality which is anything but naive. NOTES (1) World's Classics edition (1935; rptd. London: Oxford Univ. P r e s s , 1970). Henceforth all citations to this novel will appear by chapter number within the text. Since this edition includes two volumes in one, the volume number will also appear. (2) "Orley F a r m " , r e v . National Review, 32. (3) F r y e , Natural Perspective, 142.

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(4) Robert Polhemus, in his comprehensive study, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1968), 76-88, talks about Orley Farm in many of the same ways that I do, discussing the moral issues, the "Fall" motif, and the role of the audience in making judgments, but he is somewhat less concerned than I with the techniques by which Trollope creates these and other effects, and we do not come to the same conclusions. (5) Polhemus, Changing World, 84-85, also notes that Moulder's gourmandizing is symbolic. (6) Not only are there many characters but those characters have lives which the audience is told about in detail; Mr. Furnival has an unsatisfactory marriage. We learn that Mr. Kenneby, a minor character, has had an unsuccessful romance and is being managed through a second by his relatives. The interrelationships of characters are complex and the network of relationships is not hidden from the audience. (7) Public and private scenes appear to be differentiated by their r e ality and morality quotients. One distinction which might be made has to do with the artificial quality of the public scenes in contrast to the moral realism of the private scenes. However, the public scenes, too, though "staged" by the participants, who are in varying degrees insincere, have their own truth to the judicial process as Trollope is somewhat exaggeratedly describing it. In their way, these scenes are as realistic as scenes in the confession sequence. It is evident that there are various levels of reality in the novel. (8) George L. Becker's discussion of this subject in "Realism: An Essay in Definition", MLQ 10 (June 1949), 187, emphasizes the equation in a similar way. "As he (the realistic writer) sees it, the lives of most people are a losing fight . . . . Most institutions fall far short of their own pretensions or the valuations placed upon them by interested adherents. . . . This conception affects the formal a s pects of the work also." Becker's view is that all realistic fiction is pain-filled. I would maintain that although Trollope's conception is not tied to the idea that realism and pain are synonymous he makes use of this notion in Orley Farm and in other novels. Here he wishes to show that some individuals must take responsibility for their own pain and that others are free and need not fight the "losing fight", and that institutions, though they may "fall short of their own pretensions" are nonetheless necessary and stabilizing. (9) James, "Anthony Trollope", 247. (10) "The author withdraws, leaving his characters to act out their own destinies without his intervention and comment", Becker, 187. (11) Elizabeth Drew, Life and Art in the Novel (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Press, 1962), 6. (12) David Skilton, in a fine book which appeared while this book was in preparation, says, in a discussion of Trollope's realism, that the intrusive author establishes the grounds upon which the world of the novel and its characters must be taken. "The essential thing about Trollopian autarky is that it gives a complete scheme of social and moral standards, by which to judge the characters and situations as each novel progresses." Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries:

36 A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction (London: Longman, 1972), 145. (13) Paul Elmer More, "My Debt to Trollope", in The Demon of The Absolute, Shelburne Essays I (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), 108. (14) Robert M. Adams, "Orley Farm and Real Fiction", NCF 8 (195354), 41. (15) Muir, Structure of the Novel, 19.

2. THE BELTON ESTATE: ROMANTIC COMEDY, EXPANSION AND DEFLATION

In Orley F a r m , despite the density and complexity of the narrative, the worlds division and the modes division neatly correspond, so that the Green World of easily-achieved happiness is always the site of standard Victorian romantic comedy. In contrast, while in The Belton Estate, (1) a relatively simple narrative, there is only one world, the novel is complicated by the author's modification and expansion of the mode of romantic comedy; the same world must accommodate several varieties of comedy, each with somewhat different conventions . Although the union of Clara Amedroz and Will Belton is the climax of a traditional plot in which the heroine must choose between an admirable and an inadequate lover, the decision is actually not so straightforward. Clara must also decide whether or not to risk the loss of love and of social respectability by maintaining her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a lady who has committed adultery. That the subject of adultery should be tied so closely to the love choice in a Victorian romantic comedy is in itself quite surprising. More s u r prising, even, than that, in terms of romantic comedy conventions of the time, is the fact that this same Mrs. Askerton, a "fallen woman", can continue to interact with the spotless Clara Amedroz instead of dying a lonely death in the time-honored way after giving birth to an illegitimate child. It becomes clear that the narrative d e parts from convention first of all through the integration of a pattern of complicating moral and psychological variables. In a succession of what appear on the surface to be orthodox kinds of scenes, the author disappoints a number of conventional expectations surrounding the romantic comedy mode. An examination of several of these scenes will illustrate the kind of modification which takes place throughout the novel. Two love scenes, the first between Clara and Will, the second b e tween Clara and Frederic, which contrast the young woman's suitors, are uncommon in a number of ways. In the first of these scenes, Will Belton proposes marriage and Clara disposes by rejecting his offer. The misguided rejection of the right man early on in the novel is a fairly standard kind of scene in this type of fiction. 'Clara, I love you better than all the world put together.' She now looked at him; but still she did not believe it. It could not be that after all her boastings she should have made so gross a blunder. 'I hope you do love m e ' , she said; 'indeed, you are bound

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to do so, for you promised that you would be my brother.' 'But that will not satisfy me now, Clara. Clara, I want to be your husband.' 'Will!' she exlaimed. 'Now you know it all, and if I have been too sudden, I must beg your pardon.' 'Oh, Will, forget that you have said this. Do not go on until everything must be over between u s . ' 'Why should anything be over between us ? Why should it be wrong in me to love you?' 'You have asked papa? Oh dear, oh dear, what am I to do?' 'Am I so odious to you then?' As he said this he got up from his seat and stood before h e r . He was a tall, well-built, handsome man, and he could assume a look and mien that were almost noble when he was moved as he was moved now. 'Odious! Do you not know that I have loved you as my cousin - that I have already learned to trust you as though you were really my brother? But this breaks it a l l . ' 'You cannot love me then as my wife?' 'No.' [5]

What is not standard is that the novelist should allow the audience to see the psychological motivation behind Clara's rejection of Will Belton. Clara admits that she likes and even loves Will, but as a cousin. The key phrase in this regard is "you promised that you would be my brother". Clara sees Will's offer of marriage as a threat. He threatens her with his more sexual approach to love. "But that will not satisfy me n o w . . . I want to be your husband." And he threatens her by providing a real and physical alternative to her fantasy romance with Frederic. "It could not be after all her boastings she should have made so gross a blunder." In the next love scene Clara's romantic dream does apparently come true. Frederic Aylmer does ask her to be his wife, and, with regard to his manners, education, respectability and profession, he is the correct lover for h e r . However, it becomes evident that he is the "wrong" man for other reasons. Trollope is manipulating the conventions with regard to what kind of a man would qualify as a proper suitor for the ideal heroine. In the previous scene we observed Clara rejecting the deserving lover. In this scene she is not completely

39 aware yet of the true character of the socially-appropriate lover who is shown to be the wrong man from a sexual and moral standpoint. Frederic, who has impeccable credentials and who is loved by Clara, comes off very badly from the start. First of all, in contrast with Will Belton, he hesitates to propose, as even she notices. "A little management on her side would, she almost knew, make things right, but then the idea of any such management distressed her; nay, more, disgusted h e r . " [9] After this, he is deprecated by the author for his lack of the capacity to feel emotion. Those who knew him well would hardly expect to see him die of a broken heart, should he ultimately be unsuccessful... the match had . . . recommended itself to him as being prudent as well as pleasant . . . she was well born and well educated, and it was the proper sort of thing for him to do. [10]

And, when he does finally make his declaration of love, he does it in as unexpressive a manner as possible. Frederic leads into his proposal by dwelling first upon the ubi sunt theme, a strange outlook for a lover in a traditional romantic pose, ". . . when I was a boy I had much more respect for my aunt's brick house in Perivale than I had for Aylmer Park . . . now it's my own - and all my respect for it is gone." [10] Not only are his remarks too nostalgic and past-centered for a happy lover, but they actually anticipate the pattern of this love scene. Clara accepts his offer with alacrity. "Can you tell me that you love me well enough to take me for your husband ?" " 'I can', she said." With her acceptance, the hero's mind changes. Having achieved easily what he has been told by his aunt to want, he is no longer interested. His respect for Clara, like his respect for Perivale, diminishes with the successful attainment of his goal. His thoughts show his concern with property more than with love. Captain Aylmer . . . already began almost to doubt whether it was wise on his part to devote the inner-most bin of his cellar to a wine that was so cheap . . . (he thought) she was a woman of value, not to be snapped up easily . . . but he began to fancy now that he had been wrong in that opinion. [10]

His words to Clara and his actions reveal his changed mind, and this results in a chilly ending for the scene. " 'Contented? - well, - yes; I think I am', he said." The scene concludes with what the author r e peatedly describes as Frederic's "kiss as cold and proper as if they had been man and wife for y e a r s . " [10] What is unusual in this scene is the devastating portrait of Frederic. Though he is not a villain but an ordinary upper middle-class gentleman who is afraid of feeling, the audience, which has been led to see

40 the action of making love and the state of being moral as conjoined, is directed to compare his manner of making love unfavorably with Will's open expression of passion, and to despise him. Given a psychologically complex hero whose weakness renders him morally inadequate, given a rather intelligent though temporarily love-blinded heroine, it is clear why their love scenes together must be failures, and why it is only a matter of time until she rejects him altogether. An argument is precipitated in the following scene which brings about just such a rejection when Clara's allegiance to Frederic's mother is demanded in return for his approval. 'After all, it is you I am to marry, and not your mother . . .' ' . . . as my respect for her opinion is equal to my affection for her person I hope that you will make a great effort to gain her esteem.' 'I never make any efforts of this kind. If esteem doesn't come without efforts it isn't worth having.' [11] Clara is as iconoclastic and uncompromising as he is mother-dominated. Hence, when Frederic admits that he has promised his aunt to propose, it is not surprising that she should break the engagement. "I mean that our engagement shall be at an end . . . you shall again be free. . . . " A conclusion which must emerge from an examination of this sequence of scenes is that although they are typical kinds of romantic comedy scenes, they are significant variations upon the standard form. First of all, they are all negative scenes. In some respects, every scene focuses upon rejection, pain, and a lack of satisfactory completion instead of upon the successful release of emotion common in other fictions of this type. Also, individually and collectively, they deal with issues of sexual repression and fear; they deny that respectability, education and good intentions can overcome a lack of feeling; and they link sex and emotion with morality. And they do all of this in unusually open language. An analysis of what I take to be the novel's climactic scene in which Clara, visiting at Aylmer Park, comes into conflict with her fiance's mother over the Askerton issue, will show how various subversive elements coalesce within a traditional framework. Lady Aylmer, Frederic's mother, may appear to be just another obstructionist parent with numerous prototypes in the romantic comedy tradition, (2) a figure whose opposition to the union of the lovers must be thwarted, who must be fooled, and/or converted so that the lovers can live happily ever after. But Lady Aylmer is also a representative of a generally accepted set of middle-class values and a highly r e spectable member of society. 'Not agree with me about Mrs. Askerton! How is it possible that any decent young woman should not agree with me! It is a matter in which there is no room for a doubt. True; - the story true! Of course it is true. Does she not know that it would not have reached

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her from Aylmer Park if it were not t r u e ? . . . Why, Frederic, she cannot have been taught to understand the first principle of morals in life.' [19]

She is neither fooled nor converted at the finale. She is "defeated" not by the lovers together but by the heroine alone whose "victory" consists in nothing more than the rejection of the value system which Lady Aylmer represents. Coming after a long series of more minor skirmishes, this scene arises predictably out of the Askerton issue. Lady Aylmer attempts to persuade Clara to give up her friend. 'I believe it to be an undoubted fact that Mrs. Askerton is, - is, not at all what she ought to b e . ' 'Which of us is what we ought to be?' said Clara. 'Miss Amedroz, on this subject I am not at all inclined to joke. Is it not true that Mrs. Askerton - ' 'You must excuse me, Lady Aylmer, but what I know of Mrs. Askerton, I know altogether in confidence; so that I cannot speak to you of her past l i f e . ' 'But, Miss Amedroz, pray excuse me if I say that I must speak of it.' 'But I have got nothing to say about i t . ' 'You have, I believe, admitted the truth of the allegations made by us as to this woman.' Clara was becoming very angry. . . . She was striving to consider how best she might assert her own independence. But she was fully determined that in this matter she would not bend an inch to Lady Aylmer. 'I believe we may take that as admitted?' said her ladyship. 'I am not aware that I have admitted anything to you, Lady Aylmer, or said anything that can justify you in questioning me on the subject. ' 'Justify me in questioning a young woman who tells me that she is to be my future daughter-in-law!' 'The story of this woman's life, - whether she be Mrs. Askerton or not, I don't know - ' 'She is Mrs. Askerton', said Clara. 'As to that I do not profess to know, and I dare say that you are no wiser than myself. But what she has been we do know.' . . . 'What she has been we do know, and I ask you, as a duty which I own to my son, whether you have put an end to your acquaintance with so very disreputable a person, - a person whom even to have known is a disgrace ?' 'I know her, and - ' 'Stop one minute, if you please. My questions are these - Have you put an end to that acquaintance ? Are you ready to give a promise that it shall never be resumed?' 'I have not put an end to that acquaintance, - or rather that affectionate friendship as I should call it, and I am ready to promise

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that it shall be maintained with all my heart.' 'You undoubtedly have a hold upon him, Miss Amedroz, and I think that it is a great misfortune. Of course, when he hears what your conduct is with reference to this - person, he will release himself from his entanglement.' 'He can release himself from his entanglement whenever he chooses', said Clara, rising from her chair. 'Indeed, he is released. I shall let Captain Aylmer know that our engagement must be at an end, unless he will promise that I shall never in future be subjected to the unwarrantable insolence of his mother.' [26] A penniless and virtually friendless Victorian young woman dares to reject security, position, and the authority of elders for what seem to be much less tangible goods of conscience. That this in many ways conventional heroine should be the defender of a rather unconventional pattern of behavior is illustrative of the contradictions created within the narrative through the combination of romantic conventions and untraditional elements. Undeniably, the novel shares many of the properties of romantic comedies in general. Its leading characters appear to be free from pain, free from the natural consequences of their actions, and free to criticize but to remain members in good standing of their society. Furthermore, there is an orthodox happy ending with a wedding which follows after the verbal defeat of the social dragon, Lady Aylmer. The rules which govern the world of The Belton Estate, it is clear, allow the principal actors to realize all of their aspirations. In contrast, in the world of The Bertrams as well as in the primary world of Orley Farm not only is love intimately connected with pain, but also, individuals lack the freedom which Clara and Will exercise to control their universe. In this novel the heroine suffers the pangs of love but her suffering is temporary. She is made miserable by her difficulties with Frederic Aylmer, by her moral problem with the Askertons, and by her discomfort at Aylmer Park. However, Frederic is easily eliminated from consideration when his family proves unbearable; her father conveniently dies; and the Askerton problem is "solved" with Clara's acceptance of their friendship in the face of societal opposition. At Aylmer Park, as we have just seen, though the experience is unpleasant, the situation is not permanent and she seems to be able to control it. Because the protagonists have the power to control their lives, they actively create their own happy ending. Clara, for example, has remained free not to marry, and she seems free to refuse Frederic and Will, and to fend off Lady Aylmer's attempt to interfere in the choice of her friends and in the conduct of her life. Will, despite a number of obstacles, can build a family fortune, can earn the respect and admiration of the difficult Mr. Amedroz, and, finally, can win the love of the lady he desires. Just as individual freedom is celebrated in the mode of romantic comedy, social integration is also endorsed. It is significant, in this

43 respect, that Clara and Will can and do depart from certain of society's values without forfeiting its approbation. Clara's embrace of Mrs. Askerton's cause ultimately loses her no social status. More than that, these free characters have the power to bring about the integration of others. Though the Askertons are isolated, at the opening of the novel, by the ostracism which is the consequence of what society has considered their anti-social action, the boundary between them and Belton is eliminated at the conclusion and they too become members of their society once again. Clara's acceptance of the Askertons makes them socially acceptable, their aid to her with her love problems makes them virtuous, and their pain resulting from isolation disappears. The triumph of integration, of course, is the union of the lovers which attests to the harmony between the characters and their society. In the mode of romantic comedy the wedding is the official sign that " . . . Benevolent fortune smiles broadly upon the action, and all loose ends are neatly tied up in a 'happily-ever-after' ending and an unambiguous resolution." (3) Nevertheless, despite the fact that the audience is to be satisfied with a predictable resolution of the traditional plot, even the final love scene emphasizes some of the contradictions which have been apparent all along. The ambiguity in the relationship of Clara and Will continues to be exploited. The chapter which encloses the scene is entitled "Taking Possession", and it is evident that Clara is still reluctant to agree to the proposal because she views marriage to Will as a surrender of her independence. At the same time, her friend Mrs. Askerton, the woman who has been a vocal opponent to society's law, is now insisting that the same law supports the power of men to destroy the individuality of women by marrying them. 'Why should he come?' Clara had said. 'Simply to take you to his own house, like any other of his goods and chattels.' 'I am not his goods or his chattels.' 'But you soon will be; and why shouldn't you accept your lot quietly? He is Belton of Belton, and everything here belongs to him.' 'I do not belong to him.' 'What nonsense! When a man has the command of the situation, as he has, he can do just what he p l e a s e s . . . . 'That is nonsense, if you please.' 'Indeed if you had any of that decent feeling of feminine inferiority which ought to belong to all women, he would have found you sitting on the doorstep of his house waiting for him.' 'Perhaps he is demanding that you shall be delivered up to him. If he does I shall vote for obeying.1 'And I for disobeying, - and shall vote very strongly too.' Clara, as she came forth, felt herself quite unable to speak, or walk, or look after her usual manner. She knew herself to be a victim, - to be so far a victim that she could no longer control her own

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fate. To Captain Aylmer, at any rate, she had never succumbed. In all her dealings with him she had fought upon an equal footing. She had never been compelled to own herself mastered. But now she was being led out that she might confess her own submission, and acknowledge that hitherto she had not known what was good for h e r . She knew that she would have to yield. She must have known how happy she was to have an opportunity of yielding; but yet, yet, had there been any room for choice, she thought she would have refrained from walking with her cousin that evening. [311

Clara does, of course, walk, and does accept Will's proposal. . . . . as quick as lightning, he flung his arms around her, and kissed her again. . . 'William, William', she said; 'how can you serve me like that? . . . Why are you so rough with m e ? ' she said. 'Clara, say that you love m e . ' 'I will say nothing to you because you are so rough.' 'Clara, say that you love m e . ' 'Have I not always loved you, Will, since almost the first moment that I saw you ?' 'But that won't do. You know that is not fair. Come, Clara; I've had a deal of trouble, - and grief too; haven't I? You should say a word to make up for it; - that is, if you can say i t . ' 'What can a word like that signify to you to-day? You have got everything.' 'Have I got you?' Still she paused. 'I will have an answer. Have I got you ? Are you now my own ?' 'I suppose so, Will. Don't now. I will not have it again. Does not that satisfy you?' 'Tell me that you love m e . ' 'You know that I love you.' 'Better than anybody in the world?' 'Yes; - better than anybody in the world.' 'And after all you will be - my wife?' 'Oh, Will, - how you question one!' [31]

Even here, at the height of the passion, one senses the conflict b e tween the heroine's desire for sexual and emotional fulfilment and her very real fear that her personality will be annhilated by her lover. As a result, though there is a good deal of emotion, and, in terms of the plot, everything turns out veiy well indeed. Clara's ambivalence does, to a certain extent, affect our view of the love scene and the kind of fulfilment it implies. Furthermore, instead of ending the novel on this note of union, Trollope, in his most daring departure from convention, goes on to depict the married life of the couple two years later, a life, to judge from the conversation, which is dull, unemotional, and uninteresting.

