Written 1878 (3 - 4 October)
Published 1878 (November), Masonic Magazine, Christmas Number
Published in a book 1882 (December), Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her
Prices; and Other Stories, Wm Isbister
To Trollope-l
May 13, 1998
Re: Short Story, "Catherine Carmichael:" A Hard World
Maybe it's that I have been reading Trollope's Irish novels, and have this past couple of months read The Bertrams and slowly journeyed through TWWLN, but as I got into this story I was struck by how the statement that Trollope is bed-time reading or writes of and for the well-off complacent and out-of-touch-with-hard-realities middle class only shows the person who says it has read very little of Trollope. Even the classic 10 novels (5 Barsetshire, and 5 Pallisers) cannot sustain this idea for someone who thinks, and of course they are only a bit over 1/5th of the novels (47 in total).
I wish I had Jill's patience and gift for detailed summary and paraphrase; then I could persuade interest more people in reading this story than just the few of us who have kept up. In brief synopsis: this is the story of a young woman brought up in the roughest of circumstances, a member of the family of a gold-digger, one of 8 children, the father although originally genteel become hardened and alcoholic over the years. When both parents die, her brothers follow her father's "trade;" the young children are sent back to Scotland because they cannot fend for themselves; and for her the only way to survive is to marry a hard and mean-spirited brutal man whose brother she has fallen in love with, but who himself has no means with which to support her.
I assigned this story in a Junior Level Advanced Writing in Humanities class I taught a couple of years ago: what struck them most was how, even if delicately or hintingly put, how raw was the depiction of the sexual relationship between the hard male, Peter Carmichael, and Catherine. I will quote but two of several passages which suggest the mean way this man would take her, the leering and jeering of his superiority, and the submission she was forced into:
"in this way he liked her, though it was as a man may like a dog whom he licks into obedience. Though he would tell her that she was sulky, and treat her with rough violence if she answered him, yet he never repented his bargain" (1995 AT: Later Short Stories, ed. JSutherland, p 499)
Again:
"Perhaps he got all from her that he wanted to get. He did not complain that her voice was not loving. he was harsh, odious in his ways with her, sometimes almost violent; but it may be doubted whether he would have been less so had she attempted to turn him by any show of false affection" (p 501).
They were also struck by how many times Trollope tells us the woman hates the man. Hate is a strong word. Again and again Trollope brings us back to this core of ravaged feeling:
"She was the man's wife, and she hated him. She had never known before what it was to hate a human being..." (p 497)"She hated her husband... " (p 501)
"she hated her husband, and she loved that other man" (p 501)
"the man was so odious... There was no dealing in fair words with one so suspicious, so unmanly, so inhuman" (p 502).
It's relentless.
This time I noticed how her hatred came not only from his savage taking of her, his violence, his coarseness, and his leering jealousy, but from his not increasing the allowance of food he had provided for the household. The four people are expected to survive on what three had. There is also a paragraph on how he "doles" it out and makes her feel every bite as something owed him (p 498). I have come to be aware of how basic Trollope is, how in all his stories he always refers us to the bases of life no matter how far from these the characters like to think they are.
Since I have since then had a couple of Maori students I also this time paid attention to the growing relationship she sustains with the Maori servant who is described as "soft and very silent-- softly and silently civil, so that he seemed to be a protection to her against the foul old woman [a woman servant who loathes this rival], and that lord of hers, who was so much fouler to her imagination" (another reference to sex here, p 497). Naturally Carmichael gets rid of this man. We are told that the night after this man "possessed" her (their wedding night) "she allowed herself to be crushed" (p 496) for a time. For after the first year with him, and when Peter's brother comes to stay after the Maori leaves, Catherine asserts herself again by telling her husband she loves his brother, and if he does not make his brother leave, she will be unfaithful.
This is a remarkable scene for a Victorian fiction. The way in which Catherine asserts herself and gains strength is by telling her husband she is in love with another and if he does not get rid of the other man she will go to bed with him. She comes to this by thinking about the sexual and in all areas of life inhumane violation of her dignity, self-respect and independence he has been inflicting for the past year:
"Why not give way to the sound! [of Peter's brother's voice] Why not ill-treat the man who had so foully ill-treated her? What did she owe to him but her misery? What he had done for her but make a slave of her...""was any of this [love, protection, friendship, someone to trust] given to her when he would turn round and leer at her, reminding her by his leer that he had cuahgt her and made a slave of her" (p 504).