45 Clara is overheard speaking to Will about Frederic Aylmer and his bride, whom they have just entertained at dinner. 'I was as sure of it as possible', Clara said to her husband that night. 'Sure of what, my dear?' 'That she would have a red nose.' 'Who has got a red nose?' 'Don't be stupid, Will. Who should have it but Lady Emily?' 'Upon my word I didn't observe it.' 'You never observe anything, Will; do you? But don't you think she is very plain?' 'Upon my word I don't know. She isn't as handsome as some people.' 'Don't be a fool, Will. How old do you suppose her to be?' 'How old? Let me see. Thirty, perhaps.' 'If she's not over forty, I'll consent to change noses with h e r . ' 'No; - we won't do that; not if I know it.' 'I cannot conceive why any man should marry such a woman as that. Not but what she's a very good woman, I dare say; only what can a man get by it. To be sure there's the title, if that's worth anything.' But Will Belton was never good for much conversation at this hour, and was too fast asleep to make any rejoinder to the last remark. [32] It is evident from this interchange that the love affair has been r e placed by the commonplaces of "middle-aged" marriage although barely two years have passed since the proposal and its acceptance. Now, Clara, formerly the most loving and lovely of women, jibes at Will - "You never observe anything" and "Don't be a fool". He r e sponds by falling asleep. Nonetheless, this conclusion does not seem entirely inconsistent with the pattern as a whole in which romantic comedy elements have been both presented and subverted all along. Throughout the novel, the orderly, progressive narrative movement toward the requisite happy ending has been encroached upon by psychological and moral realism which has had the effect of creating a rhythmic pattern of inflation and deflation. Something more extreme, however,' is occurring in this final scene. Although a number of romantic comedy conventions were undercut from the start, the lovers always remained credible representatives of romantic comedy ideals. When Clara and Will are subverted and their love scene is superceded by the marriage scene, the plausibility of the novel's romantic comedy conventions is challenged and the not at all idealized picture of their married life appears by contrast to be entirely too realistic. A contemporary reviewer, in fact, attacked the ending for excessive and misplaced realism. "The heroine protesting that her old lover's wife is plain and over forty and has a horrid red nose and the hero meanwhile turning his gigantic back and snoring - there we leave them. A sublime picture! This is what a crude half-considered notion of realism comes t o . " (4) I would argue that what he is calling "realism" is simply the appearance of realism

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which is the result of the sudden and unexpected deflation of the p r o tagonists . Trollope has led the audience to believe that Clara and Will, who represent the highest moral values in the novel, will live together passionately forever, as heroes and heroines in Victorian romantic comedies are assumed to do. Then, when they are deflated and made to seem human, imperfect, and not very interesting, the romance goes out of the novel. The reader is disoriented and falls back upon his own least romantic and most cynical experience to judge the work's realism. The romantic comedy idealizations of the rest of the novel come to seem, in retrospect, not altogether credible, so that, indeed, as the Saturday Review critic correctly perceived, the final scene does appear to be considerably more realistic than the r e s t of the novel. The work as a whole, however, alternates continually between idealization and criticism of the ideal, and thus between the kind of " r e alism" which results from consistency within the conventional f r a m e , and the realism produced out of disruption of consistency and the denial of predictable expectations. Trollope is manipulating, often within the same scene, two antithetical comic impulses, toward integration and toward deflation, while affording the audience, within certain limits, the option of accepting the romantic comedy at face value, or judging and rejecting it, that is, remaining credulously within the fiction or exiting with the author at the end to view the n a r rative from an ultimately critical perspective. The Belton Estate is, it is apparent, a novel with built-in contradictions which are only summarized in the ambiguously-double ending, the penultimate scene celebrating integration and passion, and the final scene deflating the lovers and their meaning. Despite the single world structure and the predictability of the love-to-marriage sequence which fulfills the r e quirements of the romantic comedy mode, the last scene concludes the novel on a note of what might be called parody, making more e m phatic the subversion of romantic comedy conventions which has been taking place all along. NOTES (1) The Belton Estate. World's Classics edition (1923; rptd. London: Oxford Univ. P r e s s , 1964). All citations appear in the text by chapter number. (2) Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 164. (3) Nelvin Vos, The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox P r e s s , 1966), 22. (4) "The Belton Estate", rev. Saturday Review 21 (February 1866), 142.

3. THE BERTRAMS: SOCIAL SATIRE, MELODRAMA AND THE CONTINGENT WORLD

The Bertrams (1), published in 1859, presents us with a single world whose "sets of possibilities for action" are much more limited than those of The Belton Estate. This novel also subverts conventional r o mantic comedy ideas, but it does so by giving to all of its characters very little freedom to direct their own lives, and by employing such ordinarily diverse modes as satire and melodrama to paint a bleak picture of the world in which all are forced to dwell. The romantic comedy pattern is there, in potentio, it is true. Two young men, George Bertram and Arthur Wilkinson, friends and cousins, involve themselves with two young women and this narrative traces the development of each relationship, leading, after numerous obstacles, to marriage. In actuality, however, the plot details the too-painful education of these characters into the way of the world. The typical movement of comedy toward union and freedom becomes, then, instead, a movement toward dissolution and pain. The Bildungsroman elements, those elements which should insure that the chief characters, George and Caroline and Adela and Arthur, are educated through their experiences and through them grow better and happier, are contradicted by the consistent failure pattern which is exhibited on many levels. George, who begins by earning the coveted "Double First" at Oxford, fails in love and life. Caroline, described initially as a "goddess", learns too late about the evils of prudence and destroys the happiness of others as well as her own. Arthur, beginning in second place and remaining there, learns only a little about how to control his own fate. In still another variation upon this formula of the inversion of expectations, the traditional quest and conversion pattern is treated ironically by the author. Thus, George seeks his father in Jerusalem, but his father, an ignoble parasite, is not worth the seeking. The quest provides the author with the opportunity to satirize the Victorian sentimentalization of the parent-child relationship. The quest motif is related, also, to George's desire to find avocation. This, too, is satirically treated. His hastily-arrived-at determination to become a clergyman, based on emotional attitudes toward the Holy Land, is followed immediately by his "conversion" to Caroline's more pragmatic values when he falls in love with h e r . Also, George, seeking to escape through travel to a foreign land from a materialistic to an idealistic society is shown to discover another materialistic England in microcosm, transplanted to Jerusalem. The conventional patterns of romantic love leading to happy marriage, of quest and conversion leading to self-knowledge, of education leading to success, then, are

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all Inverted. A closer examination of individual scenes and scene sequences will reveal that they reflect this fusion of love stories with satire upon Victorian institutions and attitudes, and in addition, melodrama. The most typical kind of scene or sequence in the novel is that which depicts the downward progress of the characters as a result of their failure to comprehend the precariousness of their positions vis a vis the world and those whom they love. At the same time that many of the scenes record the failures of characters, they are meant to be love scenes as well. This makes for some strangely disjunctive effects. For example, the necessity to control one's emotions results in "non-love scenes" in which love cannot be expressed openly. The formal meeting to dissolve a relationship exhibits on another level the misunderstanding and lack of self-knowledge common to characters in this novel. Certain love scenes, indeed, are parodies of the form, in which the author relates love to the dismal failures of humans in that constricting world, while using the frame to make clear what the romantic love ideal is and how far these scenes depart from it. For the greater part of the novel, however, in almost no case do the love scenes come to entirely felicitous conclusions. Relatedly, other kinds of scenes expose society's vices satirically, through sermons, parables or debates, or dramatically, as characters from the love scenes, good characters, encounter figures who represent some of the less admirable qualities of the world. The linkage between generalized satire and the failure patterns of individual characters is illustrated as early as the first two scenes of the novel. In the frame of the opening passage the novelist employs a Carlylean persona for angry satire. Couching his Jeremiad in ironically Biblical rhetoric, Trollope invents his own "commandments" which summarize his view of the world as follows, "To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. This is the special text that we delight to follow, and success is the god that we delight to worship." [1] From that opening his text gathers fury and he rages on about the "race" which is life. "Let us have strength and speed. And how shall we know who are strong and swift if we do not train our horses to run against each other?" [1] He follows the invective with a dramatized parable about two seekers after success, "Thompson" and "Johnson", one who plays the world's games and wins and one who refuses to play and fails. This sermon, so different from his usual opening scenes, typically descriptive or genealogical, is meant to shock, to prepare the way for an unorthodox tale of romantic love, to undermine at the start the conventions of the romantic comedy novel in which the audience might be intending to believe, and to establish the pattern of failure which I have already described. The second scene continues the pattern of failure begun in the first scene by introducing George Bertram who has just received the "Double-First", Arthur Wilkinson who has done much less well than expected at school, and Henry Harcourt, an Oxford alumnus who represents the attitude of the prudent world which Trollope here despises. In this scene, then, the themes of vocation and success and failure are related dramatically. Harcourt's comment in which he judges

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Arthur to George, "You always overrated that man" [2],makes clear that this world has no tolerance for failure. Nearly all of Arthur's subsequent encounters show him failing to cope with the hostile universe. One scene, for example, depicts him summoned to a remote castle in the icy cold of winter where an unaccountably mad lord offers him a church living whose monies he must permit his mother to control, an outrageous condition which he subsequently accepts. His failure in life connects with his failure in love. 'Adela, I could not withstand the offer when it was made to m e . ' 'I am sure you could not.' "So I am little more than a curate in the parish as far as the income is concerned.' 'But you have got your fellowship.' '. . . but it is quite impossible . . . that I should ever marry.' 'Oh!' said Adela, with a tremor in her voice. . . . [4] Adela Gauntlet's response to his confession is silence. Though she loves him, she does not give way to emotion, but resorts to religious commonplaces instead of expressing her love. " 'We cannot have everything here', said Adela, trying to smile." [4] In this love scene, Adela's comprehension of the fact that prudence conflicts with and defeats romance predicts the state of frustration in which both pairs of lovers will find themselves during the central portion of the narrative. They love, but internal and external obstacles forbid them to express love openly or to find fulfilment in marriage. George's scenes appear, by way of contrast, to go on happily for a time but progressively come to form a similar pattern of failure. The first meeting of the hero and heroine takes place on a picnic in the Valley of Jehoshaphat in Jerusalem and hints comically at the difficulties inherent in the seemingly problem-free relationship. A Mr. M'Gabbery, who considers himself a rival to Bertram for the attention of Miss Waddington, attempts to ingratiate himself with her. His foolishness plays an important part in bringing Caroline and George together. Picking up George's comment that he had not remembered his father whom he had last seen when he was a child, M'Gabbery, as the voice of Victorian sentimentality, comments, thinking to demean George in the eyes of Caroline, "Your memory must be very bad then . . . I perfectly remember the sweetness of my mother's caresses when I was but three years old. There is nothing, Miss Waddington, to equal the sweetness of a mother's k i s s e s . " Caroline and George, however, refuse to accept this artificial romanticizing of the parent-child relationship. The two, George and Caroline, come together to put him in his place with wit. The dialogue develops as follows. 'There is nothing, Miss Waddington, to equal the sweetness of a mother's k i s s e s . ' 'I never knew them . . . But I have found an aunt's do nearly as well.' 'A grandmother's are not bad', said Bertram, looking very grave. [9]

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This scene, which ruins Mr. M'Gabbery, gives George an opportunity to perform for Caroline in the manner of the kind of comic hero she fancies. Caroline, intent upon following George to look at some inaccessible view, slips and falls into a shallow pool of water. Mr. M'Gabbery the "hero" jumps in after her, splashing her totally and getting himself thoroughly wet while George's response is merely to laugh. George refuses to take her fall seriously, and though he offers to "save" her he makes his offer in mock heroic idiom. "I am the sinner Miss Waddington . . . and on me let the punishment fall. I will go back to Jerusalem; and in order that you may suffer no inconvenience, I will bring hither all your boxes and all your trunks on the backs of a score of Arab p o r t e r s . " Miss Waddington replies 'You know you intend to do no such thing. You have already told me your ideas as to waiting upon young ladies.' [9] From the start George insists that he will not be a woman's slave. Although Caroline admires this, she is ambivalent about the kind of man she prefers. 'No man is really liked who is ever ready to run on messages and tie up parcels. It is generally considered that a man knows his own value, and that, if he be willing to do such work, such work is fit for him.' 'You never do anything to oblige, then?' 'Very rarely; at least, not in the little domestic line . . . . ladies are never really grateful to a man for turning himself into a flunky.' 'Ah! I like to be attended to all the s a m e . ' 'Then there is Mr. M'Gabbery. Half a smile will keep him at your feet the whole day.' [9] Nevertheless, Caroline and George do become allied in the comic r e p artee, and, respecting each other's independence and verbal agility, fall in love. Trollope is combining satire with romantic comedy in such a way that the former serves at least partly to undercut the latter mode in these scenes. While George and Caroline play conventional love games, the author uses them to make comments about the roles of men and women, parents and children, and the false and immoral expectations surrounding them all. Furthermore, their dialogue is meant to indicate that they are unaware of how serious their misunderstandings of each other are and how inadequate a protection verbal sophistication will be in London and Littlebath. Both think of the love match as a struggle for control and fear the annihilation of their individual personalities . Although George does propose in Jerusalem, having been "converted" from the temporary worship of Christ to the worship of Caroline, the separation and dissolution is prepared for immediately. Caroline, playing the role of courtly love lady, and speaking as prudence dictates, enforces a ban upon the marriage until after George shall have been called to the bar and will be able to support her in the man-

51 ner which she deems proper. The dialogue between them which follows her announcement is neither comic nor loving. The conflict between prudence and passion is expressed, the pattern of failure for George and Caroline introduced, and the comedy of romance, to all intents, concluded. 'And what is the date, Miss Waddington, that you are now kind enough to name for our wedding day?' 'The day after you shall have been called to the bar, Mr. Bertram. That is, if the press of two such great events together will not be too much for you.' 'Of course you know that is putting it off for nearly three years ?' 'For more than two, I believe, certainly.' [15] The same chapter which contains that unpromising exchange ends with Caroline's aunt's belief that a typical romantic comedy ending may still occur. "In Aunt Mary's mind, the rich uncle, the rich grandfather, was still the god that was to come down upon the stage and relieve them from their great difficulty." [15] Trollope makes it clear that such a solution is impossible in the world he has created for George and Caroline. Aunt Mary's remarks and the comedy in these early scenes do not predict accurately the pattern of development in the remainder of the novel. The central portion of the book is devoted to creating the feeling of the passage of several years' time and is notable for the absence of major scenes involving the principals. This is meant to illustrate the communications failure precipitating the destruction of the r e lationship between the lovers. George, losing his ambition because Caroline will not marry him and give him a reason to be ambitious, dissipates and falls in and out of occupations increasingly less savory. Since he determines not to see Caroline, letters replace the dramatic scenes and become a tool of expressing distance and misunderstanding. The author condemns this substitution of letters for encounters but does not interfere to avert disaster. His intrusions instead judge both characters to have erred. "Miss Waddington had been very prudent, but there might perhaps have been a prudence yet more desirable" [17] and "An angry letter, especially if the writer be well-loved, is so much fiercer than any angry speech, so much more unendurable." [18]

Displayed in the key letter sequence is this same conflict between prudence and passion which delivers the coup de grace to what is already an unstable relationship, resulting, finally, in a scene in which the lovers meet only in order to part. George begins the sequence by requesting, in a letter, that Caroline shorten the waiting period before their marriage. She, now more in love with him than ever, considers his request but, because she fears he is trying to manipulate her through her emotions, finally refuses in another letter. The letters pick up again after Henry Harcourt, now Caroline's confidante, advises her on Bertram's state of affections, "I do not think that Bertram's heart is changed" . . . "Bertram is my dear friend, and I know his fine qualities; but I cannot but own that he justified you

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in that temporary want of confidence which you now express." [18] The climax is precipitated when George, discovering this intercourse, responds with a letter couched in angry "legal" terms, demanding that she no longer confide in Harcourt. Caroline then makes her first fatal error in showing the letter of her fiancé to Harcourt for his support. By going to Harcourt for comfort she is opening the circle of interrelationships, destroying the "pair-ness" of the present relationship and substituting for scenes with George, scenes with Harcourt who is everything George is not - wordly, self-seeking, calculating, prudent, and corrupt. The element of intrigue is added and hastens the completion of the failure pattern when Harcourt, in the first of several dramatic scenes, tells George that Caroline has shown him the letter. Playing the role of a friend who hesitates to say inflammatory things, telling just enough truth to cause George, who no longer trusts him, to trust his observations, Harcourt says, " . . . 1 doubt its coming off at all (the wedding). Each of you is too proud for the other. Neither of you can forgive what the other has done. I do not think you will ultimately come together." [19] Bertram looked full at Harcourt as this was said, and observed that there was not the usual easy, gentlemanlike smile on the barrister's face; and yet the barrister was doing his best to look as usual. The fact was, that Harcourt was playing a game, and playing it with considerable skill, but his performance was not altogether a Garrick. Something might have been read in his face had Bertram been cunning enough to read it. But Bertram was not a cunning man. [19] The long-awaited encounter between the lovers (midway through the book) which formalizes the break is a love scene in which love is just not enough to ensure union. Caroline's failures eventuate partly because she is too successful at controlling her emotions and too blind to recognize her passionate nature. Bertram's error is serious. He fails to understand Caroline's true feelings toward him. "I have long felt that I ought to give you this release; for I have known that you have not thoroughly loved m e . " [20] But his fault is excusable and his error is the kind made commonly in romantic comedies. Caroline's flaw is connected to her prudence, a sign that she has been corrupted by the values she herself satirized in the earlier scenes. Her first decision, to postpone the marriage for three years, was worldly and unwise. Now, in this scene she makes a similarly incorrect decision. When George accuses her of showing his letter to Harcourt, Caroline admits her guilt but plays the role of an unapproachable "goddess". 'Yes George; it is true. I did show your letter to Mr. Harcourt . . . that letter had made me very unhappy . . . It was cruel!' [20] Torn between love and independence, she cannot confess that she has been in error. True to form, it is she who breaks the engagement.

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"I may consider then that all is over between u s , " and George replies, "You have back your hand." [20] Though she knew that when he was gone from her her heart would be breaking, she wouldnot bring herself down to use a woman's softness. She could not say that she had been wrong, wrong because distracted by her misery, wrong because he was away from her, wrong because disturbed in her spirits by the depth of the love she felt for him; she could not confess this . . . 'Good-bye, Mr. B e r t r a m . ' She would have said something more, but she feared to trust herself with any word that might have any sound of tenderness. She took his hand, however, and returned the pressure which he gave it. She looked into his eyes, and saw that they were full of tears but still she did not speak. [20] Caroline's failure pattern continues because her need for love is overcome by her desire to maintain her independence and her desire to obtain the kind of status and success her world approves. Her false assumption, following the breakup, that she wants that kind of success enough to surrender happiness leads her to ally h e r self more firmly with Harcourt, and finally, to m a r r y him, an act which proves to be the greatest mistake of her life which is at the same time the ultimate triumph of prudence. Harcourt, equally p r u dent, schemes to marry her so that he will inherit her grandfather's fortune, and so that he will be possessed of a decorative "accessory" for his drawing room. Each is using the other. Thus, it is not surprising that in the scenes which portray their first walk together and, shortly thereafter, their wedding, the novelist should manipulate love scene-wedding scene formats to illustrate the difference between the conventional novel of romantic love and this novel. In the first scene, he uses satire to undercut the romantic love elements, juxtaposing a sentimental frame with the overtly unsentimental occasion. Trollope, in his persona as Tom Moore, p r o vides a standard view of love which is corrected by the action. "And then they started on their walk. Oh! those lovers' rambles! . . . If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this." [28} The author pretends that he and the audience are both too old for this kind of walk. "They are done and over for us, O my compatriots. Never again, unless we are destined to rejoin our houris in heaven, and to saunter over fields of Asphodel in another and a greener youth - never again shall those joys be ours!"[28] But for our friend Sir Henry every joy was present, youth and wealth and joy were all his, and his all together . . . . Was it not sweet for him to wander through the rye ? Had he not fallen upon an Elysium, a very paradise of earthly joys ? Was not his springtide at the full? [28] The ironic contrast between the narrator's romanticism and the true relationship of Harcourt and Caroline is revealed in the attitudes of

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each of the " l o v e r s " . Caroline, still unable to be honest about h e r feelings, denies romance in general though what she really means is that she does not want this particular relationship to be built upon any romantic ideas. She says to Harcourt, cold-bloodedly. 'I have loved once, and no good has come of it. It was contrary to my nature to do so - to love in that mad, passionate, s e l f - s a c r i ficing m a n n e r . But yet I did. I think I may say with certainty that I never shall be so foolish again.' [28] Harcourt at this point considers the advisability of rescinding his offer to h e r because he, as a manipulator, is aware of the controlvalue of d i s i n t e r e s t . In an extended passage he contemplates rejecting Caroline but it is obvious that he is becoming emotionally attached to the idea of numbering h e r among his p o s s e s s i o n s . "It would not be easy . . . to find a face m o r e beautiful with which to adorn his d r a w i n g - r o o m . " [28] And he determines, because Caroline is likely to be h e i r e s s to h e r grandfather's estate ("It might be, if he could play his c a r d s wisely, that he would get it all. . . . "), [28] that he will continue his suit. This is his greatest mistake and it eventually leads to his downfall. Although, as we have just seen, the platitudes of the n a r r a t o r a r e undercut by the calculating behavior and language of the unromantic p a i r , the tone shifts once m o r e at the conclusion of the scene as the lovers discuss the details of their future life together in p r o s a i c t e r m s as if they w e r e average lovers in an ordinary realistic novel. [28] 'You liked the house on the whole; did you?' Caroline during the past week had been up to see the new house in Eaton Square. 'Oh, yes; very much. Nothing could be n i c e r . Only I am afraid i t ' s expensive.' This was a subject on which Caroline could talk to him. 'Not p a r t i c u l a r l y ' , said Sir Henry. 'Of course one can't get a house in London f o r nothing. I shall have r a t h e r a bargain of that if I can pay the money down. The great thing is whether you like i t . ' 'I was charmed with it. I never saw p r e t t i e r drawing-rooms - never. And the bedrooms f o r a London house a r e so l a r g e and a i r y . ' 'Did you go into the dining-room?' 'Oh, yes; I went i n . ' ' T h e r e ' s room f o r four-and-twenty, is t h e r e n o t ? ' 'Well, I don't know. I can't give an opinion about that. You could have t h r e e times that number at s u p p e r . ' ' I ' m not thinking about suppers; but I'm s u r e you could. Kitchen's convenient, e h ? ' A s i m i l a r radical juxtaposition of tones is evident in the wedding scene in which the m a c a b r e n a r r a t o r insists that Caroline's m a r r i a g e to H a r court is a kind of death. Instead of presenting the wedding dramatically, he d e s c r i b e s the action and comments upon it in an uncharacteristically obsessive, symbolic way, using the wedding bells repetitively to s t r e s s the disharmony of this match and to heighten the sense of ultimate d i s aster.

55 Trollope begins the chapter which encloses the scene with the words, "And now came the day of execution", [30] and continues to develop the implied parallel to emphasize the contrast between this particular marriage and the usual meaning of the ceremony. " . . . and so a fitting breakfast was prepared. And then the bells were rung, the Hadley bells, the merry marriage-bells." [30] Inevitably, the bells' sound causes the novelist to think about death and dust and ashes and he connects the funeral ceremony to the wedding ceremony. He talks about what the bells ought to mean to a couple "about to be two no longer - now to become one bone and one flesh." Because this couple's marriage is meaningless to each of them sacramentally, the marriage bells can only make an unharmonious sound. The repetition of the phrase, "Out rung the Hadley bells, the happy marriage-bells", [30] develops this irony. He stresses the discrepancy between what he and the reader see in contrast to what the world sees. "They who saw her arrayed in that bright frosty marriage morning, and watched the majesty of her brow . . . all swore that the young lawyer had done well. . . . And so the marriage-bells rang on, with all their merriness, with all their joy." Caroline has acted, "as some stage queen acts . . ."'[30] and what she does negates the sacrament. Each has sworn, Trollope says, to a different concept of what the marriage is to mean, and the counterpoint of the bells emphasizes the lack of true love in this union. Caroline and Harcourt, riding off upon their honeymoon, conclude this scene, as they did their lovers' walk, with a discussion of financial matters. He announces to her that Uncle George has given them a large sum of money as a wedding present and she responds, "I'm very glad of it; very." Here, too, as in the love scene, pragmatic language dealing with the subject of finances brings the scene back from the metaphorical content of the frame, anchoring it in what appears, by way of contrast, to be a kind of reality. There is a necessary pause in which the relationship deteriorates completely, and Harcourt's fortunes take a turn for the worse so that he is more actively seeking to become the heir to Caroline's grandfather, as a means of survival. Then George is brought back into the action by Harcourt, who, for various reasons, would like to observe his wife in an encounter with her old lover. As he says, "he sometimes did feel almost curious to know whether it were possible to rouse this doll of his to any sense of life or animation." [33] The pattern, thereafter, consists of a sequence of scenes leading to a trap set by Harcourt to catch Caroline and George, and to her consequent permanent departure from his house and their marriage. The climactic scenes in this sequence are a confession of mutual love and Caroline's "confession" to Harcourt that she despises him and loves George Bertram still. Instead of ending the novel with comic love games, Trollope concludes it by bringing out serious conflicts and dangerous passions. In this trap sequence, language, character, and action come together to make the novel into a kind of opera, a term which the novelist sometimes uses to describe this narrative. (4)

Up to this point in the novel, the language of characters (as opposed

56 to the language of the narrator) has been heightened primarily when they are alone because the rules of the world which they inhabit demand that they not say to each other in emotional terms what they really feel. The combination of extreme actions and extreme language which may be termed "operatic" is realized only when Harcourt and Caroline, Caroline and George interact dramatically in these latter scenes of passionate love and passionate hatred. Before the operatic scenes begin, George is re-introduced. The marriage, though, far from happy, is at a point of uneasy stasis. George and Caroline first dance together at a ball, and, speaking, begin to lose control. Blaming George for her misery, she asks, 'And whose doing has this been? Why is it that I may not think of past times? Why is it that all thought, all memories are denied me? Who broke the cup at the very fountain?' [34] The confession of their mutual responsibility for their failures follows and is purgative, resulting in the first satisfactory love scene. 1 We have been like two children who have quarrelled over their plaything, and broken it in pieces while it was yet new. We cannot put the wheels again together, or make the broken reed produce sweet sounds.' 'No', he said, 'No, no, no. No sounds are any longer sweet. There is no music now.' [35]

The "operatic" confrontation pattern then begins with a scene between Caroline and her husband. Harcourt, now jealous of Bertram and worried over financial matters, demands that Caroline make efforts to ingratiate herself with her grandfather at Hadley. She refuses. Her husband's language is threatening and is evidence that he is becoming desperate. 'You know how I am situated - how great the stake is; and you will do nothing to help me win it. . . . D o you not know that when I m a r ried you, I looked to your . . . fortune?' [35] His prudence is replaced by a more insistent villainy, hers by greater self-honesty. Such pretenses as those upon which their marriage has been based are eroded. Caroline's sexual revulsion from Harcourt is expressed in her ruminations, if not yet directly to her husband, and contrasted, in the following scene, with her passionate love for B e r tram: Her brow grew wildly black as she thought of his caresses, his love, which were more hateful to her even than his coarse ill-humour . . . bound in a foul Mezentian embrace to a being against whom all (her) human gorge rose in violent disgust!' [35] The development from the "civilized" language of the husband-wife argument to the uncompromisingly fierce and metaphoric language

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in which she contemplates her situation reflects the increasingly melodramatic tenor of the narrative. George, planning to leave London, comes to say goodbye to Caroline forever. The crucial fact about this scene will not be Harcourt's "trap" but the breakdown of Caroline's defenses and, therefore, her confessions of love and hatred, the confessions she was unable to make earlier. Caroline's confession to George is the personal climax of the novel for it reflects her complete break with the prudent world and her acceptance of the passion in herself. Once again, the novelist's frame sets up romantic comedy conventions and plays them off against the melodrama inherent in the scene to produce dislocative effects based primarily upon the distinction between what is actually taking place and what might have been, that is, what the conventions in a novel with a freer world would have produced. "If a wholesome loaf on your tables, and a strong arm round your waists, and a warm heart to lean on cannot make you happy, then you are not the girls for whom I take you." [36] The dialogue between George and Caroline which follows illustrates the difference between the way of life suggested in the frame and the actual way the lives of these characters have developed. George confesses first: 'I suppose that now, for the last time, I may speak truly - as a man should speak. Lady Harcourt, I have never ceased to love you, never for one moment; never since that day when we walked together among those strange tombs. My love for you had been the dream of my life.' 'But, why - why - why? - ' She could not speak further, for her voice was choked with tears. 'I know what you would say. Why was I so stern to you!' 'Why did you go away? Why did you not come to us ?' 'Because you distrusted me; not as your lover, but as a man. But I did not come here to blame you, Caroline.' 'Nor to be blamed.' [35] Caroline weeps. Then George touches her shoulder. The scene develops after that through gestures which, in opposition to the sexual revulsion expressed in the previous scene, reveal sexual passion. The movements of both, it will be seen, indicate a progressive intimacy that goes beyond the heightened language, and certainly beyond the comic language of the scene frame. He came up to her, and lightly put his hand upon her shoulder. His touch was very light, but yet she felt that there was love in it - illicit, dishonest love. There was treason in it to her lord's rights. Her lord! Yes, he was her lord, and it was treason. But it was very sweet that touch; it was as though a thrill of love passed across her and embraced her whole body. Treason to such a creature as that! a brute with a face of brass and feet of clay, who had got hold of her with a false idea that by her aid he could turn his base brass into gold as base! Could there be treason to such a one as he? Ah! what would the world say of her were she to share that flight?

58 'Caroline', he murmured in her ear. 'Caroline; dearest Caroline!' Thus he murmured soft words into her ear, while his hand still rested gently on her shoulder - oh, so gently! And still she answered nothing, but the gurgling of her sobs was audible to him enough. 'Caroline', he repeated; 'dearest, dearest Caroline.' And then he was on his knees beside her; and the hand which had touched her shoulder was now pressed upon her arm. [35] 'Go, George - go - go; thou, only love of my heart; my darling; mine that might have been; mine that never can be now - never never - never. Go, George. It is over now. I have been base, and vile, and cowardly - unworthy of your dear memory. But it shall not be so again. You shall not blush that you have loved me.' He took her outstretched hands in his, and stood for awhile gazing into her face. Then, with the strong motion of his arms, he drew her close to his breast, pressed her to his heart, and imprinted one warm kiss upon her brow. Then he left her, and got to the drawing-room door with his fleetest step. [35] The kiss enforces the realization of both characters that they are about to break the moral law and the scene concludes with George's hasty departure. In the following scene of this sequence Harcourt announces that he has set up their meeting as a trap, and has spied upon them, and Caroline reacts. Harcourt's intrigue is completed but not on his terms since Caroline does not, when accused, behave as if she were a trapped animal. Instead she turns the confession scene into a defiant assertion of love and then of hate. 'Who brought us again together?' 'I did so; trusting to your judgment and good taste.' 'I did not wish to see him. I did not ask him here. I would have r e mained at home month after month rather than have met him, had I been allowed my own way.' 'Nonsense! Why should you have been so afraid to meet him?' 'Because I love him.' She is able to assert to her husband that he is sexually distasteful to her and that the marriage is immoral and illegitimate. 'And you allowed him to embrace you - to hold you in his arms to kiss you?' 'Ah me; yes - for the last time. He did kiss me. I feel his lips now upon my brow. And then I told him that I loved him; loved none but him; could love none other. Then I bade him begone; and he went. Now, sir, I think you know it all. You seem to have had two accounts of the interview; I hope they do not disagree?' 'Such audacious effrontery I never witnessed in my life - never heard of before - ' 'What, sir, did you think that I should lie to you?' 'I thought there was some sense of shame left in you.' 'Too high a sense of shame for that. I wish you could know it all.

59 I wish I could tell you the tone of his voice, and the look of his eye. I wish I could tell you how my heart drooped, and all but fainted, as I felt that he must leave me for ever. I am a married woman, and it was needful that he should go.' After this there was a slight pause, and then she added: 'Now, Sir Henry, I think you know it all. Now may I go?' He rose from his chair and began walking the length of the room, backwards and forwards, with quick step. As we have before said, he had a heart in his bosom; he had blood in his veins; he had those feelings of a man which make the scorn of a beautiful woman so intolerable. And then she was his wife, his property, his dependent, his own. For a moment he forgot the Hadley moneybags, sorely as he wanted them, and the true man spoke out with full, unabated anger. 'Brazen-faced harlot!' he exclaimed, as he passed her in his walk; 'unmitigated harlot!' 'Yes, sir', she answered, in a low tone, coming up to him as she spoke, laying her hand upon his arm, and looking still full into his face - looking into it with such a gaze that even he cowered before her. 'Yes, sir, I was the thing you say. When I came to you, and sold my woman's purity for a name, a house, a place before the world - when I gave you my hand, but could not give my heart, I was - what you have said.' 'Stop, sir, and let me speak. I have told you often that I did not love you. I tell you so now again. I have never loved you - never shall love you. You have called me now by a base name; and in that I have lived with you and have not loved you, I dare not say that you have called me falsely. But I will sin no more.' 'What is it you mean?' 'I will not deserve the name again - even from you.' [36] In this sequence of scenes the language is clearly operatic. George and Caroline's passions are consummated in verbal climaxes, first the lovers' "sexual" duet, then the "murder" of Harcourt by Caroline. "Acting out" their desires in words only, they say things that could never be said in a comic scene. Since real people, it might be argued, do not call each other "brazenfaced harlot" and "thou, only love of my heart" such a heightening of language and emotions appears to be antithetical to the kind of via media realism which is the hallmark of orthodox romantic comedy. There is bound to be, with melodrama, a certain sacrifice of pictorial reality, as at least one critic has pointed out. "It is necessary . . . that the conventional devices of suspense and climax be eliminated . . . to make the plot . . . as unsensational as possible for the sake of a faithful reproduction of 'real life' . . . " (5) Nevertheless, these scenes do manage to be convincingly realistic because all along the novelist has been creating a different set of expectations for realism based partly on the "conventional devices of suspense and climax." Since the romantic comedy elements have been undercut in a particular way, the melodrama rings true.

60 From the start of the novel Trollope has emphasized his view that to fail to give way to honest emotions, particularly the emotion of love, is corrupt. Since the chief characters who submit to the c o r ruption of the cold and unfeeling world make unfortunate and frequently disastrous errors, such submission is presented as an unnatural r e sistance to the passion that is in them. That the passion is there we are allowed to overhear in their ruminations and asides. Hence, when they are freed from the world's strictures, and release their emotions melodramatically this does not seem unreal, but, on the contrary, an expression of their true natures. Since the satirical presentation of the world as unfeeling makes the melodrama more convincingly real, the novel's use of satire, usually considered antithetical to realism, (6) works in conjunction with the melodrama to create the appearance of reality. This effect is heightened when a number of characters are introduced into the novel as objects of the satire who, in direct contrast to the chief characters, lack the power to express real emotion. The lack of emotional capability in Sir Lionel Bertram, Mr. Stistick, and even Sir Henry Harcourt, for the most part, makes them into one-dimensional monsters who are, in a sense, unrealistic. Then the juxtaposition of these satiric characters with the passionate characters, often in the same scenes, makes the chief characters seem more realistic. To illustrate the way in which satire asserts the realism of passion consider the scene in which Caroline, immediately following her separation from George, attends a card party at which all of the old ladies are playing the game as if it were as serious as life itself. These characters are made so monstrous through the author's satiric lens that Caroline's grief seems all the more human in comparison. Watch the gleam of joy that lights up the half-dead, sallow countenance of old Mrs. Shortpointz as she finds the ace of trumps at the back of her hand, the very last card. Happy, happy Mrs. Shortpointz ! Watch the triumph which illumines even the painted cheeks and half-hidden wrinkles of Lady Longspade as she brings in at the end of the hand three winning little clubs, and sees kings and queens fall impotent at their call. Triumphant, successful Lady Longspade! Was Napoleon more triumphant? did a brighter glow of self-satisfied inward power cross his features, when at Ulm he succeeded in separating poor Mack from all his friends ? [22] This same figure-ground relationship occurs once again during the first scene of the reunion between the lovers. In contrast to the passions of hero and heroine which both are endeavoring to control, the characters seated around them at this dinner party, Baron Brawl and Mr. and Mrs. Stistick, reduce the issues of the day - education and politics - to mere phrases in a meaningless argument, and are themselves deflated, mocked for their lack of humanity. 'What do you say, Lady Harcourt', asked the baron, 'as to the management of a school with - how many millions of them, Mr. Stistick?' ' Five hundred and fifty-five thousand male children - '

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'Suppose we say boys', said the judge. 'Boys?' asked Mr. Stistick, not quite understanding him, but rather disconcerted by the familiarity of the word. 'Well, I suppose they must be boys; - at least the most of them.' 'They are all from nine to twelve, I say', continued Mr. Stistick, completely bewildered. 'Oh, that alters the question', said the judge. 'Not at all', said Mr. Stistick. 'There is accommodation for only - ' 'Well, we'll ask Lady Harcourt. What do you say, Lady Harcourt?' Lady Harcourt felt herself by no means inclined to enter into the joke on either side; so she said, with her gravest smile, 'I'm sure Mr. Stistick understands very well what he's talking about.' [33] This unreality of the satirized characters makes the passionate charact e r s seem more real. Yet, the satire contributes a note of realism on its own account, aside from the way it operates in conjunction with the melodrama. However much the satirized individuals are distorted, what they r e p resent is assumed to be a real phenomenon. The chief characters in whom one is led to believe, and with whom one sympathizes, must operate according to the cruel and arbitrary rules of an uncomic world. The principal function of the satire in this regard is to depict the c o r ruption of the social system on a number of different levels. The operatic structure, the melodramatic language, and the heavy incursion of satire in the novel should not imply that the world being depicted is not real. Opera/melodrama is to human feelings as satire is to the social situation, exaggerated perhaps, but an exaggeration of real passions in what is meant to be a "real" though certainly not traditionally comic Trollopian world. Despite the marriages at the finale, then, no one would be likely to mistake The Bertrams for an orthodox romantic comedy novel. The melodrama briefly permits a certain amount of freedom of utterance to the characters but a truly integrative comic ending is impossible. This is exemplified most dramatically when Harcourt commits suicide in a grand climax to the opera plot, but the sad wedding of George and Caroline, after the passage of several years' time, reiterates the major point of the novel in a less spectacular way. There is, Trollope is saying, a great discrepancy between dream and fictional reality, given the limited "possibilities for action" in the novel's world. A r thur Wilkinson never really succeeds in being more than a poor, overworked clergyman, and the Bertram marriage is sterile. The work concludes with these authorial remarks. Reader, can you call to mind what was the plan of life which Caroline Waddington had formed in the boldness of her young heart ? Can you remember the aspirations of George Bertram, as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, watching the stones of the temple over against him ? [47] While a happy ending of a sort is achieved, there is an irretrievable loss in the struggle. Though, in The Belton Estate, where romantic

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comedy prevails, Clara returns victorious to the world of Belton, George, Arthur, and Caroline are seen, instead, as victims of their kind of world and its values; what is stressed is the vast difference between their dreams and their achievements. NOTES (1) The Bertrams, 10th English edition (London: Chapman and Hall, n . d . ) . Henceforth all citations will appear in the text by chapter number. (2) Upon his departure, however, she breaks into the sort of melodramatic utterance typical of characters in this novel who are forced to control their emotions in front of others for world-related reasons. "He, to talk of sympathy to a woman thinking with him exactly as he thought! he who was so timid of the world that he feared to love lest perchance his supplies of bread and meat might fail him!" [4] (3) Caroline's true emotions are in evidence in this rumination. He had left her, and she knew not how to live without him. That was the thorn that struck fast in her woman's bosom. She could never again look into those deep, thoughtful eyes; never again feel the pressure of that strong, manly arm; never hear the poetry of that rich voice as she had heard it when he poured words of love and truth into her ear. Bertram had many faults, and while he belonged to her, she had thought of them often enough; but he had many v i r tues also, and now she could think but of them. [20] (4) He introduces his characters, for example, operatically. "I have called her a heroine; it is the novelist's customary name for his prima donna and so I use it. But many opera companies have more than one prima donna", [4] and "And now for Caroline Waddington, our donna primissima. Her qualities, attributes, and virtues must be given more in detail. . . " [ 9 ] (5) Becker, "Realism", p. 187. (6) A Spectator reviewer asserted that the satire could not help but destroy such realism as there was in The Bertrams. If he has the constructive gift to form a probable and well-sustained story, and the dramatic genius requisite to create persons of real flesh and blood (which may be doubted), his natural tendency to satire and smart remark interferes with the exercise of the first-named faculties, and introduces elements of suspension, if not of confusion into the narrative. In a satirical novel consistency either in persons or events is a secondary matter. "The Bertrams", rev. Spectator 32 (19 March, 1859), 328.