So she threatens him in such a way as to make him believe she will sexually betray him, and she does this by showing her utter contempt for him ("he must know also her thorough contempt for himself"). I think the word he whispers in her ear is the same that the villain of Macdermots calls Thady Macdermot's sister, that the vicious old earl calls the Dean's daughter in Is He Popenjoy?: harlot. But she is undeterred (p 505).
We are told that after this their relationship changed: "She felt that, poor a creature as he was, she had driven him to respect her" (p 506). Her emotion when the brother leaves is intense. She kisses his garments, and then remains faithful to her husand once again. But she has had a highly unconventional moral victory.
Such a central climactic scene reveals Trollope could see more deeply than any conventional morality of his day that was voiced.
The point of the story is to show us a survivor. Catherine survives. It is to show us the story of how a brave sensitive person living in desolate isolated circumstances can behave. Catherine is actually a Christian heroine. She does not return evil for evil and is loyal and hard-working and self-sacrificing, even keeping her sensitivity--as well as her sanity. She does think to drown herself in the dark river, but never really acts on this longing. Instead on a Christmas Eve her husband drowns. Peter insists on returning to her one dark rough night, stubborn to the last, and drowns in the rough black waters himself.
When Trollope shows Catherine is simply stunned, I think he articulates one of the reasons he wrote such a story which I suggested above:
"It is a part of the cruelty of life which is lived in desolate places, far awya, that when death comes, the small incidents of death are not mitigated to the sufferer by the hands of strangers" (p 508).
Catherine has to take care of the corpse: "But she could not grieve, nor for that [him or the caring for the corpse]; only for her own wretchedness and isolation" (p 508). Trollope doesn't lie: she is relieved too: "That voice, that touch, that cunning leer of that eye, woudl never trouble her again. She had been freed from something" (p 509).
She does need something to live for beyond this, and the story has a final upsweep--as life can have as it goes on. After all the old man was not an ogre, but left her his property. The final ending is happy--if the word happy can be used of the brief last upsweep of the final scene. She refuses to take the property from him; she says because she "hated" this man (p 511), she cannot take this gift from him. The idea seems to make her ill. But then his brother, John is told; he returns, and from him, whom she loves, she will take the property (p 514).
A subsidiary theme is of course about women's position in this world, and how vulnerable they are. Trollope wrote it after his visit to his son. It makes me want to read Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, which is said to be a story of a primal conflict over land between someone who worked said land without a piece of paper to say he owned it and someone else who comes later on and pays the government for said piece of land. Harry Heathcote is also said to be a Christmas story. Yes "Catherine Carmichael" is often counted as one of Trollope's Christmas stories as key turning points in the plot are set up in successive Christmas days and eves.
I am also fascinated by the concision. Since Trollope's purpose is to trace a long-term relationship and he must do it in a brief space, his story begins to take the form of a parable. I think this is true of a few of his novellas. There is a grand sweep to the sentences, and he shows he can contain and suggest many events in a tight pattern swiftly. This concision and gift for precise words which are general yet suggestive is part of the strength of Trollope's art in all his books, and he relies on it in a number of these stories and his novellas (I think especially of the Golden Lion of Granpère which has the same parable feel).
Ellen Moody
From: The Hansens Some Christmas story! As Ellen says, this is no simple
bedtime reading. Besides what she has said, I want to
mention briefly how this story portrays Catherine's reaction
to her marriage contract.
When her horrible husband finally dies and leaves the farm
and all his money to her, Catherine is unable to accept the
wealth that has been left to her. She feels guilty for having
hated him throughout the marriage. Even though she put up
with all his roughness and bad will, she tried to keep her end
of the bargan but failed in her own eyes. This was even after
she realized angrily that other women received kindness and
protection in exchange for their 'true obediance.' She somehow
thought that she did not uphold her end of the contract, even
though her husband did worse. Was this perhaps Trollope's
way of saying that there are some marriages that should not
be sustained? He never talks about Catherine running away,
and instead kills off the husband.
For a contracted 'Christmas Story,' this sure is a tough tale.
I wonder if Trollope wasn't trying to scare off such
agreements to produce sentiment for the Holidays?