4. THE CLAVE RINGS: IRONY IN HARMONY AND TENSION WITH ROMANTIC COMEDY

In neither The Bertrams nor The Claverings (1) are the expectations for romantic comedy fully realized, for in neither work are freedom, union, integration and mobility available to everyone. (2) The B e r trams concludes with a sense of loss, with the feeling that all of the characters, as a result of their encounters with the harsh realities of their world, have been robbed of joy. The Claverings ends on a note of happiness for some, but pain and loss for others. Despite the similarities, The Claverings differs from The Bertrams by virtue of the unequal distribution of success and failure in its world. An individual's fate, the novel seems to indicate, is not completely accidental but is at least partly dependent upon his sex. Yet, there is no direct indictment of those responsible for this situation. Instead, the author, in order to show how the male and female relationships to the world of the novel are bound to differ, manipulates both charact e r s and situations ironically while refraining from making overt judgments himself. The irony follows a standard pattern when it is developed around the characters' blindness to the realities of their positions in the world. (3) At the same time, Trollope leads the reader to perceive the d i s junctions between his own expectations and the ways in which charact e r and plot unfold, and, thereby, between social and poetic justice. Analysis will reveal how the novelist employs the techniques of the ironic mode to examine the double standard. The blindness/sight dichotomy is an important structuring element for the narrative which follows the c a r e e r s of Julia Ongar (née B r a bazon) and Harry Clavering, both of whom are, at the beginning of the novel, lacking in self-awareness. Subsequent scenes deal with their problems of recognition and their separate journeys to s e l f consciousness. (4) Harry Clavering, the hero, is human and fallible and even duplicitous but he does not see himself as he is. The novelist seldom condemns him outright, however. Instead, he shows him acting foolishly but excuses him with a direct address to the reader, preceded by the phrase, "I fear. . . . " Harry Clavering, who is the hero of our story, will not, I f e a r , have hitherto presented himself to the reader as having much of the heroic nature in his character. It will, perhaps, be complained of him that he is fickle, vain, easily led, and almost as easily led to evil as to good. . . Harry Clavering, fellow of his college, six feet high, with handsome face and person, and with plenty to say

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for himself on all subjects, was esteemed highly and regarded much by those who knew him, in spite of those little foibles which marred his character . . . [10] and When I declare that as yet he had not come to any firm resolution, I fear that he will be held as being too weak for the role of hero even in such pages as these. [28] Harry's lack of self-knowledge is evident at every turn. He thinks of himself as both a lover and a gentleman. As a lover, however, he recovers quickly from his passion for Julia Brabazon, slides into an engagement to Florence Burton, and then becomes affianced to both of them at once. As a gentleman, he condemns for their lack of polish two other men in the novel who are clearly superior to him in every way that counts. To Mr. Saul, the clergyman who has acted impeccably in his proposal to Harry's sister, he says, "But my dear fellow, you can't really be in earnest? . . . " Mr. Saul replies, ". . . 1 certainly was - and certainly am in earnest." Harry, engaged at the time to two women, pronounces, with an air of self-righteous finality, "Then I must say that I think you have a very erroneous idea of what the conduct of a gentleman should be." [34] The other person whom Harry inclines to scorn is his future brother-in-law, Theodore Burton, "Harry Clavering could not bring himself to take a liking to him, because he wore cotton gloves, and had an odious habit of dusting his shoes with his pocket-handkerchief, twice Harry saw him do this on the first day of their acquaintance, and he regretted it exceedingly. The cotton gloves, too, were offensive, as were also the thick shoes which had been dusted; but the dusting was the great sin." [7] Yet, Theodore Burton, a man who dusts his boots with his handkerchief, treats Harry generously at all times, even after learning of his involvement with Lady Ongar. Harry Clavering, because he believes, erroneously, that he is the only true gentleman, consistently misjudges others, misapprehending both people and situations. Furthermore, he conceives of himself as a person of overwhelming capabilities and ambitions and as a potentially heroic character. "You see", he tells his parents, "I could have no scope in the church for that sort of ambition which would satisfy me. Look at such men as Locke, and Stephenson and Brassey. They are the men who seem to me to do most in the world." [2] Although Harry believes that his own powers of intelligence and ambition will bring about his success, it is evident that his success occurs despite his character and not because of it. Julia is as blind in her way as Harry is. By the time she learns to know herself it is too late for her to achieve a traditional romantic comedy ending. From the opening scene, indeed, Julia's statements with regard to the plan for her course of life illustrate her failure to comprehend the limitations inherent in her world. (5) She rejects Harry in the autumnal garden of Clavering Park, the estate of her brother-in-law Hugh Clavering, referred to by Michael Sadleir as "the superbly ironic background to the love tale of Julia Ongar and

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young Harry Clavering." (6) It was now the end of August, and the parterres, beds, and bits of lawn were dry, disfigured, and almost ugly, from the effects of a long drought. In gardens to which care and labor are given abundantly, flower-beds will be pretty, and grass will be green, let the weather be what it may; but care and labor were but scantily bestowed on the Clavering Gardens, and everything was yellow, adust, harsh, and dry. [1]

The garden is as dry and fruitless as the marriage she undertakes will turn out to be. In point of fact, she will fall and be forbidden even this poor garden as she fulfills the ambitions expressed here. Her assertion of pragmatism contrasts radically with Harry's romanticism, but both are equally ignorant of the way in which their world operates. 'My falsehood, if you should choose to call me false, is of a very different nature, and is pardonable by all laws known in the world.' 'You are a jilt - that is all.' 'Come, Harry, don't use hard words', and she put her hand kindly upon his arm. 'Look at me, such as I am, and at yourself, and then say whether anything but misery could come of a match between you and me. Our ages by the register are the same, but I am ten yours older than you by the world. Lord Ongar certainly wants a wife, and I intend to be true to him - and useful.' 'How about love?' 'And to love him, sir. Do you think that no man can win a woman's love, unless he is filled to the brim with poetry, and has a neck like Lord Byron, and is handsome like your worship? You are very handsome, Harry, and you, too, should go into the market and make the best of yourself. Why should you not learn to love some nice girl that has money to assist you?' iy

'If you could only know how infinitely I should prefer your lot to mine! Oh, Harry, I envy you! I do envy you! You have got the ball at your feet, and the world before you, and can win every thing for yourself.' 'But nothing is any thing without your love.' 'Pshaw! Love, indeed, What could I do for you but ruin you?' 'But I do love now.' 'Be a man, then, and keep it to yourself. Love is not to be our master. You can choose, as I say; but I have had no choice - no choise but to be married well, or to go out like a snuff of a candle. I don't like the snuff of a candle, and, therefore, I am going to be married well.' 'And that suffices ?' 'It must suffice.' [1]

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Julia sees as her only avenue to success marriage to someone who can give her financial security. She, like Caroline Waddington, in The Bertrams, denies love and chooses, instead, a marriage to insure her "survival", basing her action upon what she believes the laws of the world dictate. "My falsehood", she says, " . . . is p a r donable by all laws known in the world." However, the world, she will discover, does not pardon women who act openly to achieve their ambitions. Her story is therefore a complex fable of success and f a i l ure. As the lovers go their separate ways, her plan is fulfilled with the speed, if not the end result, of comedy. In a short time, Julia m a r ries Lord Ongar and he dies, leaving her the previously-arranged sum of seven thousand pounds a year. She is still young but now she is widowed and rich. Her success seems to fulfill her predictions, and she has not gone out "like the snuff of a candle". Nevertheless, all is not well for Lady Ongar. It turns out that during the short m a r riage, all of which the couple has lived abroad, Lord Ongar has made his wife's existence a hell on earth, finally conspiring to destroy her reputation, and shut her out of the society which she was certain had approved her initial action. The difference between what she had a s sumed would occur and what actually did occur is made clear by the first of a series of "confessions" she makes to Harry Clavering. Her description of life with Lord Ongar provides a radical contrast to her expectations in the f i r s t scene and is meant to convince the audience, and Harry, its surrogate here, that she has been blameless in her treatment of the now-departed lord. 'I have such a tale to tell you', she said; 'such a tale!' 'I fear that you have not been happy', said he, 'since I saw you l a s t . ' 'Happy!' she replied. 'I have lived such a life as I did not think any man or woman could be made to live on this side of the grave. I will be honest with you, Harry. Nothing but the conviction that it could not be for long, has saved me from destroying myself. I knew that he must die! 1 'Oh, Lady Ongar!' ' Y e s , indeed; that is the name he gave me; and because I consented to take it from him, he treated me - oh, heavens! how am I to find words to tell you what he did, and the way in which he treated me. A woman could not tell it to a man. Harry, I have no friend that I trust but you, but to you I can not tell it. When he found that he had been wrong in marrying me, that he did not want the thing which he had thought would suit him, that I was a drag upon him rather than a comfort - what was his mode, do you think, of ridding himself of the burden ?' Clavering sat silent looking at her. Both her hands were now up to her forehead, and her large eyes were gazing at him till he found himself unable to withdraw his own for a moment from her face. 'He strove to get another man to take me off his hands; and when he found that he was failing, he charged me with the guilt which he himself had contrived for m e . ' 'Lady Ongar!'

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'Yes; you may well stare at me. You may well speak hoarsely and look like that. It may be that even you will not believe me;but by the God in whom we both believe, I tell you nothing but the truth. He attempted that and he failed, and then he accused me of the crime which he could not bring me to commit.' 'And what then? 1 'Yes; what then! Harry, I had a thing to do and a life to live that would have tried the bravest: but I went through it. I stuck to him to the last! He told me before he was dying - before that last frightful illness, that I was staying with him for his money. 'For your money, my lord', I said, 'and for my own name.' And so it was. Would it have been wise in me, after all that I had gone through, to have given up that for which I had sold myself? I had been very poor, and had been so placed that poverty, even such poverty as mine, was a curse to me. You know what I gave up because I feared that curse. Was I to be foiled at last, because such a creature as that wanted to shirk out of his bargain? I knew there were some who would say I had been false, Hugh Clavering says so now, I suppose. But they never should say I had left him to die alone in a foreign land.' [7] The amelioration of Lady Ongar's character is effected through this scene and others like it. Events and characters are seen increasingly from her vantage point. The reader is no longer to consider her an outlaw who has "earned" society's displeasure. The more personal and emotional the treatment of her as a character, the less "comic" and "romantic" the narrative as a whole. It becomes clear that though Julia has sinned and suffered, she will continue to suffer. Although she has come to a partial recognition of how her own ignorance has contributed to her pain, she still believes, erroneously, that the suffering may have been worth the price, and that she is free: "I have one advantage, Harry - one advantage over her and some others. I am f r e e . The chains have hurt me sorely during my slavery; but I am f r e e , and the price of my servitude remains." (7) The remainder of her narrative is devoted to indicating that no price would be enough to compensate for her fate and that her " f r e e dom" is illusory. She has never really had the freedom to choose how her life will be conducted and she has less now. Her scenes are steps on the path to this terrible and complete recognition, and multiple ironies are developed around this essential revelation. In the next segment of this sequence she takes possession of the beautiful country estate of Lord Ongar which has been part of her m a r riage settlement and finds that the land which she had desired so much means nothing to her because she is spurned by society. In one of the few extended character ruminations in the book, the "garden" image of the first scene is picked up again and used to point out the difference between Julia's dreams and the actuality of possession. Against a backdrop of absolute plenitude this time ("The corn in the granaries and the ricks in the hay-yard, the horses in the stable, the cows lowing in the fields - they were all hers") ("the price was in her hands") it is Julia's internal life which is shown to be sere and bereft of

68 comfort. The progress in this scene is toward her recognition of that fact, couched in the religious rhetoric of the Fall and its aftermath. She is isolated at Ongar Park, and rejected by all, and, for the first time, she understands what it means to be without love. She comes to comprehend that Paradise is not a place, but a state of mind, that even Ongar Park is Hell, that she is fallen out of the Garden and cannot possess it. The phrase which is repeated throughout the scene of her discovery is "the apples at her rich country seat had quickly become ashes between her teeth. . . . " ( 8 ) Threatened by a series of figures whom Trollope treats somewhat comically but, who, coming out of her life in Europe, are actually dangerous, Lady Ongar seeks the aid of the one member of society who has not rejected her - Harry Clavering, her old lover. His plot is reunited with hers and through him the crucial irony is constructed - the irony connected with her ignorance of his engagement to Florence Burton, her blind belief in his purity, and her hope that he may love her again. "Oh, Harry, you are so honest! Your honesty is beautiful. A spade will ever be a spade with you. . . a word of truth is so pleasant after living in a world of lies. I know you will not lie to me, Harry. You never did." [15] Harry does, however, lie to her, repeatedly, in scene after scene. The pattern consists always of a trusting confession by Julia followed by an opportunity for the hero's own confession, which he considers but invariably rejects. "He felt now was the moment in which he should tell her of his engagement, but he let the moment pass without using it. And, indeed, it would have been hard for him to tell. In telling such a story he would have been cautioning her that it was useless for her to love him - and this he could not bring himself to do." [15] Their intimacy grows until at last, Harry, overcome by passion, "engages" himself to Lady Ongar by kissing her. The love scene is reminiscent of Caroline Waddington's belated confession of love to George Bertram, but, because the shadow of Harry's other engagement lurks always in the background, and, primarily, because his "confessions" of love are never confessions of responsibility, the scene is painful rather than liberating, ironic rather than romantic. Then he rose suddenly from his chair, and taking her in his arms, and holding her closely to his bosom, pressed his lips to hers. He was so quick in this that she had not the power, even if she had the wish to restrain him. But she struggled in his arms, and held her face aloof from him as she gently rebuked his passion. 'No, Harry, no; not so', she said, 'it must not be so.' 'Yes, Julia, yes; it shall be so; ever so - always so.' 121]

Julia falls into the trap of thinking that now, finally, no farther suffering can occur because she has won the hand of the man she has always loved. Like Oedipus, she feels secure, although she has yet to learn all there is to know about her hero and the value of his proposal. (9) At last, through no effort of Harry's, Julia discovers the existence

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of the other woman, and her recognition is absolute. She comprehends for the first time the extent of her helplessness. Lady Ongar begins the scene with a challenge to the hero. "Harry, tell the truth - tell me all the truth." [25] Harry's first impulse is to recognize his own failings at last. He despised himself for not having written with warm, full-expressed affection to Florence, and with honest, clear truth to Julia. Half his misery rose from this feeling of self-abasement, and from the consciousness that he was weak - piteously weak, exactly in that in which he had often boasted to himself that he was strong. [25] However, when he does respond to Lady Ongar's demand for the truth, he still cannot admit his guilt. 'Harry, tell me the truth; tell me all the truth.' She had come f o r ward to meet him in the middle of the room when she spoke these words, and stood looking him in the face, not having given him her hand. 'What truth?' said Harry. 'Have I ever told you a lie?' But he knew well what was the truth required of him. 'Lies can be acted as well as told. Harry, tell me at once. Who is Florence Burton; who and what?' [25] Julia perceives that she has been trapped a second time, but this time by misplaced love and not by misplaced pragmatism. 'Are you engaged to marry h e r ? ' 'Yes, Lady Ongar, l a m . ' 'Then you have had your revenge on me, and now we are quits.' 'No, Lady Ongar', said he, 'there has been no revenge.' 'We will call it justice, if you please. At any rate, I do not mean to complain.' 'If you ever injured me - ' he began. 'I did injure you' , said she, sharply. 'If you ever injured me, I forgave you f r e e l y . ' 'I did injure you - ' As she spoke she rose from her seat, showing how impossible to her was that tranquility which she had attempted to maintain. 'I did injure you, but the injury came to you early in life, and sat lightly on you. Within a few months you had learned to love this young lady at the place you went to - the first young lady you saw! I had not done you so much harm, Harry. But that which you have done me can not be undone.' [25] Harry, nevertheless, prey, as usual, to his emotions, proposes again rather than confesses, a change which could conceivably turn the r e lationship in the direction of comedy if he were f r e e to m a r r y Julia. (10) She knows, now, however, that such a conclusion is unlikely.

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"That (harm) which you have done me can not be undone", she says. Still, he commits himself to her and to passion more absolutely than ever before. 'I have intended to be true to you - to you and to her.' 'Were you true when you acted as you did the other night?' She endeavored to seat herself with composure, but the attempt failed, and as she fell back upon the sofa he just heard the sob which had cost her so great and vain an effort to restrain. In an instant he was kneeling at her feet, and grasping at the hand with which she was hiding her face. 'Julia', he said, 'look at me: let us, at any rate, understand each other at last. You have told me that you love me; and I have told you - and I tell you now, that I love none other as I love you - have never loved any other as I have loved you. Give me your hand.' Then, coming to her, he took her hand, while she sat with her face averted from him. 'Tell me that you will be my wife.' [25] Julia, acting for both of them, much the nobler of the two, perhaps too good for her role in the novel, refuses to acquiesce to his proposal, makes it open-ended, contingent upon his second thoughts. She was less selfish than he, and was thinking - was trying to think what might be best for them all, but above all, what might be best for him. 'Speak to me', he said, 'and acknowledge that you wronged me when you thought that the expression of my love was an insult to you.' 'It is easy to say speak. What shall I say?' 'Say that you will be my wife.' 'No, I will not say it.' She rose again from her chair, and took her hand away from him. 'I will not say it. Go now and think over all that you have done; and I also will think of it. God help me. What evil comes, when evil has been done! But, Harry, I understand you now, and I at least will blame you no more. Go and see Florence Burton; and if, when you see her, you find that you can love her, take her to your heart, and be true to her. You shall never hear another reproach from me. Go now, go; there is nothing more to be said.' [25] It is evident that all of her actions henceforth are based upon selflessness, the result of her newly-formed perceptions. She not only accepts her fate but even defends Florence Burton's rights. Harry, on the other hand, as evidenced by the second foolish and meaningless proposal, never comes to terms with the discrepancy between his idea of himself and his true character. The novelist exploits the differences between what these characters perceive and what they ought to perceive about themselves and their situations in order to produce what may be termed the "interior irony", and Harry remains, throughout the novel, the target of this kind of irony. When Julia's initial ignorance and assumed worldliness are replaced by knowledge and humanity, she is no longer a butt of this sort

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of irony. Other kinds of irony are employed to induce in the reader the r e c ognition that his expectations for what may happen, like Julia's, can differ from what does happen. "Ironies of situation", in Brooks'and Warren's t e r m , are created out of "the discrepancy between what we expect the outcome of an action to be, or what would seem to be the fitting outcome, and the actual outcome." (11) Situational ironies result in this novel when audience expectations for love and marriage in standard romantic comedy terms are disappointed, and when the characters' fates seem undeserved, ambiguous, or inappropriate in other ways, or when the predictable moral outline of events is violated by the author. (12) In the Fanny-Mr. Saul subplot Trollope o r ganizes a typical love-to-marriage plot, and in the picture of the m a r riage of Cecilia and Theodore Burton he presents the audience with the ideal marriage as a natural end product of the ideal romance. However, the relationships of Florence Burton and Harry Clavering, Hugh and Hermione Clavering, and Julia Brabazon and Lord Ongar disappoint reader expectations in a number of ways. Considered in order below, they represent successively greater departures from romantic comedy conventions. The plot of the romance between Fanny and Mr. Saul is almost too neat. A poor but scrupulously honest clergyman from the gentlemanly class overcomes the objections of Fanny's well-to-do family when he is able, through an accident of fate, to obtain a superior clerical living. Because she is good and he is deserving, and their plot soutterly predictable, there can be no audience surprise at or dissatisfaction with this fortuitous outcome. With scenes of the daily lives of Theodore and Cecilia Burton Trollope completes the picture by illustrating in some detail the perfect marriage in t e r m s realistic enough to make it credible. Though Harry comes to Onslow Crescent expecting only stiff bourgeois respectability, he is shown discovering a comic Eden there. Order, harmony, cleanliness, beauty, and humour are all visible in this idyllic picture of domestic interaction, as the dialogue reveals. He knew that Mr. Burton had a family, and he had pictured to himself an untidy, ugly house, with an untidy, motherly woman going about with a baby in her a r m s . Such would naturally be the home of a man who dusted his shoes with his pocket handkerchief. But to his surprise he found himself in as pretty a drawingroom as he remembered to have seen; and seated on a sofa was almost as pretty a woman as he remembered.

There was not much reticence among the Burtons. He could not but feel this, though now, at the present moment, he was disposed to think specially well of the family because Mrs. Burton and her children were so nice. 'And this is another daughter?' 'Yes; another future niece, Mr. Clavering. But I suppose I may call

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you Harry; may I not? My name is Cecilia. Yes, that is Miss P e r t . ' 'I'm not Miss P e r t ' , said the little soft round ball of a girl from the chair. 'I'm Sophy Burton. Oh! you mustn't tittle.' Harry found himself quite at home in ten minutes; and, before Mr. Burton had returned, had been taken up stairs into the nursery to see Theodore Burton Junior being as yet only some few months old. . . . 'Theodore tells me every thing. I don't think there's a drain planned under a railway-bank, but that he shows it me in some way; and I feel so grateful for it. It makes me know that I can never do enough for him. I hope you'll be as good to Flo as he is to m e . ' 'We can't both be perfect, you know.' [36] The dinner was plain, but good, and Harry after a while became happy and satisfied, although he had come to the house with something almost like a resolution to find fault. There was some wild fowl, and he was agreeably surprised as he watched the mental anxiety and gastronomic skill with which Burton went through the process of preparing the gravy, with lemon and pepper, having in the room a little silver pot and an apparatus of fire for the occasion. He would as soon have expected the Archbishop of Canterbury himself to go through such an operation in the dining-room at Lambeth as the hard-working man of business whom he had known in the chambers at the Adelphi. 'Does he always do that, Mrs. Burton?' Harry asked. 'Always', said Burton, 'when I can get the materials. One doesn't bother one's self about a cold leg of mutton, you know, which is my usual dinner when we are alone. The children have it hot in the middle of the day.' 'Such a thing never happened to him yet, Harry', said Mrs. Burton. 'Gently with the pepper', said the editor. It was the first word he had spoken for some time. 'Be good enough to remember that, your self, when you are writing your article to-night.' 'No, none for me, Theodore', said Mrs. Burton. 'Cissy!' 'I have dined really. If I had remembered that you were going to display your cookery, I would have kept some of my energy; but I forgot i t ! ' 'As a rule', said Burton, 'I don't think women recognize any difference in flavors. I believe wild duck and hashed mutton would be quite the same to my wife if her eyes were blinded. I should not mind this, if it were not that they are generally proud of the deficiency. They think it grand.' [38] . . . he satisfied himself that the life of Onslow Crescent was a better manner of life than that which was likely to prevail in Bolton Street. [38]

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In the Fanny-Mr. Saul romance and the Cecilia and Theodore m a r riage, then, there are no inherent situational ironies because charact e r s are what they seem and seem to get what they deserve. The reader is meant to see no discrepancies between his expectations and the outcome of events. Less perfect and more complex is the relationship of Harry and Florence. Here again many of the ingredients of standard romantic comedy are present, but slightly skewed. Florence, who is good and deserving, suffers through a painful but not extensive period in doubt as to Harry's intentions and is rewarded, at last, with his love, their marriage, and a title, a veritable triumph of the social fairytale. However, there are a number of ironies connected with her success in this achievement of love. Harry, it is true, stands higher on the social ladder than she does, and he is handsome and desirable, but since the audience is made constantly aware of the hero's moral inferiority to her, this victory is not altogether satisfying, and her marriage, though predictable, seems not entirely appropriate. On a more overtly negative level, Trollope presents the Hermione and Hugh Clavering marriage. Hermione, a decent and loving wife, is married to Hugh, a socially-unexceptionable but cruel man. First her only child dies and then her husband. Inhabiting her own interior ironic universe, she blindly and inconsolably mourns the husband f o r ever as if he had been Prince Albert, continuing, despite the grimness of her family situation, to believe or to pretend to believe that the Victorian ideal of the happy marriage has some applicability to her life. The audience sees, as she does not dare to, the difference between her dream and her reality, but, in the process, is disabused of any expectation it might have had that marriage invariably solves everything in a Trollope novel. There is an obvious gulf between the standard romantic comedy convention, the societally-approved attitude toward marriage, and the segment of life Trollope has chosen to display here. Both Hugh and Hermione are imperfect but he is not monstrously unreal, after all. We see them at extremely close range in situations which tend, in other fictions, to have prescribed social and literary forms, and to demand from the characters certain specific kinds of behavior and emotion. When Hugh joins Hermione, immediately following the death of their only child, the novelisticallypredictable and socially-acceptable emotion would be shared grief. Hermione does mourn the death of "little Hughy" in the orthodox way but Hugh absolutely refuses to accept his role as the consoling husband. Instead, he displays his true feelings, disappointment at the loss of the male heir and contempt for his wife's weakness, her grief, and her failure to provide him with strong offspring. Because their frames of reference differ their rhetorics are also disparate. 'The Lord giveth', said the wife, 'and the Lord taketh away.' Hearing this, Sir Hugh made with his head a gesture of impatience. 'Blessed be the name of the Lord', continued Lady Clavering. Her voice was low and almost trembling, and she repeated the words as though they were a task which she had set herself. 'That's all very well in its way', said he, 'but what's the special

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use of it now? I hate twaddle. One must bear one's misfortune as one best can. I don't believe that kind of thing ever makes it lighter.' 'Hugh', she said, 'will you not see him?' 'What good will that do ?' 'I think you would regret it if you were to let them take him away without looking at him. He is so pretty as he lays in his little bed. I thought you would come with me to see him.' 'Why h e r e ? ' he said, almost angrily, as he entered. 'I have had him here with me since you went.' 'He should not be here now', he said, shuddering. "I wish he had been moved before I came. I will not have this room any more; r e member that.' She led him up to the foot of the little cot, which stood close by the head of her own bed, and then she removed a handkerchief which lay upon the child's face. 'Oh, Hugh! oh, Hugh!' she said, and, throwing her arms around his neck, she wept violently upon his breast. For a few moments he did not disturb her, but stood looking at his boy's face. 'Hugh, Hugh', she repeated, 'will you not be kind to me ? Do be kind to me. It is not my fault that we are childless.' Still he endured her for a few moments longer. He spoke no word to her, but he let her remain there, with her head upon his breast. 'Dear Hugh, I love you so truly!' 'This is nonsense', said he, 'sheer nonsense.' His voice was low, and very hoarse. 'Why do you talk of kindness now?' [20]

Hermione's religious sentiments ("the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. . . .") sound pathetic and perhaps cliched in the face of Hugh's impieties, his cruel honesty. The child's death, it is clear, does not provide the occasion for a renewal of love, for peace-making and family re-integration. Instead, this already troubled marriage deteriorates further, as evidenced in a later scene when Hugh announces to his wife that he is leaving her for a four-month fishing trip. Here, in comparison to the scene after the death of the son, the dialogue does not reveal two opposing rhetorics. Because Hermione is no longer bound to the kind of religious language demanded by the death scene, she can say what she feels. Her language level and her husband's are approximately the same. The assumptions, however, r e main irreconcilably opposed. What is most obvious is the rigid power relationship between men and women. Hermione can moan and accuse but she cannot win even a verbal battle against her emotionally-uncommitted spouse. 'Hugh', she said, when next she saw him, 'you can't really mean that you are going to leave me from this time till the winter?' 'I said nothing about the winter.' 'Well - till October.' 'I said that I was going, and I usually mean what I say.' 'I can not believe it, Hugh; I can not bring myself to think that you will be so c r u e l . ' 'Look here, Hermy, if you take to calling names I won't stand i t . '

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'And I won't stand it either. What am I to do ? Am I to be here in this dreadful barrack of a house all alone ? How would you like it ? Would you bear it for one month, let alone four or five? I won't remain here, I tell you that fairly. . . . ' 'What have I done to deserve this? Have I ever done any thing that you told me not? It's all because of Hughy - my darling - so it is; and it's cruel of you, and not like a husband; and it's not manly. It's very cruel. I didn't think any body would have been so cruel as you are to m e . ' Then she broke down and burst into tears. 'Have you done, Hermy?' said her husband. 'No, I've not done.' 'Then go on again' said he. But, in truth, she had done, and could only repeat her last accusation. 'You're very, very c r u e l . ' 'You said that before.' 'And I'll say it again. I'll tell every body, so I will. I'll tell your uncle at the rectory, and he shall speak to you.' 'Look here, Hermy, I can bear a deal of nonsense from you, because some women are given to talk nonsense; but if I find you telling tales about me out of this house, and especially to my uncle, or indeed to any body, I'll let you know what it is to be c r u e l . ' 'You can't be worse than you a r e . ' [34] This sequence of unpleasant scenes contrasts radically with scenes depicting the much more attractive relationships of Fanny and Mr. Saul and Theodore and Cecilia Burton. These scenes are ironic not because they jar with what we know about Hugh and Hermione's r e lationship but because they underscore the vast difference between standard fictional realizations of the Victorian ideal of love and m a r riage and this particular realization. Hermione's relationship with her husband challenges the clichés (in both romantic comedy and life) about the inherent goodness and Tightness of the marital institution, and illustrates the fact that there is the potential within it for causing and suffering great pain. More terrible, even, than Hermione's marriage, however, is Julia's to Lord Ongar. She not only suffers personal and sexual rejection when her husband quickly tires of her, but she must also undergo a far more bizarre indignity. Lord Ongar attempts to trap her into a sexual liaison with his best friend. (13) When she does not fall, he continues to assert that she has sinned so that he may have an excuse for dissolving the now-boring match. These actions on his part seem to constitute a much more grave violation of the marriage contract than Hugh's institutionally-supported kind of cruelty, and ought to mitigate Julia's crime of entering into the union with essentially m e r cenary intentions. Not only does this marriage fail to satisfy romantic comedy expectations for a good marriage, but, granting that Julia has committed a sin in denying her love for Harry, (14) it also exceeds expectations for the kind of bad marriage she (or anyone else) should have to endure. The intended meaning of Julia's fate in the context of the novel as a whole is somewhat ambiguous. (15) She suf-

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fers in and from the marriage, and there is a certain sense in which that may be considered "fitting" or "appropriate". She has, after all, sinned, and she does obtain Lord Ongar's money to which the marriage, and perhaps the suffering, have entitled her. However, she is excluded from society and doomed to lovelessness forever. Furthermore, her ending looks even less comfortable when considered, as it is meant to be, alongside Harry's undeserved harvest of plenty. Two people who started out at the same time to make their way in the world, they are, at the end of the novel, in very different positions. Julia achieves only a part of what she had initially desired, and her achievement has got to be qualified by her suffering, while Harry, who has been no paragon of virtue either, acquires everything with no strings attached. One contemporary reviewer found nothing amiss in such a distribution of rewards. He interpreted the ending, in fact, as a triumph of social justice. "In The Claverings this presence of the respectable god of social justice is perhaps more remarkable than in any previous book from the same hand. Everything turns out just as our belief in the general comfort of the universe requires that it should do." (16) However, it is this "respectable god of social justice" who makes the rules which allow no other alternatives but marriage for money to intelligent but impecunious women. It is this "respectable god of social justice" who condemns Julia and dooms her to isolation for seizing upon her only available option. And it is this same "respectable god of social justice" who welcomes Harry eagerly after he has committed a major indiscretion by engaging himself to two women at once. The distinction between the world's system of social justice and true justice is made clear by the author, who has unified their two narrative patterns into a single design which makes this point. Describing Harry's return to the fold, he comments: 'Alas! alas! I fear that justice was outraged in the welcome that Harry received on that evening. I have said that he would be called upon to own his sins, and so much, at least, should have been required of him. But he owned no sin. I have said that a certain degradation must attend him in that first interview after his reconciliation. Instead of this, the hours that he spent that evening in Onslow Terrace were hours of one long ovation. He was, as it were, put upon a throne as a king who had returned from his conquest, and those two women did him honor, almost kneeling at his feet. . . [41]

If the term "poetic justice" implies the fulfilment of certain moral expectations inherent in each novel's format, if poetic justice ought to include an ethical component, one is led to the conclusion that social justice in The Claverings must be different in some respect from poetic and/or moral justice. Even if, as the reviewer says, social justice is done, one may feel, along with the narrator, that other forms of justice are "outraged". The pattern which emerges suggests that the society portrayed in the novel makes more stringent demands on some characters than it does on others, that stan-

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dards are not the same for every individual, and, in fact, that it is the double standard for men and women which governs social attitudes and determines fates. It may at first appear incomprehensible that the female characters in the world of the novel should themselves reinforce the operation of this standard, but they do. Florence and Cecilia, as we have just seen, treat Harry as a "king", and Lady Ongar takes upon herself all the blame for her own plight, and she and Florence together continue to withhold censure from him, acting as if he is worthy of their devotion and adoration when it is manifestly evident that he is not. 'I gave up the dearest heart, the sweetest temper, ay, and the truest man that, that - Well you have won him instead, and he has been the gainer.'

'He has told me of that parting', said Florence. 'I am sure he has. And, Miss Burton, if you will allow me to say one word further - do not be made to think any ill of him because of what happened the other day.' 'I think no ill of him', said Florence, proudly. 'That is well. But I am sure you do not. You are not one to think evil, as I take it, of any body, much less of him whom you love. When he saw me again, free as I am, and when I saw him, thinking him also to be free, was it strange that some memory of old days should come back upon us ? But the fault, if fault there has been, was mine.' [47] Theodore Burton comments upon the way in which his own wife, too, implements the double standard by judging Julia and other unfortunate women harshly upon hearsay evidence while tolerating any sort of male misbehavior. "I know that you would forgive a man anything, and a woman nothing." [31] The author concurs: "When men went astray in matters of love it was within the power of Cecilia Burton's heart to forgive them; but she could not pardon women that so sinned . . . " [28] Knowing full well that Harry is not morally good enough for Florence, Cecilia nonetheless works ceaselessly to bring about their marriage. This activity is explicable at least in part because it reflects her tacit recognition that her sister-in-law is trapped by the system. If she weds Harry, Florence must take him without any illusions as to his character, while maintaining the fiction that he is entirely admirable, but if the marriage is not accomplished, there may be no other marital opportunities for her. Most of the women in the novel realize that they cannot as a rule afford to admit that men are imperfect. Therefore, even the most comfortable among them accept the double standard and promote its inequalities as vigorously as the overtly oppressive Lord Ongars and Hugh Claverings. The ease with which Harry gains and keeps the social approval of both men and women no matter how he acts, while Julia is immediately condemned by all, merely reflects the way in which the world is organized.

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Outspoken criticism of this system of social justice, ordinarily not forthcoming from the women, is evoked primarily from Theodore Burton. He contemplates, on one occasion, how society would react against Florence should Harry refuse to honor the engagement. . . as he thought of the possibility of treachery on Harry's part, he regarded almost with dismay the conclusion to which he was forced to come . . . He might proclaim the offender to the world as false, and the world would laugh at the proclaimer and shake hands with the offender.' [28] Although it is true that Harry is highly successful and everything he does is apparently considered socially acceptable, he never does obtain the approval of Theodore Burton, a perfect husband and family man and a hard-working member of the middle class who is never undercut. Theodore Burton seems, in this regard, to speak as an author surrogate, since the author, too, withholds approval from Harry. In point of fact, Trollope is very much aware of how far from perfect his protagonist is. "He should have been chivalric, manly, full of high duty. He should have been all this, and also full of love, and then he would have been a hero. But men, as I see them are not often heroic." [28] Trollope's awareness of Harry's flaws as well as his emphasis upon the hero's resemblance to the average man is consistent with his blatant manipulation of coincidence to give Harry wealth and happiness at the end. By doing away with a helpless child and then employing a shipwreck to kill off the two remaining heirs with one blow in order that Harry may effortlessly obtain his title, Trollope makes it appear that coincidence alone is responsible for Harry's pecuniary success. His character and his luck are meant to conflict ironically. It is obvious not only that he has done nothing to earn his success, but that he never will do anything even though he has always considered himself an active and potentially heroic figure. Once again it is Theodore Burton who, in the very last words of the novel, makes it clear that the whole of Harry's narrative has been a highly ironic variation upon the Bildungsroman format. (17) "Providence has done very well for Florence", says Theodore, "And Providence has done very well for him also, but Providence was making a great mistake when he expected him to earn his bread." [48] Harry Clavering, the hero, has progressed, without the benefit of either industry or selfknowledge, to an enviable social and pecuniary position, and, as Theodore's comment indicates, it is evident that his future will be a continuation of his present life of comfort, inactivity, and self-deception. The conclusion is a perfect cloture for a structure which has been overwhelmingly ironic throughout. That is, although the fates of the chief characters have partly to do with their prescribed social roles and the responses of their society to those roles, the author has arranged the plot so as to make Harry's success appear even more overtly unearned. (18) Though irony dominates the novel, the ironic mode is not entirely

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inimical to either romantic comedy or realism. Harry's narrative, for example, can be interpreted as straightforward romantic comedy. He does, after all, reject the "bad" girl, Julia Ongar, and m a r r y the "good" girl, Florence Burton, and they can be presumed to live happily ever after. Even though Trollope undercuts this interpretation of Harry's story very heavily, as we have seen, he does not foreclose it as he does in The Bertrams, where the entire narrative is set up to lead one to the conclusion that romantic comedy conventions cannot flourish for anyone in that novel's world. Furthermore, Mr. Saul and Fanny, Cecilia and Theodore, the Reverend and Mrs. Clavering lead happy, successful, romantic comedy lives. It is equally possible and viable to interpret Harry's good fortune and Julia's status as a social outcast, as well as Hermione's sociallyconditioned misery and Florence's ambiguous success, all as quite realistic. There is a persuasive case made for the fact that in the society to which all these characters belong it is logical to assume that some will get more and others less than they deserve, and, more to the point, that ordinary men can succeed where women cannot. The National Review notes that The Claverings is not a standard romantic comedy since "We are not spared the inequalities of real life. . . " (19) Bradford Booth complains that the ending is not realistic. "The r e alist must stay within the bounds of the probable and the reasonable. . . . When the realist permits the solution to turn on an accident, we may be pretty certain that he is shirking the labor that a more ordered conclusion would entail."

"When in The Claverings Sir Hugh Clavering and his brother are drowned off the coast of Norway and Harry becomes unexpectedly heir to a large estate, the reader feels cheated. The moral problem which has been posed is quite evaded by this facile and unconvincing solution." (20) However, coincidence and accident, given the nature of the world, merely serve to reinforce what are already inherent differences in the ways in which men and women are almost invariably treated. As Julia herself saw at the beginning of the novel, it is always likely that men will get more than women do, and possible also that they will get more and women less than they deserve. It is paradoxical but also true that men and women dwelling in the same spatial area live, with regard to their "possibilities for action", in two separate worlds. NOTES (1) The Claverings, first American edition (New York: Harper, 1866) All citations will be by chapter and will appear in the text. For comment upon the dating of this edition see: Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography (London: Constable, 1928), 84-85. (2) Frye (in Anatomy of Criticism, 165-167) suggests, for one thing,

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that the action of comedy is the employment of freedom for the overcoming of obstacles, and, for another, that the impetus of romantic comedy is toward the inclusion of "as many people as possible in its final society. . An early theorist of comedy, JohnTzetzes, suggested, relatedly, that comedy is generally the result of flexibility, leaving open the possibility for change. His view is summarized in James Feibleman, In Praise of Comedy: A Study in its Theory and Practice (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), 91. (3) Garnett Sedgewick, Of Irony: Especially in Drama (1935; rptd. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967), 25. "The spectator knows the facts, the people in the play do not. A character's actual situation is one thing, his idea or interpretation of it is another; the promise things have for him is at variance with their outcome - they are not what they seem." (4) However, further ironies are developed around the fact that there is no necessary relationship between self-consciousness and success. (5) Alan Reynolds Thompson, The Dry Mock: A Study of Irony in Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1948), 9. "Chance or fate in real life, the author in fiction, makes the outcome incongruous to the expectation." (6) Michael Sadleir, Anthony Trollope: A Commentary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; New York: Riverside, 1927), 183. (7) However, Trollope seldom allows the reader to identify so completely with Julia Ongar that she becomes an unambiguously sympathetic figure. (8) This same image, echoic of Paradise Lost, appears in The Bertrams (chap. 30) where it is used to describe Caroline Waddington's sensations just prior to her marriage to Henry Harcourt. (9) Harry, on the other hand, feels somewhat guilty but is unable to tell either of the women about his relationship with the other. He moves constantly back and forth between Julia's house in Bolton Street and the house of Cecilia Burton in Onslow Crescent, and this movement reflects his characteristic inability to reach a decision and act upon it. (10) A. R. Thompson feels that all irony has a partially comic effect, and therefore, that it is possible for the audience to see something comic, though perhaps painful, in Harry's self-deception which leads him to be continually professing his love and loyalty while continually acting badly. The Dry Mock, 33. "The ironical state of mind involves some degree of detachment, for it is in part a comic point of view." (11) Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York: Appleton, 1936), 606. (12) It is true that unpredictability (on which the concept of situational irony is based) is not an infallible guide to irony. Granting that certain aspects of The Claverings are predictable, however, need not foreclose irony. It is predictable, given Julia's sins, that she will have to pay some price, and, with somewhat less certainty, that the hero, as heroes do, will probably succeed. However, more elements than not, in this work, are unexpected. It requires a complete uncritical acceptance of narrative coincidence as a device to foresee that Lord Ongar will die almost immediately, Julia having attained to his wealth, or,

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on a more complex level, that she will find herself unfulfilled, or that she will become engaged again to Harry Clavering; or that Archie and Hugh will die in a strange accident; or that the hero will prove weak and inadequate right up until the end, unless one postulates a structure which is totally ironic. Although the relationship between irony and unpredictability is not inevitable and certainly will not hold true in all respects for all Trollope novels, the assumption of such a relationship is useful for interpreting the organization of the n a r rative of The Claverings. (13) This sub-section of the main plot is Trollope's own variation, a Victorian but also anti-Victorian variation, upon the themes of earlier fictions. Rakes, in novels by Richardson and Radcliffe, b e sieged and attempted to deflower virgins. Frequently, individuals trusted by the besieged heroine acted as bawds to achieve the overthrow of her virtue. What is radical here is that Trollope makes the husband into both the rake and the bawd. Although he had given Henry Harcourt similar activities in The Bertrams, they were somewhat less immorally motivated and much less overtly described. This is Richardson's plot redone with Trollope's sense of what marriage is supposed to mean to the Victorians. (14) Trollope does feel that denial of love is generally a serious m a t ter, and a sin for which there is no easy forgiveness, and that may partly explain how much Julia does have to suffer. He says in the Autobiography, "Then comes the punishment natural to the offence. When she is f r e e , the man whom she had loved, and who had loved her, is engaged to another woman." Autobiography, 141. (15) Julia is not the only character whose fate disappoints expectations or reveals ambiguities. There are others, too, regarding whose dispositions the reader may feel some confusion or dissatisfaction. We have seen how Florence Burton's power is limited so that she can only achieve happiness in the most stereotyped way, and how Hermione has had the requisite marriage but little or no happiness. Consider, on the other hand, the even greater degree of ambiguity in the dispositions of Hugh and Archie Clavering. Hugh makes Hermione unhappy for years before he is accidentally drowned, spending her money to indulge his own desires and ruling his household like a tyrant. He has everything while he lives, including social approval. Then Trollope kills him off. Death seems to be a rather extreme penalty for what is, after all, not unusual behavior among husbands. Furthermore, though Hermione is freed by his death, she seems just as unhappy without him as she was with him. Archie, his brother, also killed in the shipwreck, is useless and parasitic, but harmless. Since his death does not appear to be meant as an exemplum of what should happen to parasites, it does not fit neatly into a retributive scheme. It cannot be said, either, in all fairness, that all women in the novel suffer as a result of the double standard. Cecilia Burton and Mrs. Clavering, Harry's mother, have happy, relatively free lives despite the arrangement of the world which so heavily favors men, but I do not feel that their happiness contradicts the overall pattern I have identified and described. (16) "The Claverings", rev. Saturday Review 23 (18 May 1867),638.