Bart
R: Short Story: "Not If I Know It"
Bart writes of "Catherine Carmichael:
One suspects so, except when we get to the
above very brief tale we find that Trollope can write
a Christmas story which captures in a brief moment
what he meant when he said a Christmas story
to be unhypocritical and not opportunistic (written
for money and to pander to unreal sentiment)
"should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to
instil others... with Christian charity." Unless I
am mistaken his last tale has a "real savour
of Christmas about it" though it too eschews
the family festivities that Dickens made so much
of and which have become part of a myth of Christmas
which is now fading from us.
Ellen Short Story: "Catherine Carmichael:" A Marriage Story
Bart also asked:
Maybe it was. It is also the last in a series of stories
which argues that marriages should not be mere
money arrangements. If we remember back to "Journey
to Panama" and recall that Miss Viner had never met
her intended, and how bitter she was about being
coerced into marriage, we can see this theme
turning these two stories into a kind of diptych:
before & then during and after.
Ellen Moody
Three years later Jeremy chose to read it as one of several
Christmas stories everyone on the list were invited to read:
To Trollope-l
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 21:24:21 +0800 had been saving a selection of Christmas stories to read when I went to
Ireland for Christmas but I left the book at home, so I have been catching
up now I am back.
I was very interested in Catherine Carmichael but the introduction in the
Oxford Worlds Classic edition gives very limited information. I presume it
was published as a "Christmas" story given that it is set over three
consecutive Christmases. But it is as black a story as one could imagine - a
tale of a vulnerable youg girl who has no option but to become the victim
in a violent and abusive marriage.
There is a "happy ending" but Trollope seems to make no attempt to give his
happy ending any credibility. The husband dies, the girl inherits his
wealth, gives it to the husband's distant cousin (whom she has always loved)
and is promptly asked to marry him. Of course she deserves the luck, but it
is hard to believe in it. Moreover the distant cousin knew what her fate
would be when she was carried off to her marriage, knew he could have
prevented it, but thought it better to condemn her to this fate rather than
marry her himself. Her lot as his wife would have been poverty as the wife
of a gold digger but it would have been better than the marriage which
awaited her. Why did she not hate the cousin for abandoning her so
callously?
The story reads to me like a savage sending-up of the notion that everything
can be made all right by Christmas. This tallies with Trollope's views on
Christmas stories in his autobiography. Does anyone have any views or know
any more details about the publication of this story and how it was
received?
Regards
Jeremy
I answered Jeremy by rewriting and expanding the posting
I had written in 1998 in the light of what I had written since. It became
a two-part essay-cum-posting.
January 9, 2001
Re: Short Story, "Catherine Carmichael:" A Story About Survival (I)
Jeremy asks for information and commentary or other people's
thoughts on this hard story. John Sutherland writes that
it 'was first published in the Christmas issue (1878) of the
Masonic Magazine. The proprietor, A. F. A. Woodford,
wrote to Trollope on 20 Stepember 1878 asking for a story'.
Ten days later Trollope wrote offering to provide a story for
£100; they agreed on 3 October and Trollope delivered the
story 10 days later. Trollope had visited New Zealand
6 years earlier; his travel book, Australia and New Zealand
was published 1874. The story was never reprinted in
Trollope's lifetime.
We can speculate on a couple of things. We now know that
Trollope was probably a Mason. The Masons have a long
tradition of 'enlightenment' or anti-church somewhat radical
thought. Such a story for a Masonic Magazine would not
go down badly. Another possibility is that Trollope had
written a story already, one which had occurred to him
as a result of his experiences, and he needed only to
reshape it.
For those who have not read the story here is a brief
synopsis: this is the story of a young woman brought
up in the roughest of circumstances, a member of the
family of a gold-digger, one of 8 children. The father although
originally genteel, has become hardened and alcoholic over the
years. When both parents die, her brothers follow her
father's "trade;" the young children are sent back to
Scotland because they cannot fend for themselves; and
for her the only way to survive is to marry a hard and
mean-spirited brutal man whose brother she has fallen
in love with, but who himself has no means with which
to support her.