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(17) The Bertrams is a kind of anti-Bildungsroman for everyone. George Bertram and Caroline Waddington and Arthur Wilkinson and even Henry Harcourt seek to fulfill themselves, to achieve the Victorian dream of success. They all learn about the world the hard way, and they all ultimately fail. The Bildung format in The Claverings, on the contrary, indicates how the world selectively rewards and destroys. Julia, the most significant example, achieves s e l f knowledge but pays a great price for it.' (18) The implication, all through my analysis, is that the novel is constructed in such a way that it is tacitly critical of the double standard and the world which enforces it. Soren Kierkegaard's descriptions of irony seem appropriate here. As he sees it, irony is a negative mode which is implicitly critical of the status quo. Although "it does not destroy vanity. . . " it is a mode which does not have "the power of reconciliation within itself as does the comic." The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 273. Instead, "irony is like the negative way, not the truth but the way." Concept, 340. (19) "Mr. Trollope's Novels", National Review 7 (October 1858), 418-419. (20) Anthony Trollope, 174-175.

5. NINA BALATKA, LINDA TRESSEL, MISS MACKENZIE: FAIRYTALE, ANTI-FAIRYTALE, ROMANTIC COMEDY FAIRYTALE

In The Claverings, The Bertrams, Orley Farm and The BeltonEstate, Trollope creates forms which are in some respects conventional but not rigid. These novels utilize, to a lesser or greater extent, the social fairytale, in which a man and a woman meet, fall in love, and overcome a misunderstanding, lack of funds, or similar difficulty to marry and live happily ever after within their society. However, each novel is constructed so that different modes play against one another, comedy against romance, satire against melodrama, to produce v a r i ous complicated effects. When Trollope undertook to write Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel (1) he was setting out in another direction. He says of these books in the Autobiography, "I will speak of them together as they are of the same nature. . . . Of course I had endeavored to change not only my manner of language but my manner of story telling also. . . . English life in them there was none. There was more of romance proper than had been usual with m e . " (2) He had decided to publish the two stories anonymously, to disguise his familiar style, to write in a new idiom and to substitute for the English background settings more exotic. As a result, the social fairytale is replaced by "romance proper", that is, the fairytale mode. Although the love game is retained, it is played by different rules in worlds even more restrictive than those of either The B e r t r a m s or The Claverings, and the narrative patterns reflect the character of these less flexible worlds. The moral design and the plot pattern of Nina Balatka both exhibit a kind of structural rigidity. The moral argument of the book is that Christians treat Jews unfairly and that most Jews are better than most Christians. Trollope uses the intrigue of a Christian family against Anton Trendellsohn, a Jew, to suggest that the minds of Christians who must practice cruelty to assert their Christianity, who p r o fess to believe in Christ but do not love are distorted. He insists upon an absolute contrast between the good Christian heroine and the bad Christian background from which she comes. The narrative makes the moral point in no uncertain t e r m s , permitting the reader no doubts as to the goodness of the Jews and the evil of the Christians. There is no possibility of interpreting events and characters in any way but one. This schematization of plot and moral idea turns the book into a kind of tract. (3) The plot depicts the struggles of a Christian girl, in love with a Jew, who is villified by relatives and friends of her own religious persuasion but who is accepted, finally, by the Jews. This narrative serves and

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m i r r o r s the moral design. Nina, the heroine, preaches the virtues of Judaism to her Christian relatives, and is a spokeswoman for her own true Christianity to the Jews who feel that as a Christian she is a threat to them. Through her, Trollope engineers confrontations of values rather than dramatic scenes. Moral argument lacks the tension which would result from a conflict of interpersonal relationships, here played down in favor of discussion and sermon. In point of fact, there is not even a genuine dialogue. Since Christians and Jews do not really interact and the situation in Prague is essentially static, most scenes are, in a manner of speaking, traditional "folk dances" in which the partners never touch. The Zamenoys, Nina's relatives, as the representative Christians, do their steps on one side of the r e ligious and social b a r r i e r , attempting to convince first Nina and then Anton that the marriage would be a mistake, while the Jews, Anton, Rebecca, and old Trendellsohn, do their steps on the other side. The structure, which reflects the impossibility of communication and thus of detente between these religious enemies, is appropriate to the message. That the author keeps the novel within the boundaries of tract throughout and preaches the message right up until the end is evidenced in the very last words of the novel. They are uttered by the Balatkas' old servant Souchey, who was involved in an earlier scheme to destroy the match between Nina and Anton by sowing distrust and suspicion between them. He is the only character who sees what harm intolerance can do and is converted to tolerance. Refusing to m a r r y Lotta Luxa, a female servant in the Zamenoy household, he tells her, "no. . . for you nearly drove me to be the murderer of my m i s t r e s s . " [16]

Nina Balatka, however, is, as suggested by Trollope himself, as much a fairytale as it is a tract. Its foreign setting, its exploitation of symbolic scenery, its employment of standard folk themes in the plot, its tendency to avoid dialogue in dramatic scenes, and its f o r tuitous ending are all elements characteristic of fairy or folk tales. It is not only the foreignness of the locale which creates the fairytale atmosphere. Unlike other Trollope novels (The Bertrams, for example) in which English life is merely transplanted to foreign soil, the atmosphere of Nina Balatka is strange as well as foreign. (4) There are, of course, no Englishmen, but more importantly, the world is not the workaday world. Prague, though depicted, as Trollope noted proudly, with accuracy of detail, (5) is a mysterious place. It seems dark and empty of people. Though Nina travels continually between the Jewish quarter and her Christian home she seldom meets or even sees anyone. The streets are frequently described as deserted (this, in a capital city) and many scenes take place outdoors at night. The landscape itself is threatening. The empty night and the Moldau River and the bridge over it are symbols of the heroine's despair and isolation, as the landscape for Sir Gawain's journey to the hall of the Green Knight (although the parallel is perhaps far-fetched) is barren and threatening and a symbol of his despair. Time and time again Nina debates her course of action while standing upon the bridge, contemplating death by drowning as the only way out of her difficulties.

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Not surprisingly, then, the bridge and the river become the setting for the denouement, also in a scene set in darkness. Though the river lacks the vigor of the same symbol in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, it lends to Nina Balatka the mysterious air of darker fairytales . Another element which links the book closely to the fairytale is the importance to the plot of certain common folk themes, the bride test and the lover's choice of a poor girl rather than a rich one. (6) The testing motif is common to the religious tales of Constance and Griselda, for example, with which this novel shares certain similarities. Nina is repeatedly tested by her lover who mistrusts her fidelity, and his testing plays an important part in the narrative. First he requests that Nina search her father's desk for the missing deeds to his property and then he demands that she open her private box of papers for him to search. At other times he asks her to swear that she has not got the deeds in her possession. . . . He had learned her character, and perceived how absolutely she fed upon his love; and he would take care that the food should always be there, palpably there, for her sustenance. But - but he must try her yet once more before all this could be done for her. She must pass yet once again through the fire; and if then she should come forth as gold she should be to him the one pure ingot which the earth contained. [11] The artificial nature of the testing plot is evidenced by the ease of its solution. When Anton does finally discover the whereabouts of the deeds he is no longer interested in them. The lover's choice motif is even more simple; the starving heroine is given a rich husband who will take care of her, but only after the testing games have taken place. (7) The fact that Nina's dire poverty is eliminated by her marriage to a rich man is a manifestation of the common folktale theme of the "poor girl rewarded". (8) Nina Balatka not only uses the motifs of fairytales but is also structured to some extent like a tale insofar as the story is told more through narration than through dramatic dialogue. Dialogue creates an illusion which seems to differ from the type of illusion aimed at in the fairytale. (9) For the climax, the author does employ melodrama to involve the audience in the excitement of Nina's suicide attempt, but, rather than create the scene through dialogue, he describes the action in vivid, even lurid terms. As Nina, abandoned by her lover and isolated by the death of her father, is about to leap to her death in the river, she is rescued by her Jewish rival and her Christian servant. On a sudden, at the very moment that Souchey and Rebecca were in the act of passing beneath the feet of the saint, the clouds swept by from off the disc of the waning moon, and the three faces were looking at each other in the clear pale light of the night. Souchey started back and screamed. Rebecca leaped forward and put the grasp of her hand tight upon the skirt of Nina's dress, first one

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hand and then the other, and pressing forward with her body against the parapet, she got a hold also of Nina's foot. [15] Despite the predominance of verbs such as "swept", "started back", "screamed", "leaped", "pressing forward", and "got hold", this passage gains its effect primarily through description of action, and, in that sense, does not really exceed the limits of the fairytale. Trollope does turn immediately afterward to dialogue in order to exploit the pathos of his heroine's situation but the dialogue, too, is stiff and patterned. 'Why have you come to me?' she said. 'Why have you not left me alone?' 'Dear Nina, your sorrows have been too heavy for you to bear.' 'Yes; they have been very heavy.' 'We will comfort you, and they shall be softened.' 'I do not want comfort. I only want to - to - to go.'

'I will not be carried back', said Nina. 'No, dear; the house is desolate and cold. You shall not go there. You shall come to our house, and we will do for you the best we can there, and you shall be comfortable. There is no one there but mother, and she is kind and gracious. She will understand that your father has died, and that you are alone.' [15] The novel's romantic love finale is in keeping with the rather formal presentation of earlier scenes. Nina and Anton do, in spite of what seem to be overwhelming religious and cultural obstacles, achieve happiness; Nina is rewarded and her enemies made impotent. As Susanne Langer defines the fairytale ". . . The theme is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one. . . over his or her superiors. . . ." (10) Nina Balatka, picturing as it does the unlikely victory of a poverty-stricken and completely innocent young woman over her scheming relatives, her doubting lover, and her Jewish rival, fits this definition. The two lovers are not absorbed into the life of their society, however, as they would be at the end of a social fairytale, but disappear into the distance to find another kind of life which is not precisely described. "Early in the following year, while the ground was yet bound with frost, and the great plains of Bohemia were still covered with snow, a Jew and his wife took their leave of Prague, and started for one of the great cities of the west." [16] This type of ending, which offers poise and fulfilment but not finality, is archetypal for the fairytale. "Ends of this sort suit fairy-stories", Tolkien says, "because such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern 'realistic' stories. . . . " (11) Nina Balatka does convey, in the rhythmic prose of this traditional conclusion, a sense of timelessness, a sense that this is

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already an old tale being retold which will be told again and again. Within the limits Trollope had set for himself in this novel, the combination of tract and fairytale is an appropriate form. The fairytale distances the tract elements just enough so that the Victorian audience is able to tolerate the rather pointed message, and the exploitation of pathos makes them care more for Nina than for doctrine. The modes are balanced in such a way that they are complementary. However, it is clear that Nina Balatka is different from novels of the realistic tradition within which Trollope ordinarily defined himself. (12) Though the novel is effective in its way, it does not show T r o l lope doing what he does best. In Linda Tressel, published a year later than Nina Balatka, Trollope substitutes Nuremberg for Prague as a setting for what is in some ways the same kind of book within the self-chosen limitations of the romance framework. Once again there is a female protagonist who is pure and good, beset by enemies, isolated from and/or in conflict with her society. However, Trollope does not succeed so completely, in this novel, in breaking away from his typical format. Linda Tressel is a somewhat more complicated "fairytale" than Nina Balatka, and Nuremberg a more populous setting than Prague. Trollope does, as he intends, leave behind the English social system which is ordinarily his starting point for romantic comedies, but Nuremberg, unlike Prague, is neither empty nor silent nor dark. Instead, it is full of sunshine and full of people. Against this background is played out a tale of suffering which raises sophisticated questions regarding an individual's responsibility to his society, to his family, and to himself. The structure reflects this complex of concerns. There is not, as in Nina Balatka, merely a static opposition of sides. Rather, the n a r rative illustrates, in more dynamic terms, how conflicting demands upon the heroine lead to explosion, escape, and finally, death. Linda Tressel, the principal character, is a pawn of forces beyond her control, but individualistic enough to resist with all her strength the pressures exerted, on the one hand by her aunt, Madame Staubach, a religious fanatic, and by Peter Steinmarc, an old man with the sexual appetites of "January" of The Merchant's Tale, and on the other hand by Ludovic Valcarm, her professed lover. The scene sequences depict the heroine's increasing desperation which begins when Madame Staubach attempts to force Linda into a marriage with their lodger. 'Will you consent to marry Peter Steinmarc?' 'I cannot promise that, Aunt Charlotte.' 'Then I will never forgive you, - never. And God will never forgive you.' [4] Peter, who finds her youth and innocence desirable, enjoys the thought of her ultimate submission to him. Ludovic, like the other two, manipulates the heroine. The plot describes how Linda's p e r sonality is violated by all these people, the substitute parent, the old suitor, and the young one, and how this oppression is not merely

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countenanced but encouraged by Nuremberg society. The aunt employs the rhetoric of escatology to enforce her conviction that marriage to an old man is an opportunity for Linda to practice the subjugation of the flesh. However, Linda is unwilling to believe that life is only a preparation through suffering for death. The stage is therefore set for conflict introduced in the first dialogue and continued, with increasing tension, from then on. 'that which I shall propose to you is for your welfare, here and hereafter, even though it may not at first seem to you to be agreeable. Our lodger, Peter Steinmarc has spoken to me, and he is anxious to make you his wife.' 'Peter Steinmarc!' 'Yes, Linda, Peter Steinmarc.' 'Old Peter Steinmarc!' 'He is not old.' 'I will never marry Peter Steinmarc, aunt Charlotte.' 'Herr Steinmarc wants nothing that is not of right.' 'I am not of his right', said Linda. [2] Peter Steinmarc's proposal is the second step in the sequence. Peter is seen through Linda, at first, as a sort of comic pantalone. However, her description of him indicates her sexual revulsion, as well. The young girl's delicacy is revolted by the thought of marriage to this aged and uncouth figure. She told herself that sooner or later her aunt would conquer her, that sooner or later that mean-faced old man, with his snuffy fingers, and his few straggling hairs brushed over his bald pate, with his big shoes spreading here and there because of his corns, . . . would become her husband, and that it would be her duty to look after his wine, and his old shoes, and his old hat, and to have her own little possessions doled out to her by his penuriousness. [2] Peter Steinmarc may seem to be a foolish old man who can be gulled as old suitors are traditionally gulled in romantic comedies, but he is actually not at all comic but threatening. "The fall of a creaking shoe on the stairs, a sound which she knew full well, and stump, bump, dump, Peter was descending from his apartments to those of his neighbours below him." Although Linda responds to his proposal by making fun of his vanity and his presumption in desiring to marry someone much younger than himself, he is bound to have the upper hand. 'If you want to get married you should marry someone as old as yourself. . . . you are three times as old as I am and that is not becoming.' He answers her with self-righteous fury, and reflects that he "thought

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it would be well that Linda should be crushed. Yes; the thought also that he might be the means of crushing her. " [3] Sensing Linda's guilt feelings about her love for some other man, he seizes the advantage. "Yes, I understand. You blush now. Very well. I shall know how to manage you - or your aunt will know. " The entrance of Ludovic Vale arm which completes the introductory sequence is different from Peter's "stump, bump, dump". Linda notices him across the river from her room and watches him jump across to her side. There was a considerable distance between him and the garden of the red house. . . But there was a pole in the boat, and Linda saw the young man take up the pole and prepare for a spring, and in a moment he was standing in the narrow garden. . . . Was ever such a leap seen before ? Then she thought how safe she would have been from Peter Steinmarc, had Peter Steinmarc been in the boat. [4] Her admiration makes the point that Ludovic is not merely young and glamorous, but also that he has unusual methods of operating v i s - à vis Nuremberg society. Even his first words are romantic and calculated to appeal to a romantic young girl. Nevertheless, their encount e r , like the scene between her and Peter is a struggle. She does not acquiesce willingly to his avowed passion. 'Linda, I love you. ' 'I don't want your love. 1

[4]

Ludovic demands that Linda admit to loving him before he will agree to depart. 'And now they tell me that my cousin Peter is to be your husband. ' 'No, No. He will never be my husband. ' 'You will promise that?' 'He will never be my husband. ' 'Thanks, dearest; a thousand thanks for that. But your aunt is his friend. It is not t r u e ? ' 'Of course she is his friend. 1 'And would give you to him. ' 'I am not hers to give. I am not to be given away at all. I choose to stay as I am. You know that you are very wicked to be here, but I believe you want to get me into trouble. ' 'Oh, Linda!' 'Then go. If you wish me to forgive you, go instantly. ' 'Say that you love me, and I will be gone at once. ' 'I will not say it. ' 'And do you not love me, a little? Oh, Linda, you are so dear to me!' 'Why do you not go. '

[4]

It is evident that the love scenes, instead of providing either release

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or salvation merely add another form of pressure to the life of the heroine. Ludovic can be as heartless as Steinmarc and as insistent as Linda's aunt. Both Ludovic and Madame Staubach, indeed, though they possess absolutely opposing points of view, use rhetoric to cloud the issues and obscure the facts, to attempt to sweep Linda into compliance with their wishes. 'You have done that', she said, 'which would destroy the character of any girl in Nuremberg. 1 'If you mean, aunt Charlotte, that the thing which has happened would destroy the character of any girl in Nuremberg, it may p e r haps be true. If so, I am very unfortunate.' 'Have you not told me that you love him?' 'I do; - I do; - I do! One cannot help one's love. To love as I do is another misfortune. There is nothing but misery around me. You have heard the whole truth now, and you may as well spare me further rebuke.' 'Do you not know how such misery should be m e t ? ' Linda shook her head. 'Have you prayed to be forgiven this terrible sin?' 'What sin?' said Linda, again almost screaming in her energy. 'The terrible sin of receiving this man in the absence of your friends.' 'It was no sin. I am sinful, I know, - very; no one perhaps more so. But there was no sin there. Could I help his coming? Aunt Charlotte, if you do not believe me about this, it is better that we should never speak to each other again. If so, we must live apart.' 'How can that be? We cannot rid ourselves of each other.' 'I will go anywhere, - into service, away from Nuremberg, - where you will. But I will not be told that I am a l i a r . ' [5]

Linda resists rhetoric with plain statement, answering her aunt's, "Have you prayed to be forgiven this terrible sin?" with the phrase, "What s i n ? " . It is a brave, desperate fight to retain some measure of self-direction. However, it avails her little. She cannot win. Instead, she becomes a virtual prisoner of her aunt. "All September went by, and all October, and life in the red house in the island in Nuremberg was a very sad life indeed." [6] This unjust incarceration helps to motivate her first escape. Ludovic, who invariably arrives when the pressures upon the heroine are greatest, organizes the plan for a flight to Augsburg. In attempting to persuade her to run away, he, like Madame Staubach, appeals to her guilt and love, but in the artificial language of the sonneteer. "Because I love you better than the light of heaven. Because I would go through fire and water to be near you. . . . " Linda, even though she thinks she loves him, distrusts this language. As such she does not approve his plan. However, he has an additional weapon. He uses his sexuality to persuade her to do what he wants. He wound his own arm round her waist tightly, and pressed his face

91 close to hers. 'Linda, Linda, - my own, my own! - O God! how happy I am!' She suffered it all, but spoke not a word. His hot kisses were rained upon her lips, but she gave him never a kiss in return. He pressed her with all the muscles of his body, and she simply bore the pressure, uncomplaining, uncomplying, hardly thinking, half conscious, almost swooning, hysterical, with blood rushing wildly to her heart, lost in an agony of mingled fear and love. [6] The heroine is torn between guilt and desire. Enjoined by her aunt to accept Madame Staubach's interpretation of morality, she is pressed by Ludovic to deny traditional social and moral strictures and commit herself to him which will also mean giving up her autonomy in order to make him the arbiter of her morality. Overcome by his sexual force, she surrenders her will to him and they flee together. The flight, which shifts the pattern of the narrative from argument to action, is a disaster. After a while she became very cold; - so cold that that now became for the moment her greatest cause of suffering. It was mid-winter, and though the cloak she had brought was the warmest garment she possessed, it was very insufficient for such work as the present night had brought upon her. Besides her cloak, she had nothing wherewith to wrap herself. Her feet became like ice, and then the chill crept up her body; and though she clung very close to her lover, she could not keep herself from shivering as though in an ague fit. She had no hesitation now in striving to obtain somewarmth by his close proximity. It seemed to her as though the cold would kill her before she could reach Augsburg. [HI

'May we not go now?' said Linda, when she saw that the other passengers had alighted. 'Don't be in a hurry, my girl. By God, there are those ruffians, the gendarmerie. It's all up. By Jove! yes, it's all up. That is hard, after all I did in Nuremberg.' [11]

Linda suffers unbearably from the extreme cold and she comes to feel that Ludovic is less interested in her than in the revolution against the Nuremberg government and in his own escape. At the end of the trip her protector is arrested, her reputation tarnished, and she r e turns to Nuremberg to face again the same situation from which she has fled. At this point the argumentative pattern is resumed. Although she has committed no crime, Linda's aberration is treated by her aunt and by society as the worst of sins. Madame Staubachmust work to persuade her boarder to take Linda in spite of her bad character but she does succeed. The heroine makes one last desperate attempt to frighten Peter into dropping his suit, announcing that if forced

92 to wed she will ruin him. 'I will lead you such a life. . . . I will make you rue the day you first saw me. . . . I will disgrace you. . . . I will waste everything you have. . . . Do you think that you are to trample me under foot, and that I will not have my revenge?' [13] He replies, "I will not let you escape. I will make you pay dearly for all of this one of these days, Fräulein." (13) This is the climactic scene in the novel. It indicates that Linda will never be able to accept the marriage and that Peter Steinmarc, with the encouragement of Madame Staubach, remains obdurately committed to it. As if in answer to this scene, Ludovic reappears, but this time there is no encounter. Linda resists his love and his proffered aid, refusing to meet with him. There is no final touching love scene. Instead, Ludovic accosts Linda's aunt to say only, "It's against the law to make a young woman a prisoner." Linda rejects both alternatives, Peter's and Ludovic's. Nuremberg rejects compromise. All that remains is her solitary escape to Cologne to her death. Trollope then creates what one could consider a "happy" ending for Linda. At the home of her kindly relatives she is comforted through her lingering illness by pure and "fair-haired cousins" with "soft voices", "soft eyes" and "soft hands". It is asexual comfort which is a foretaste of heaven. (14) She expires gradually and bravely. ". . . At last, when the full summer had come, she died at Cologne in Madame Staubach's a r m s . " In a tone similar to that of the ending of Nina Balatka, the description of her death is hagiographic and is meant to be a final vindication of her position. Although she dies after she has run off twice from the house of her guardian and after she has slept in the same railroad car with a man to whom she is not even betrothed, and has, in the process, broken her engagement to an approved suitor, she is to be considered blameless. She has been destroyed, Trollope makes it clear, by individuals who are a part of a society confident of its own morality but immoral. There is a tractlike simplicity in the point; nonetheless, it is fairly radical to make the "fallen" woman the only virtuous individual in the novel, and to suggest that the family and society are not admirable exemplars of morality. Madame Staubach, as we have seen, makes her religion serve her own ends by ascribing to her personal desires a religious purpose. (15) Though she loves her niece, she raises Linda to believe in damnation and hellfire, and then tries to force her to marry Peter Steinmarc because it will be good for her soul to be subject to someone she despises. Her misguided zeal is condemned by the author who says that parents or guardians may demand too much from their charges: " . . . Undutiful! So she called herself; but had she not, in truth, paid duty to her aunt beyond that which one human being can owe to another ? Are we to believe that the very soul of the offspring is to be at the disposition of the parent?" [16] Equally worthy of condemnation is Nuremberg society as a whole.

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It is directly complicitous with Peter Steinmarc and Madame Staubach, forcing Linda into acting in ways which will give it cause to disapprove of her. Just prior to his disappearance forever Ludovic condemns all of Nuremberg for its behavior toward Linda. "Among you", he says, "you are treating that girl as cruelly as ever a girl was treated." [14] Individual members of society are culpable for failing to recognize and to respond adequately to her desperation. For example, Herr Molk, the aged counselor to whom Linda goes for advice, attempts to pressure her into the hated marriage. Mr. Heisse, her next-door neighbor, sees her plight but when asked for help, refuses to become involved. Even Fanny, her good friend, and clearly the best of the lot, is too absorbed in her own love and m a r riage to do anything much for Linda. Her misery cannot be blamed solely upon Peter Steinmarc and Madame Staubach; the townspeople (one can compare this to the emptiness of the landscape in Nina Balatka) are involved in bringing about the suffering and death of the heroine. Linda, who, all by herself, fights the apathy, the fixed opinions, the self-satisfaction of her entire society, tries desperately to r e main within it. When Ludovic reappears and she tells her aunt that he is in their house, she chooses, despite her love for him, to ally herself with her society's values. As should be readily obvious, Linda Tressel is conscious of her societal affiliation in a way that Nina Balatka is not. Her act is similar in meaning to Julia Ongar's dutiful surrender of Harry Clavering to Florence Burton. Linda, like Julia, shows an acceptance of prevailing standards. Despite her unwillingness to break her ties with society, however, the audience is directed to reject Nuremberg and any character who represents its values. Because the moral design is presented in dramatic scenes in terms of social conflict within a concrete world, Linda Tressel seems to have a greater affinity to novels in the "English realistic tradition" than it does to Nina Balatka. That the world is somewhat "dense" is evidenced by the fact that Nuremberg, in contrast to Trollope's Prague, is inhabited by characters, other than the principal actors, who lead ordinary lives, infected neither by the religious mania of Madame Staubach nor the revolutionary zeal of Ludovic Valcarm. Fanny and Max Bogen, for example, fall in love, m a r r y , and live in solid comfort. (16) Nevertheless, there are other elements which indicate that Trollope has, as he himself suggested, developed a form for this novel which differs from "English realism". One of the keys to the new form is the character and role of Ludovic Valcarm. In sun-lit, bourgeois Nuremberg, Ludovic seems to be an anomalous figure. He is not only an outsider but an opponent of its values. He lives in the shadows, comes and goes almost magically, even managing to emerge mysteriously from prison. He is clearly a character from another tradition, very different from heroes such as Will Belton, who f a r m s his land scientifically, or George Bertram, who goes to the university and becomes a lawyer, or Harry Clavering who studies to be an engineer, or even from Anton Trendellsohn, the Jewish businessman. These individuals are grounded in the social life of their communities.

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(Anton, an outsider in Prague, is tied to his own Jewish community.) Ludovic floats free from his world. He introduces the element of romance into the book, raising the expectation in the reader that he has the power to make the fairytale come true. It is he who arranges the first escape for Linda. It is his plan to transport her to Augsburg, a journey aimed at propelling her into his world. Because Linda, despite her strong opposition to its unfair demands, is linked firmly to her society, because Ludovic's behavior tends to be irresponsible, or perhaps because neither of them can overcome the oppressive powers of state and family, his attempt to create a happy ending through romantic flight is an utter failure. Ludovic's role is an active one. He is not there to tell the tale but to change its direction. (17) The result of his intervention, however, is not fairytale but its direct opposite, a mode I term the anti-fairytale. Out of the love professed alike by Madame Staubach and Ludovic Valcarm, in fact, comes not a happy ending, nor even a conditionally happy ending, but suffering and death. It is characteristic of the anti-fairytale that everything invariably happens for the worst. The anti-fairytale appears to possess the outline of fairytale or romance. It does employ fairytale motifs, but, because the motifs are inverted, the shape of the fiction is changed, and not in the direction Ludovic's presence might initially have suggested. The "fleeing of maiden to escape marriage" and the "escape from an undesired lover", (18) common folk tale motifs, are transformed in a single negative direction. The maiden does not escape through flight. She has to die in order to elude the pursuit of the "undesired lover". The Cinderella motif, in which "a person in a mean position. . . makes a good marriage", (19) though it aptly describes the plot of Nina Balatka, appears only in inverted form in Linda Tressel. There is "an unkind stepmother", a "mean position", and the potential for marriage - but the story is turned around so that there can be no happy marriage. Because Ludovic is a failed prince he cannot save the heroine. Tetchen, who introduces Ludovic into the house and attempts to persuade Linda to run away with him, is responsible for leading her into compromising situations. Though essentially wellmeaning, she is a failed fairygodmother. Therefore, although it may sometimes appear that Linda will overcome all obstacles and live happily ever after, she, of course, does not. Cinderella never becomes the princess. Instead, her death carries the form to its logical conclusion. If Nina Balatka is, as I have already indicated, unrealistic insofar as fairytale motifs govern the development of the narrative, it would seem to follow that an anti-fairytale such as Linda Tressel, which undercuts the conventions of fairytales, should create the appearance of realism. The mode of anti-fairytale, however, subverts the expectations for realism as well as for fairytale. The overwhelming negativism evidenced in the succession of failed hopes and unmitigated disasters which describes the plot of Linda Tressel seems so excessive as to be improbable. In the words of one reviewer, "No sane woman who was not wicked would, in real life, act as Aunt Staubach acted; and no man who was not an utter knave would be such an ass

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as Peter was . . . . The story is . . . so improbable and melancholy that it cannot be read with pleasure." (20) In George Levine's view, also, probability is linked with moderation. A realistic work, he says, ought to deal with "the world of compromise". (21) In Linda Tres sel the melancholy is unrelieved. The virtuous heroine is defeated by those in authority and betrayed by everyone she trusts. No character or event intervenes to mediate against her dismal end. If an excess of suffering for the principal character within a pattern leading inevitably to death is unrealistic, and if an excess of fortuitously-arrived-at happiness is also considered unrealistic, it is apparent that "English realism" is generally thought to exist somewhere between these extremes. It follows, then, that to make the fairytale come true in spite of plot logic, as Trollope does in Nina Balatka, or to deny it altogether, as he does in Linda Tressel, produces a similar effect: realism is made subordinate to other modes. Levine suggests that novels are likely to be most convincing in their realism if characters in the worlds of the novels are "enmeshed in the local and contingent". (22) Individuals, he makes it clear, must be shown to be involved with and inhibited by social networks, mores and behavioral strictures. There is little sense of contingency in either Nina Balatka or Linda Tressel, however. In Nina Balatka the spectrum of prescribed behaviors and possible results is narrow, but the heroine is separated from her community rather than caught up in the operations of its social networks; there is, as a result, little sense of "enmeshedness". In Linda Tressel the converse is true. The heroine's world is more complex, but she is too much "enmeshed" in it; she is trapped by her community and its demands. She, even more than Nina, has almost no flexibility, and therefore nothing is possible. In both books, realism, according to these tenets, is qualified. Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel are somewhat less interesting than Trollope's realistic novels, not because realism is in itself a novelistic virtue, or its absence a vice, but because some of the ingredients of Trollope's realism happen to be important ingredients in the worlds and structures of his most successful novels. The greater the flexibility of the worlds-modes combination, the greater the opportunity for the development of scenes and plots. Even in the unpleasantly rigid worlds of The Bertrams and The Claverings, because there are more possibilities, there is more action than there is in either of the two fairytales. Trollope creates, in these novels, environments in which freedom for individuals to maneuver in order to obtain what they want is balanced against social demands. Drama can sometimes be developed out of a character's discovery of and battle against the limitations inherent in his world, but if action depends at all upon a balance of freedom and social restriction, Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel are bound to be less dramatic than the other works discussed. The form which results from the combination of the modes of fairytale and tract curtails dialogue, limits character development, and simplifies the kind and amount of interaction among characters and

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between characters and their society. The anti-fairytale, as realized in Linda Tressel, while more dependent on dialogue, still uses it largely for the purpose of argument; and, although there is a good bit more character development, the interaction among characters is circumscribed, a result of the general absence of flexibility. The kinds of scenes are limited. Their pattern is repetitive, circular, end-stopped, and negative, a result of the compression demanded by the particular modal combination. Taken all in all, the forms of both novels are not so likely to engage the reader's interest as those of other works. That Trollope's experiments with the fairytale mode need not, however, evince these particular shortcomings is evidenced by the a r t i s tically more satisfying Miss Mackenzie. In this novel he combines certain elements of the fairytale mode with realism and romantic comedy so that the modes not only coexist but exist in a dynamic r e lationship with one another. Margaret Mackenzie, thirty-eight, lonely, socially-inexperienced, plain, is surprised to receive as a legacy the fortune of a brother she had nursed through years of illness. P o s sessing money of her own for the first time, she seeks love and contemplates marriage with one of several men while attempting to find her proper place in the social world. Falling in love with a widower cousin with nine children, she is able, after overcoming the usual obstacles and misunderstandings, to m a r r y him and devote her life to caring for him and his family. Even the bare outline suggests that there are sufficient ambiguities to make this novel something less and more than simply a fairytale. The heroine, whom Trollope r e f e r s to, somewhat unfairly, as "a very unattractive old maid . . . overwhelmed by money troubles", (23) m a r r i e s an often crotchety, and not-very-good-looking older man whose conversation is mainly about money. Her marriage gives her security and social status (enabling her, for example, to leave the room ahead of her cousin and friend of lower rank, Mrs. Walter Mackenzie). The audience is not required to suspend much disbelief to accept this entirely plausible conclusion. However, such success is beyond Margaret's most r o mantic dreams. Because she starts out having nothing and expecting nothing her happiness is made to seem greater than Madeline Staveley's or Clara Amedroz's. She feels, at least, like a true Cinderella. Before permitting Cinderella to m a r r y her prince, however, Trollope seems to change direction. Having given his heroine a legacy and sent her off to a resort town to find social intercourse and friendship, he arranges for a mistake in the will to be discovered so that her money is taken away and given to her suitor-cousin John Ball, leaving her instantly penniless and totally dependent upon his charity. This unlooked-for development of the plot is meant not to undercut but to reinforce the fairytale. Because it turns out that John Ball is desirous of taking Margaret for love alone and not for the money which had originally made her attractive to him, she obtains him on her own t e r m s . She gets the only thing she has ever wanted, marriage for love. Love is thus shown to be more important than money, even in a world that had seemed to value money above all things else. Although the novel's conclusion is highly romantic, Trollope had

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intended, when he undertook to write Miss Mackenzie, to omit love altogether. "Miss Mackenzie was written with a desire to prove that a novel may be produced without any love . . . . " (24) He only reluctantly gave way to his instincts and admitted the love interest. Had he kept to his original purpose, satire and realism would surely have prevailed. Remaining would have been Mr. McGuire's squint, Mr. Rubb's yellow gloves, and Mrs. Tom Mackenzie's dinner party, and/ or Margaret's hunger for affection, the death of Tom Mackenzie, and Mrs. Tom Mackenzie's bleak struggles with genteel and not-so-genteel poverty. The domination of either of these other modes would have undermined the fairytale. As it happens, these modes neither dominate nor are dominated, but coexist in a pleasing tension with comedy and with fairytale. Because the money chase and the love search both take place within a contingent but flexible social structure far different from the rigid worlds of Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, and different even from the world of The Bertrams, romantic comedy is the end result. Though the society of Miss Mackenzie is composed of multiple levels, it is possible for characters to move among them. Nina Balatka is the victim of a society which is intolerant. She cannot be herself and satisfy her world which is philosophically rigid. She can only leave. Linda Tressel is in an even more unfortunate position. To retain any freedom in her society is impossible and to escape from it is equally impossible. Even though Linda is in basic agreement with her world's values she still cannot function successfully to achieve happiness. In contrast to both of these heroines, Margaret finds that her wishes agree perfectly with those of her society. When she achieves what she wants, those around her are satisfied also. They want "the Lion" and "the Lamb" to unite. Marriage, then, is the reinforcement of a social bond created through mutual agreement. Order prevails within a framework of flexibility. With the aid of Mrs. Walter Mackenzie, who succeeds as a fairygodmother, the novelist transforms "a very unattractive old maid" into a lovely woman." 'I never saw anybody look so altered in my life', said Mrs. Mackenzie, when Margaret apparelled, appeared in the Cavendish Square drawing room. . . . " Trollope, in transforming a plain and foolish old maid into a warm and happy bride, creates a successful romantic comedy fairytale out of what he himself felt were intractable realistic and anti-romantic materials. NOTES (1) Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel are published together in the World Classics edition (1946; rptd. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951). Miss Mackenzie is also published in the World Classics edition 1924; rptd. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936). (2) Autobiography, 146-147. In The Golden Lion of Granpere (1872) Trollope again used a foreign background for a simple tale, but the story, set in France and focussed mainly upon the relationship between a father and son, suffers from a lack of dramatic and romantic tension. The teller speculates about the motives and psychology of

98 his c h a r a c t e r s and the pace is interminably leisurely. (3) Margaret Maison, Search Your Soul Eustace: A Survey of the R e ligious Novel in the Victorian Age (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 2.

(4) John R. Tolkien, T r e e and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 46. (5) Autobiography, 147. (6) Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk L i t e r a t u r e , r e v . and enl. ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. P r e s s , 1955-1958), III, 408-411, no. H360-H388; 415, H461; V, 15, no. L160; 354-55, T121. (7) "The scale must be weighted against the hero in the folktale; he must be the youngest son with no patrimony, the poor boy with no f r i e n d s . " John Buchan, The Novel and the Fairytale, English Association Essays and Studies, No. 79 (July 1931), 10. (8) Buchan, 10. (9) Tolkien, 49. (10) Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. P r e s s , 1951), 175. (11) Tolkien, 83. He also says (p. 68) that: The consolation of f a i r y - s t o r i e s is the joy of their happy ending: or m o r e correctly of the good catastrophe. The sudden joyous 'turn' (for t h e r e is no t r u e end to any fairy-tale) . . . does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: The p o s s i bility of these is n e c e s s a r y to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat. . . (12) "The novelists who a r e considered to be anti-sensational a r e generally called r e a l i s t i c , I am r e a l i s t i c . " Autobiography, 162. (13) He drops h e r f i r s t name to emphasize that he is no longer p l a y ing the lover f o r h e r , and calls h e r "fraulein" to comment upon h e r imminent m a r r i a g e to him, after which she will be his " f r a u " and subject to his tyranny. (14) This is an unusual touch f o r an author who tends, whenever p o s sible, to de-mythicize death. (15) She never does admit that she has been wrong. The novel concludes by noticing this: During those four months at Cologne the zeal of Madame Staubach's religion had been quenched, and she had been unable to u s e h e r fanaticism, even towards h e r s e l f . But when she was alone in the world the fury of h e r creed returned. 'With faith you shall move a mountain', she would say, 'but without faith you cannot l i v e . ' She could never t r u s t h e r own faith, f o r the mountain would not be moved. [17] (16) At least one contemporary critic felt that the novel ought to be considered essentially r e a l i s t i c . He praised " . . . the fidelity with which it reflects . . . human life . . . . human nature recognizes h e r s e l f . " "Linda T r e s s e l " , r e v . The Nation 6 (18 June 1868), 494.

99

(17) Barbara Hardy discusses the role of the tale-teller as a creator of the fiction in "Towards a Poetics of Fiction 3) An Approach Through Narrative", Novel 2 (Fall 1968), 5-14, especially p. 7. It is interesting to compare Ludovic's function as teller with Julia Ongar's role as teller-participant in The Claverings. (18) Thompson, Motif-Index, V . , 289, no. T320. (19) Andrew Lang, "Introduction", to Marian Rolfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants (London: David Nutt for the Folklore Society, 1893), vii, x. (20) "Linda T r e s s e l " , rev. British Quarterly Review 48 (July 1868), 281. (21) Levine, "Romola as Fable", 95. (22) Levine, 91. (23) Autobiography, 135. (24) Autobiography, 135. Rachel Ray, published two years earlier, is also a kind of middle-class fairytale. A poor young girl's love for a radical, handsome brewer is temporarily thwarted by interfering family and townspeople. In one way, it is almost directly contrary to the plot pattern of Linda Tressel. In general, however, its tone is different from Miss Mackenzie's, more pastoral, more mellow, more even, and the satire is saved for a single institutional target, the rigidly evangelical church.