I taught the story twice by which I mean I assigned it to
junior level college students twice and had two different
students give talks on it and then attempted to encourage
a general discussion. It provided riveting matter; the last
thing the students thought to talk about was Christmas:
it was about marriage, sex, relationships between relatives,
about money and desperation. They saw it as relevant to
our world today. At the time a film (perhaps called _The
Piano_?) was popular in the theatres and we talked of
the suffering of migrants and pioneers and how women were
treated or used in such places. Trollope has a number of
stories about the hardships and hardening caused by
emigration (among them, 'Returning Home' and 'Aaron Trowe' are
powerful tragic pieces). What struck the students most was
how, even if delicately or hintingly put, how raw was
the depiction of the sexual relationship between the
hard male, Peter Carmichael, and Catherine. I will
quote but two of several passages which suggest
the mean way this man would take her, the leering
and jeering of his superiority, and the submission
she was forced into:
Again:
They were also struck by how many times Trollope
tells us the woman hates the man. Hate is a strong
word. Again and again Trollope brings us back to
this core of ravaged feeling:
"She hated her husband... " (p 501)
"she hated her husband, and she loved that
other man" (p 501)
"the man was so odious... There was no
dealing in fair words with one so suspicious,
so unmanly, so inhuman" (p 502). It's relentless. But we should note that her hatred
of her husband comes not only from his savage
taking of her, his violence, his coarseness, and his
leering jealousy, but also from his
not increasing the allowance of food he had provided
for the household. The four people are expected
to survive on what three had. There is also a
paragraph on how he "doles" it out and makes
her feel every bite as something owed him (p
498). In all Trollope's fiction he always
refers us to the bases of life no matter how
far from these the characters like to think they
are.
I actually had two Maori students in my class the
second time I taught this story. They paid attention
to the growing relationship she sustains with the Maori
servant who is described as "soft and very silent--
softly and silently civil, so that he seemed to be
a protection to her against the foul old woman
[a woman servant who loathes this rival], and
that lord of hers, who was so much fouler
to her imagination" (another reference to sex
here, p 497). Two people in servitude helping
one another? Hating the master.
Naturally Carmichael gets rid
of this man. We are told that the night
after this man "possessed" her (their wedding
night) "she allowed herself to be crushed"
(p 496) for a time. For after the first year
with him, and when Peter's brother comes
to stay after the Maori leaves, Catherine
asserts herself again by telling her
husband she loves his brother, and if
he does not make his brother leave, she
will be unfaithful.
This is a remarkable scene for a Victorian
fiction. The way in which Catherine asserts
herself and gains strength is by telling
her husband she is in love with another
and if he does not get rid of the other
man she will go to bed with him. She
comes to this by thinking about the sexual
and in all areas of life inhumane violation
of her dignity, self-respect and independence
he has been inflicting for the past year:
"was any of this [love, protection,
friendship, someone to trust] given to her when
he would turn round and leer at her, reminding
her by his leer that he had cuahgt her and made a
slave of her" (p 504). So she threatens him in such a way as to make
him believe she will sexually betray him, and
she does this by showing her utter contempt
for him ("he must know also her thorough
contempt for himself"). I think the word he
whispers in her ear is the same that the
villain of Macdermots calls Thady
Macdermot's sister, that the vicious old
earl calls the Dean's daughter in Is He
Popenjoy?: harlot. But she is undeterred
(p 505).
We are told that after this their relationship
changed: "She felt that, poor a creature
as he was, she had driven him to respect
her" (p 506). Her emotion when the brother
leaves is intense. She kisses his garments,
and then remains faithful to her husand
once again. But she has had a highly
unconventional moral victory.
Such a central climactic scene reveals
Trollope could see more deeply than
any conventional morality of his day
that was voiced.
I'll divide this posting here.
Ellen Moody
Re: Short Story, "Catherine Carmichael:" A Story About Survival (II)
One can read this story as about survival. Catherine is
a survivor. It's not easy to survive in conditions of primitiveness
and danger which usually obtain in colonies. (We are
going to return to this theme in John Caldigate, some
of which is set in Australia, and some aboard a ship --
a fascinating half-rehearsal of the material in the short
story, "A Journey to Panama", a love story broken off
which may reflect some of Trollope's experiences on board
ship alone.) Catherine survives. We see how a brave sensitive
person living in desolate isolated circumstances can hold
out, remain sane and even moral.
As a story appropriate for Christmas, as with "The Two
Generals" it is set over a series of consecutive Christmases.
However, there is another theme here, one which is consonant
with "The Telegraph Girl", another un-Christmasy Christmas
story. There the 'moral' is about charity, sympathy, how
selfishness can masquerade as weakness and thus take
over someone else. The heroine there is selfess: a
Christian heroine in secular psychological terms. In this
story we have a similarly strong heroine: maybe it's pushing
it, but I suggest that Catherine is actually a Christian
heroine. She does not return evil for evil and is loyal and
hard-working and self-sacrificing, even keeping her sensitivity --
as well as her sanity. She does think to drown herself in the
dark river, but never really acts on this longing. Instead
on a Christmas Eve her husband drowns. Peter insists on returning to
her one dark rough night, stubborn to the last, and drowns in
the rough black waters himself.
Jeremy mentioned how it bothered him the way the younger
brother just left the woman with this brutal man. My sense
was that Trollope showed us he felt he could do nothing else.
When the husband drowns himself, Trollope shows Catherine as simply
stunned, and then articulates one of the reasons he wrote
such a story:
In our post-colonial world we often hear of how evil the colonists
were, how they exploited the natives, how they grew rich. Well
some of them grew rich, and many exploited the natives. But
many people who set forth from England were themselves
working class: they were the oppressed of England and braved
the terrors of another world to try to build some decent life for
themselves elsewhere. Often they didn't suceed. Sometimes
only in the third generation did the sacrifice pay off. Trollope
himself wrote a series of letters to the Liverpool Mercury
encouraging English workers to emigrate. Stories like this
one show he understood what the average person's experience
of emigration was, how hard, how mean, how lonely. He's
registering a piece of truth. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil,
written after Trollope visited his son, and which he said focused
on his son (the hero is in effect "Fred" he says in a letter)
is a story of a primal conflict over land between someone
who worked said land without a piece of paper to say
he owned it and someone else who comes later on and pays the
government for said piece of land.
A subsidiary theme is of course about women's position in this
world, and how vulnerable they are. What I like best about
it is how Trollope tells no lies. For example, when
Catherine has to take care of her dead husband's corpse:
She is relieved too:
She does need something to live
for beyond this, and the story has a final
upsweep--as life can have as it goes
on. After all the old man was not an ogre,
but left her his property. The final ending
is happy in a qualified way --i f the word happy can be
used of the brief last upsweep of the final scene.
She refuses to take the property from the
brother; she says she refuses because
she "hated" this man (p 511), she cannot take
this gift from him. The idea seems to make her ill.
But then his brother, John is told; he returns,
and from him, whom she loves, she
will take the property (p 514).
Artistically the story is so concise: so much is packed in
in such a short space. There's material here for a novel.
Since Trollope's purpose is to trace a long-term
relationship, his story feels like a parable. I think
this is true of a few of his novellas. There is a grand sweep to the
sentences, and he shows he can contain and suggest many
events in a tight pattern swiftly. This concision and gift for
precise words which are general yet suggestive is part of the
strength of Trollope's art in all his books, and he relies on
it in a number of these stories and his novellas (I think especially
of the Golden Lion of Granpère which has the same parable
feel).
Subject: Short Stories: "Catherine Carmichael
Sender: owner-trollope-l@teleport.com
"For a contracted 'Christmas Story,' this sure is a tough tale.
I wonder if Trollope wasn't trying to scare off such
agreements to produce sentiment for the Holidays?"
anticipating the last of our stories
"Was this perhaps Trollope's way of saying that there are
some marriages that should not be sustained?"
Reply- trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Catherine Carmichael
"in this way he liked her, though it was as
a man may like a dog whom he licks into obedience.
Though he would tell her that she was sulky, and
treat her with rough violence if she answered him,
yet he never repented his bargain" (1995 AT:
Later Short Stories, ed. JSutherland, p 499)
"Perhaps he got all from her that he wanted
to get. He did not complain that her voice was not
loving. he was harsh, odious in his ways with
her, sometimes almost violent; but it may be doubted
whether he would have been less so had she attempted
to turn him by any show of false affection" (p 501).
"She was the man's wife, and she hated him.
She had never known before what it was to hate
a human being..." (p 497)
"Why not give way to the sound! [of
Peter's brother's voice] Why not ill-treat the
man who had so foully ill-treated her? What
did she owe to him but her misery? What he
had done for her but make a slave of her..."
"It is a part of the cruelty of life which is lived in desolate
places, far away, that when death comes, the small incidents of
death are not mitigated to the sufferer by the hands of strangers"
(p 508).
"But she could not grieve, nor for that [him
or the caring for the corpse]; only forher own wretchedness
and isolation" (p 508).
"That voice, that touch, that cunning leer
of that eye, woudl never trouble her again.
She had been freed from something" (p 509).
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