THE ART OF TROLLOPE'S REALISM: A TENTATIVE SUMMARY

Trollope remarked, in the Autobiography, "I am realistic", (1) and there has been little critical disagreement with his comment. However, the full implications of this self-characterization appear to hinge on the broad question of what his realism, and, indeed, the realism of almost any novelist is; since there is considerable scholarly disagreement regarding the nature of realism, (2) and since no single formulation is fully descriptive of the phenomenon, Trollope's one-sentence self-assessment seems inadequate. Yet the question of Trollope's realism does provide a fruitful approach to his work if the critic is able to focus upon how the novelist creates the appearance of realism, which is a matter of the identification of specific techniques. Even C. S. Lewis, who believes that there can be something intrinsic to the work of art which makes it realistic, feels that a fictional construct is realistic insofar as it is "true to life", (3) which puts the emphasis to a certain extent upon the author-audience relationship, and transforms his efforts to d i s till the essence of realism into an attempt to specify how novels are convincing in their realism. The preceding examinations of Orley Farm, The Belton Estate, The Bertrams, The Claverings, Nina Balatka, Linda Tressel, and (less extensively) Miss Mackenzie, have isolated a number of techniques and conventions employed by Trollope to fulfill what he himself calls "the erroneous idea of truth which the reader may be supposed to entertain". (4) In Orley Farm he satisfied this "idea of truth" through the multiple worlds design. Because there is freedom and possibility in one of the novel's worlds, the audience is willing to concede that it is possible for happy endings to take place there. The reader accepts these endings as realistic although the mode employed to describe the world is that of romantic comedy. However, at the same time, Trollope presents another more highly restricted world. The fates of the characters in that world, particularly the sufferings of Lady Mason and Sir Peregrine Orme, involve the reader on the emotional and the moral level. They suggest that one way for Trollope to cause a world to appear realistic is for him to make pain its defining element. The suffering of characters about whom the audience cares seems more realistic than the unalloyed and easily-achieved pleasure which is the lot of others. Though the realism of the one world does not cancel the realism of the other, the Green World of Orley Farm comes to seem somewhat less realistic than the world inhabited by Lady Mason, Lucius Mason, and the Ormes. In The Belton Estate the novelist is working with a more standard

101

plot in the "English realistic tradition". He first puts ordinary and human characters into a predictable romantic comedy situation. Having gained the reader's acceptance of the love story of Will Belton and Clara Amedroz as a fulfilment of his "idea of truth", however, he expands the form by changing modes without changing worlds. This has the effect of denying outright that what was agreed to as r e alistic at the beginning of the novel is as real as the scene with which the novel ends. The change of mode signals the mutation. The appearance of realism results first from the assumed agreement with r e gard to the conventions, and later, from the unforeseen comic deflation. (5) The plot of The Bertrams is also in essence a romantic love plot. Trollope does not, however, build into this work as he does into The Belton Estate the same kind of tacit agreement between author and audience to accept as true the conventions of romantic comedy. Instead the novel begins with so bitter a satire upon society that it v i r tually dares the reader to believe that romantic comedy conventions can be true. The love stories take place in a grim world and thus, although the background is recognizable, familiar, English and middleclass, the potential for romantic comedy is invariably undercut by the cold intensity of the satire. Introduced fairly late in the novel is the melodramatic mode. If one of the characteristics of English realism as the Victorians interpreted it is an adherence to the via media, The Bertrams, extreme, on occasion, in both language and plot, should be unconvincing. Yet Trollope has created out of these exaggerating modes some of his most effective scenes. One of his strategies is to caricature certain minor characters while allowing the principals to express their feelings in strong language. Part of the effect comes from the carefully arranged contrast between "real" people with extreme feelings - Caroline, George, Harcourt - and "unreal" people with no apparent feelings who suffer no pain. Through its combination of melodrama and satire The Bertrams denies the kinds of truths inherent in romantic comedy to arrive at the appearance of realism by another route. The Claverings, similar in plot, has characters, too, who seem modelled on those of The Bertrams. There is a dilettante hero, an ambitious heroine, and a poor clergyman who eventually weds the girl he loves. All of these characters seem to live in a single world, but a world different from that of The Bertrams. It is a man's world in which most women are able to succeed only in certain stereotyped roles. Though romantic comedy and domestic tragedy are present they are secondary to irony which is the dominant mode. TTiis peculiar balance of modes allows the reader "to entertain" (in Trollope'swords) a number of different possibilities, several of which make the world of The Claverings appear realistic. First, the rules of the world outside the novel may be adjudged the same as they are for characters within the novel. Even if they are not, the appearance of reality may, as in parts of The Belton Estate, be achieved by the reader's acceptance of and belief in the conventions of romantic comedy, or alternatively, by virtue of the fact that the suffering which defines the lives of some characters seems more real than the easy, painless success

102

which is the lot of others. More precisely, the fact that there is pleasure for some and pain for certain specific others reflects awhole system which the audience may choose to recognize as real. Throughout the work, the reader is given, within certain limits, the option of deciding how the novel is real, and just how real it is. The ironic mode frees Trollope from the necessity of openly taking a moral position of his own and puts the responsibility upon the audience for seeing, judging, and, in a manner of speaking, creating the "reality". (6)

Although it is evident from the foregoing that Trollope's techniques and, especially, his syntheses of techniques vary from novel to novel, some general conclusions regarding the art of his realism are possible. First of all, in accordance with the practice of other novelists of the century, he adopts many of the conventions of the "English realistic tradition", the appearance of social density, the via media, the strong moral bias, and the happy ending, usually interpreted as a socially-integrative marriage between two lovers. These conventions seem to appeal to a consensus gentium regarding what is "truth to life". Although Trollope aims to convince the reader of a novel's resemblance to what he thinks life is like, he at the same time manipulates the audience's expectations for the way in which the individual fiction will develop, often through heightening or exaggeration or through deflation. He sometimes, as in Orley Farm, equates pain with reality, but, as we have seen in Linda Tressel, pain may have the effect of diminishing realism. He may celebrate the happy ending, treat it comically, satirize it, or even deny it. He is theoretically capable of doing all of these things in the same work. Chief among the novelist's strategies is the integration of modes within complex organic "worlds", analogous to but separate from life. The conventions of the romantic comedy mode are often his starting point, but, against this familiar mode he may set any one or more of a number of other modes, satire, irony, comedy, romance, fairytale, or even realism itself. It is clear, then, that when Trollope called himself "realistic" one thing that he meant was that he knew how to create in various ways the illusion of reality. Henry James, a perceptive, and, later in life, sympathetic critic to Trollope, maintained that the effect was simply the result of accurate observation. (7) But Trollope, though he admitted that "To be realistic you must know accurately that which you describe", (8) was aware that it took more than observation to achieve the effect for which he was and is still most celebrated. "Realism in style", he noted, "has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is the object of the author who affects it . . . . " (9) As W. P. Ker said (more than fifty years ago), in reference to this passage, "Realism is not mechanical imitation; it is inventive and imaginative." (10) This study has identified, through a rather close examination of a few of Trollope's many novels, some of the ways in which he constructs worlds, develops scenes and creates the illusions which are often designated by that ever-elusive term, "realism".

103 NOTES (1) Autobiography, 162. (2) Everett Carter, "The Meaning of, and in, Realism", Antioch Review, 12 (March 1952), 78-94; Trilling, "Manners, Morals and the Novel"; Lewis, Experiment; Becker, "Realism: An Essay in Definition"; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1957); Park Honan, "Realism, Reality and the Novel", Novel 2 (Spring 1969), 197-211. This last, the report of a symposium whose participants included such fine critics as Frank Kermode, Barbara Hardy, David Lodge, and Tony Tanner, indicated no solid ground, no visible agreement, no certainties, and is indicative of the difficulties facing any critic who tries to talk about realism. (3) Lewis, Experiment, 59. (4) Thackeray (1879; rptd. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1968), 185. (5) W. P. Ker, "Anthony Trollope", in On Modern Literature: Lectures and Addresses, ed. Terence Spencer and James Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 146. He argues that comedy and r e alism must be inimical. My response is that comedy is often realistic and that deflation is a technique of comedy which is also a technique of realism. (6) "One of the things the novel does best is its work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see i t . " Trilling, "Manners, Morals", 215. (7) James, "Anthony Trollope", 101-102; 106-107. (8) Trollope, Thackeray, 185. (9) Thackeray, 184. (10) Ker, "Trollope", 146.

INDEX

Adams, Robert M. 34, 36n. Amedroz, Clara Chap. 2 passim, 62, 96 apRoberts, Ruth 14-15, 18n. Askertons 40-43 The Athenaeum 11, 16n. The Autobiography of Anthony Trollope 16, 81n., 83, 97, 98n., 99 n., 100, 103n. Aylmer, Frederick 37-40, 42, 44, 45 Aylmer, Lady 40-42 Balatka, Nina Chap. 4 passim, 97 Barchester Towers 19 Becker, George 33, 62n., 103n. The Belton Estate Chap. 2 passim, 12, 33, 47, 61, 83, 100,

101

Belton, Will Chap. 2 passim, 93 The Bertrams Chap. 3 passim, 12, 15, 63, 79, 81n., 83, 84, 95, 100-101 Bertram, George Chap. 3 passim, 68, 82n., 93 Bildungsroman 47, 78, 82n. Booth, Bradford 16n., 79, 82n. Brace, Gerald 17n. Bradbury, Malcolm 17n. Brooks, Cleanth 71, 80n. Buchan, John 98n. Burton, Cecilia 71-73, 75-76, 79, 8In., 93 Burton, Florence 64, 70-73, 76, 79, 8In., 93 Burton, Theodore 64, 71-72, 78-79

Carter, Everett 103n. The Claverings Chap. 4 passim, 12, 15-16, 83, 95, 100

Clavering, Archie 8In. Clavering, Fanny 71, 73, 75, 79 Clavering, Harry Chap. 4 passim, 93 Clavering, Hermione 71, 73-75, 79, 8In. Clavering, Hugh 64, 71, 7375, 77, 79, 8In. Cockshut, A . O . J . 16n. COMEDY 25-27, 46-47, 4950, 68, 88, 97, 101-102 Dickens, Charles 85 Drew, Elizabeth 33-34, 35n. The Dublin Univeristy Magazine 16n. "On English Prose Fiction As a Rational Amusement" (Trollope), 17n.-18n. THE ENGLISH REALISTIC TRADITION 13, 93, 95, 101-102

FAIRYTALE 15, 73, 83-87, 94-97, 98n., 102 Feibleman, James 8On. FORM AND TECHNIQUE 12, 22-25, 27-32, 34, 35n., 40, 42-48, 51, 53-56, 63, 66-68, 75, 76, 8In., 83-85, 87, 88, 93-97, 100-103 Frye, Northrop 17n., 21, 34n., 46n., 79n.-80n. Furnival, Mr. 25, 31, 35n. Furnival, Mrs. 25, 26

106 Gauntlet, Adela 47, 49 The Golden Lion of Granpere 97n.-98n. Graham, Felix 20, 21, 25, 34 Harcourt, Heniy 48, 5 1 - 5 9 , 8On., 8 I n . , 82n. Harcourt, Caroline (see also Caroline Waddington) Chap. 3 passim Hardy, B a r b a r a 9 9 n . , 103n. Honan, Park 18n. 103n. IRONY 14, 16, 53, 55, 63, 6 7 - 6 8 , 7 0 - 7 1 , 73, 78, 8 0 n . , 8 I n . , 8 2 n . , 101-102 J a m e s , Henry 1 1 - 1 2 , 16n., 33, 3 5 n . , 102 Ker, W . P . 102-103n. Kierkegaard, Soren 82n. Lang, Andrew 99n. Langer, Susanne 86, 98n. Levine, George 14, 95, 99n. Lewis, C . S . 14, 1 7 n . , 100, 103n. Linda T r e s s e l Chap. 5 passim, 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 5 - 1 6 , 97, 9 9 n , , 100, 102 Lodge, David 103n. Mackenzie, Margaret 96, 97 Maison, Margaret 98n. Mason, Joseph 32 Mason, Lady Chap. 1 passim, 100 Mason, Lucius 1 9 - 2 2 , 24, 100 MELODRAMA 14, 48, 5 5 - 5 7 , 58-61, 62n., 85-86 Miss Mackenzie 96-97, 99n., 100 Mizener, Arthur 17n. MODE (definition, 13), 1 4 - 1 5 , 17n., 37, 46, 63, 78, 87, 9 4 - 9 7 , 100-103 MORALITY 14-15, 17n.-18n., 2 1 - 2 5 , 29, 32, 34, 3 5 n . , 3 9 - 4 0 , 42, 4 5 - 4 6 , 70, 73, 7 5 - 7 9 , 8 3 - 8 4 , 9 0 - 9 3 , 102

More, Paul E l m e r 36n. Moulder, Mr. 25-26 Muir, Edwin 1 8 n . , 36n. The Nation 98n. National Review 16n., 34n., 82n. Nina Balatka Chap. 5 passim, 12, 1 5 - 1 6 , 97, 100 Ongar, Julia Chap. 4 passim, 63, 93 Orley F a r m , Chap. 1 passim, 1 1 - 1 3 , 15, 37, 42, 83, 100, 102 Orme, Edith 2 1 - 0 3 , 27, 30 Orme, Sir Peregrine 19-23, 2 7 - 3 0 , 100 Parliamentaiy Series 12 Phineas Redux 11, 16n. Polhemus, Robert 1 8 n . , 35n. Rachel Ray 99n. REALISM 1 1 - 1 6 , 3 2 - 3 4 , 35n., 4 4 - 4 6 , 5 9 - 6 1 , 71, 79, 87, 9 3 - 9 7 , 9 8 n . , 100-103 ROMANCE 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 8 n . , 34, 83, 87, 9 3 - 9 4 , 102 ROMANTIC COMEDY 15-37, 40, 4 2 - 5 3 , 57, 59, 61, 6 3 69, 71, 73, 75, 79, 80n. , 8 7 - 8 8 , 9 6 - 9 7 , 101 ROMANTIC LOVE 4 3 - 4 8 , 5 3 54, 6 5 - 6 8 , 86, 89, 9 6 - 9 7 , 101 Sadleir, Michael 16n., 6465, 7 9 n . , 80n. SATIRE 1 4 - 1 5 , 25, 27, 47-48, 50, 53, 6 0 - 6 1 , 6 2 n . , 97, 99n., 101-102 The Saturday Review 46, 46n., 8 In. Saul, Mr. 64, 71, 73, 75, 79 Scholes, Robert 17n. Scott, Sir Walter 18n. Sedgewick, Garnett, 8On. Skilton, David 35n.-36n. Stang, Richard 18n. Staubach, Aunt Charlotte,

107 87-88, 90-94 Staveley, Judge 20 Staveley, Madeline 20, 24, 96 Steinmarc', Peter 87-89, 91-95 Tanner, Tony 103n. Thompson, Alan Reynolds 80n., 99n. Thompson, Stith 98n. Tolkien, J . R . 86, 98n. Trendellsohn, Anton 83-85, 93-94 Tressel, Linda Chap. 4 passim, 97 Trilling, Lionel 14, 17n., 103n. Tzetzes, John 80n. Vale arm, Ludovic 93-94, 99n. Vos, Nelvin 46n.

87, 89-91,

Waddington, Caroline (see Caroline Harcourt) Chap. 3 passim, 68, 80n., 82n. Warren, Robert Penn 71, 80n. Watt, Ian 103n. Wilkinson, Arthur 47-49, 61 WORLDS 11-13, 19-24, 28, 32-34, 37, 46, 51, 56, 6164, 76-77, 79, 83, 93, 9597, 100-103

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de proprietatibus litterarum Series Practica 27. 28. 29. 30. 32. 33. 35. 36. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 44. 47. 48. 50. 51. 52. 54. 55. 57. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

VERNIER, R.: 'Poésie ininterrompue' et la poétique de Paul Eluard. HENNEDY, H. L.: Unity in Barsetshire. MCLEAN, S. K.: The "Bänkelsang" and the Work of Bertold Brecht. INNISS, K.: D. H. Lawrence's Bestiary. GEORGE, E. E.: Hölderlin's "Ars Poetica". SAMPSON, H. G.: The Anglican Tradition in EighteenthCentury Verse. JAKOBSON, R. and L. G. Jones: Shakespeare's Verbal Art in Th 'Expence of Spirit. SILVERMAN, E. B.: Poetic Synthesis in Shelley's "Adonais". DOUGHERTY, A.: A Study of Rhythmic Structure in the Verse of William Butler Yeats. REES, T. R.: The Technique of T. S. Eliot. EUSTIS, A.: Molière as Ironic Contemplator. CHAMPIGNY, R.: Humanism and Human Racism. A Critical Study of Essays by Sartre and Camus. EISENSTEIN, S. A.: Boarding the Ship of Death: D. H. Lawrence's Quester Heroes. SEBEOK, T. A.: Structure and Texture: Selected Essays in Cheremis Verbal Art. EWTON, R. W„ Jr.: The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel. TODD, J. E.: Emily Dickinson's Use of the Persona. METCALF, A. A.: Poetic Diction in the old English Meters of Boethius. KNOWLTON, M. A. : The Influence of Richard Rolle and of Julian of Norwich on the Middle English Lyrics. RICHMOND, H. M.: Renaissance Landscapes. English Lyrics in a European Tradition. CELLER, M. M.: Giraudoux et la métaphore. FLETCHER, R. M.: The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe. NELSON, T. A.: Shakespeare's Comic Theory. DUGAN, J. R.: Illusion and Reality. A Study of Descriptive Techniques in the Works of Guy de Maupassant. KUBY, L.: An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin's Poetry. COUCHMAN, G. W.: This our Caesar. A Study of Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. RUTTEN, P. M. van: Le langage poétique de Saint-John Perse. SCHULZ, H. J.: This Hell of Stories: A Hegelian Approach to the Novels of Samuel Beckett. DEMING, R. H.: Ceremony and Art. Robert Herrick's Poetry.

D f I. 25,28,54,28,96,48,10,20,38,52,40,18,24,35,22,22,28,28,28,22,34,18,26,28,32,30,20,32,-

de proprîetatibus litterarum Series Practica 69. 70. 71. 72. 74. 75. 78. 79. 81. 82. 83. 84. 86. 88. 89. 91. 92. 93. 96. 97. 98. 100. 101. 108. 114. 116.

GODSHALK, W. L.: Patterning in Schakespearean Drama. JAKOBSON, R. and D. Svjatopolk-Miiskij: Smert' Vladimira Majakovskogo. KOSTIS, N.: The Exorcism of Sex and Death in Julien Green's Novels. WOSHINSKY, B. R.: La Princesse de Clèves. BUEHLER, Ph. G.: The Middle English Genesis and Exodus. HEWITT, W.: Through Those Living Pillars. Man and Nature in the Works of Emile Zola. FERRANTE, J. M.: The Conflict of Love and Honor. JONES, G. H.: Henry James's Psychology of Experience. MEEHAN, V. M.: Christopher Marlowe Poet and Playwright. WAKE, C.: The Novels of Pierre Loti. JONES, L. E.: Poetic Fantasy and Fiction. The Short Stories of Jules Supervielle. BLODGETT, H.: Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bo wen's Novels. FERDINANDY, G.: L'oeuvre hispanoaméricaine de Zsigmond Remenyik. WILLSON, R. F., Jr.: 'Their Form Confounded': Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan. PARENT, D. J.: Werner Bergengruen's Das Buch Rodenstein. HAMILTON, R.: Epinikion: General Form in the Odes of Pindar. TAYLOR, M.: The Soul in Paraphrase. George Herbert's Poetics. VITZ, E. B.: The Crossroad of Intentions: A Study of Symbolic Expression in the Poetry of François Villon. COPELAND, H. C.: Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett. KAY, B.: The Theatre of Jean Mairet. TUERK, R.: Central Still: Circle and Sphere in Thoreau's Prose. ELIOPOLOS, J.: Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Language. HUDGINS, E. : Nicht-epische Strukturen des Romantischen Romans. DESSNER, L. J.: The Homely Web of Truth: A Study of Charlotte Brontë's Novels. CRICHFIELD, G.: Three Novels of Madame de Duras. JAKOBSON, R.: Puskin and His Sculptural Myth.

Dfl. 50,16,22,32,24,32,32,58,28,37,20,44,34,48,32,24,24,28,48,28,32,28,44,20,18,24,-

Series Didactica l. 2. 3.

SWAIM, K. M.: A Reading of Gulliver's Travels. BERKELEY, D. S.: Inwrought with Figures Dim. GITTLEMAN, S.: Sholom Aleichem.

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